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Phenomenal Consciousness in the Physical World

Publication

Abstract

Perhaps the most important challenge for contemporary philosophy of mind is to give a satisfactory account of how phenomenal consciousness can belong to the natural world described by the physical sciences, including the brain sciences. This conference had two aims.

Firstly it explored the coherence and plausibility of various non-reductive approaches to this problem---such as panpsychism, neutral monism and emergentism. Secondly it focused on the character of phenomenal consciousness itself, posing the question of whether there is a distinctive phenomenology of thought.

In keeping with these two aims, the conference was divided into two sections: "Consciousness and Nature", and "Cognitive Phenomenology".