Guest Lecture: “Consciousness and perceptual skills”
Speaker Tom Roberts (Edinburgh)
Date 20 May 2010, 14:30
Location
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Luisenstraße 56, Haus 1
Room 123 (ground floor)
10117 Berlin
Contact Dr. Katja Crone
Organized by Berlin School of Mind and Brain
A central problem in the philosophy of consciousness is that of the explanatory gap: the apparent impossibility of an intelligible explanation of phenomenal consciousness in physical or functional terms. In this paper, I argue that we can begin to tackle this problem by appeal to the connections between conscious experiences and the skills that they afford for the embodied subject. A subject’s perceptual sensitivity to the world poises her to perform a suite of activities and interventions – both bodily and epistemic – and consciousness, on the view that I endorse, is a non-inferential grasp of this afforded space of actions.
http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/students/phd/tomroberts.html