The Nature of Consciousness

In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.

• Offers a very useful survey of the main positions in the field as well as advancing the author’s own • Clearly written and argued • Consciousness a topic of hot debate in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science

Preface; 1. The problem of phenomenal consciousness; 2. Consciousness and supervenience; 3. The explanatory gap; 4. Consciousness and higher-order experience; 5. Consciousness and higher-order thoughts; 6. The structure of consciousness; 7. What it is like; 8. Against objectualism II: mistakes about the way things seem; 9. Consciousness and representation; 10. Consciousness and the natural order; Bibliography; Index.