Kenneth Williford

University of Texas at Arlington | UTA · Department of Philosophy and Humanities

Consciousness has been described as acting as a global workspace that integrates perception, imagination, emotion and action programming for adaptive decision making. The mechanisms of this workspace and their relationships to the phenomenology of consciousness need to be further specified. Much research in this area has focused on the neural corre...

Consciousness has been described as acting as a global workspace that integrates perception , imagination, emotion and action programming for adaptive decision making. The mechanisms of such workspace and their relationships to the phenomenology of consciousness need to be further specified. Much research in this connection has focused on the neura...

Several well-known theodicies, whatever their merits, seem to make little sense of animal suffering. Here we argue that the problem of animal suffering has more layers than has generally been acknowledged in the literature and thus poses an even greater challenge to traditional Judeo-Christian Theism than is normally thought. However, the Neo-Carte...

We argue that the projective geometrical component of the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) can account for key aspects of pre-reflective self-consciousness (PRSC) and can relate PRSC intelligibly to another signal feature of subjectivity: perspectival character or point of view. We illustrate how the projective geometrical versions of the conce...

Dieter Henrich poses a formidable challenge to relational accounts of pre-reflective self-consciousness. Such an account may manage to evade some regresses but fails to ground attitudes de se without an explanatory one. I show that a “neo-Fichtean” self-acquaintance theory, according to which consciousness is intrinsically self-related because it i...

In our response to a truly diverse set of commentaries, we first summarize the principal topical themes around which they cluster, then address two “outlier” positions (the problem of consciousness has been solved vs. is intractable). Next, we address ways in which commentaries by non-integrated information theory (IIT) authors engage with the spec...

Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of IIT's measure of consciousness, phi (Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical cir...

The three classic regress problems (the Extensive Regress of states, the Intensive Regress of contents, and the Fichte-Henrich-Shoemaker Regress of de se beliefs) related to the Self-Awareness Thesis (that one’s conscious states are the ones that one is aware of being in) can all be elegantly resolved by a self-acquaintance postulate. This resoluti...

Several influential philosophers and scientists have advanced a framework, often called Neo-Cartesianism (NC), according to which animal suffering is merely apparent. Drawing upon contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind, Neo-Cartesians challenge the mainstream position we shall call Evolutionary Continuity (EC), the view that humans are on...

Models of consciousness should account for the phenomenology of subjective experience, including perceptual illusions. The Moon Illusion is a paradigmatic example that has yet to be accounted for. The Moon often appears larger near the perceptual horizon and smaller high in the sky, though the visual angle subtended is invariant. We show how this i...

Models of consciousness should account for the phenomenology of subjective experience, including perceptual illusions. The Moon Illusion is a paradigmatic example that has yet to be accounted for. The Moon often appears larger near the perceptual horizon and smaller high in the sky, though the visual angle subtended is invariant. We show how this i...

I argue that there is a version of (quasi-Armstrongian) weak illusionism that intelligibly relates phenomenal concepts and introspective opacity, accounts for the (hard) problem intuitions Chalmers highlights (modal, epistemic, explanatory, and metaphysical), and undermines the most important arguments Chalmers deploys against type-B and type-C mat...

The three classic regress problems (the Extensive Regress of states, the Intensive Regress of contents, and the Fichte-Henrich-Shoemaker Regress of de se beliefs) related to the Self-Awareness Thesis (that one’s conscious states are the ones that one is aware of being in) can all be elegantly resolved by a self-acquaintance postulate. This resoluti...

We summarize our recently introduced Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) (Rudrauf et al., 2017) and relate it to outstanding conceptual issues in the theory of consciousness. The PCM combines a projective geometrical model of the perspectival phenomenological structure of the field of consciousness with a variational Free Energy minimization model...

We summarize our recently introduced Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) (Rudrauf et al. 2017) and relate it to outstanding conceptual issues in the theory of consciousness. The PCM combines a projective geometrical model of the perspectival phenomenological structure of the field of consciousness with a variational Free Energy minimization model...

The Moon often appears larger near the perceptual horizon and smaller high in the sky though the visual angle subtended is invariant. We show how this illusion results from the optimization of a projective geometrical frame for conscious perception through free energy minimization, as articulated in the Projective Consciousness Model. The model acc...

I aim to provide some evidence that Husserl’s description of perceptual updating actually fits very nicely into the Bayesian Brain paradigm, articulated by Karl Friston and others, and that that paradigm, in turn, can be taken as an excellent example of “Neurophenomenology”. The apparently un-phenomenological Helmholtzian component of the Bayesian...

We introduce a mathematical model of embodied consciousness, the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), which is based on the hypothesis that the spatial field of consciousness (FoC) is structured by a projective geometry and under the control of a process of active inference. The FoC in the PCM combines multisensory evidence with prior beliefs in m...

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

In this study I argue for the following claims: First, it's best to think of subjective character as the self-acquaintance of each instance of consciousness—its acquaintance with itself. Second, this entails that all instances of consciousness have some intrinsic property in virtue of which they, and not other things, bear this acquaintance relatio...

Tobias Schlicht argues that subjective character derives from the integration of mental states into a complex of representations of the organism and that therefore there is no need try to account for subjective character in terms of " reflexivity " or self-acquaintance, as I do. He further argues that the proper subject of consciousness is the whol...

In the Logical Investigations, Ideas I and many other texts, Husserl maintains that perceptual consciousness involves the intentional “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle, e.g., “color-data,” “tone-data,” and algedonic data. These data are not intrinsically representational nor are they normally themselves objects of representation...

Millikan and Her Critics offers a unique critical discussion of Ruth Millikan's highly regarded, influential, and systematic contributions to philosophy of mind and language, philosophy of biology, epistemology, and metaphysics. These newly written contributions present discussion from some of the most important philosophers in the field today and...

English translation of L’Imagination (The Imagination) by Jean-Paul Sartre

It has been proposed that self-awareness (SA), a multifaceted phenomenon central to human consciousness, depends critically on specific brain regions, namely the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Such a proposal predicts that damage to these regions should disrupt or even abolish SA. We te...

Leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness as an alternative to the two dominant reductive theories of consciousness, the representational theory of consciousness and the higher-order monitoring theory. In this pioneering collection of essays, leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousne...

Dan Zahavi has argued persuasively that some versions of self-representationalism are implausible on phenomenological and dialectical grounds: they fail to make sense of primitive self-knowledge and lead to an infinite regress. Zahavi proposes an alternative view of ubiquitous prereflective self-consciousness—the phenomenological datum upon which Z...

Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 384-413).

Kenneth Williford is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, 269 EPB, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. e-mail: kenneth-williford@uiowa.edu I would like to thank Phillip Cummins, Lorne Falkenstein, Evan Fales, Todd Ryan, Ben Hill, Annemarie Peil, Kenneth Winkler, Elizabeth Radcliffe, Charles Nussbaum, Kevin Klement, and two an...