Can I read The Significance of Consciousness on EtoBox?

The Significance of Consciousness by Charles P. Siewert is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Significance of Consciousness about?

Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection."

Who reads The Significance of Consciousness?

Author

Charles P. Siewert

Publisher

PrincetonUP

Published

1998

Language

EN

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Psychology, Social_sciences