awareness

awareness consciousness, a central feature of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize. You experience goings-on in the world, and, turning inward (‘introspecting’), you experience your experiencing. Objects of awareness can be external or internal. Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s edge, and aware of the feeling of pressure (though perhaps not simultaneously). Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have distinctive qualities: there is ‘something it is like’ to have them. It would seem important, then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round, red tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness, is round and red. What then are the qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides theorists into intransigent camps. Some materialists, like Dennett, insist that awareness lacks qualities (or lacks qualities distinct from its objects: the qualities we attribute to experiences are really those of experienced objects). This opens the way to a dismissal of ‘phenomenal’ qualities (qualia), qualities that seem to have no place in the material world. Others (T. Nagel, Ned Block) regard such qualities as patently genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some philosophers, following Frank Jackson, contend they are ‘epiphenomenal’: real but causally inefficacious. Still others, including Searle, point to what they regard as a fundamental distinction between the ‘intrinsically subjective’ character of awareness and the ‘objective,’ ‘public’ character of material objects, but deny that this yields epiphenomenalism.
See also PHENOMENOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , QUALI. J.F.H.

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