Gary Hatfield the Reality of Qualia

The Brain ’ s " New "

The Brain's "New" Science: Psychology, Neurophysiology, and Constraint*

There is a strong philosophical intuition that direct study of the brain can and will constrain the development of psychological theory. When this intuition is tested against case studies from the psychology of perception and memory, it turns out that psychology has led the way toward knowledge of neurophysiology. An abstract argument is developed to show that psychology can and must lead the w...

Why property dualists must reject substance physicalism

I argue that property dualists cannot hold that minds are physical substances. The focus of my discussion is a property dualism that takes qualia to be sui generis features of reality.

Conscious-state Anti-realism

! Philosophical discussions of phenomenal consciousness are often cast in the idiom of realism/anti-realism debates. See, for example the “phenomenal realism” discussed by Chalmers (2003), Block (2002), and McLaughlin (2003) as well as the “qualia realism” discussed by Kind (2001), Graham and Horgan (2008), and Hatfield (2007). Often, the realists label themselves as such in the interest of mak...

V . S . Ramachandran and William Hirstein Three Laws of Qualia

Neurological syndromes in which consciousness seems to malfunction, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, visual scotomas, Charles Bonnet syndrome, and synesthesia offer valuable clues about the normal functions of consciousness and ‘qualia’. An investigation into these syndromes reveals, we argue, that qualia are different from other brain states in that they possess three functional characteristics...