This brief article is in reply to Casper Skern Wilstrup’s piece: We Know Exactly What Consciousness Is — Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise. In that article it is argued that an understanding of consciousness cannot be rooted in the ideas that science presents to us about an external world…

In this note, I wish to convince you of three things, using a few examples. First, your perception of a patterned image, such as the one above, is not a copy of the image, but a hybrid of a general description, and transient bindings of that description to foveal copies…

In order to consider the boundary of the physical, I first need to say what I mean by the physical. …

Phenomenology is the study of appearances. Let’s consider an example of the simplest kind: the situation of a person gazing attentively at some physical object, such as a coffee cup. There are two parts of the situation. One is the cup itself. Another is the seeing of the cup, the…

Consider this image. Not much to see. Just a grid of randomly oriented line segments, yes?

Consider the image above. With a glance, you know many things about it. If I asked you to describe it, you would likely come up with something like: “It is a grid with short red horizontal lines at the centers of cells. White lines consisting of the left and top…

By “phenomenology” I mean the philosophical discipline, founded in its modern form by Edmund Husserl, which studies appearances. Consider an image, and the situation of a person (say Albert) attending to it. The image itself, as a physical object, might be a photograph, or pixels on a screen. The appearance…

I use the word “phenomenon” to mean appearance. This is the sense assigned to it by the philosophical discipline known as phenomenology. In this note I consider three standpoints, moving from an attitude in which the world is taken as directly present to the mind, next to theorizing the existence…

Above is a high level picture of the structure of the mind. The diagram and its commentary are derived from two primary sources: the global workspace theory of consciousness, and Kant’s view of synthesis as explicated in the chapter “The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding” (A95–130) in…