Contents

REFEREED ARTICLE

Jack Petranker
Inhabiting Conscious Experience: Engaged Objectivity in the First-Person Study of Consciousness  abstract

CONTINUING DEBATE ON VELMANS

Benjamin Libet
Can Conscious Experience Affect Brain Activity?  full text
Bruce Mangan
Volition and Property Dualism  full text
Guy Claxton
The Mind–Body Problem: Who Cares?  full text
Emilios Bouratinos
A Pre-Epistemology of Consciousness  full text
Max Velmans
Preconscious Free Will  abstract

OFF THE PAGE

Stephen Mascari
The Dualist Cartoonist’s View of JCS
Edward Subitzky
I Am a Conscious Essay   abstract
Books received

TEN YEAR CUMULATIVE INDEX

Ten Year Index of Authors
Ten Year Index of Titles

ABSTRACTS

Jack Petranker

Inhabiting Conscious Experience. Engaged Objectivity in the First-Person Study of Consciousness

Abstract: First-person methodologies have been criticized for their inability to arrive at reliable and verifiable knowledge of the contents of conscious experience. Consciousness, however, is not its contents, but the cognitive capacity that makes those contents available. That capacity is directly and uniquely accessible to first-person inquiry, provided a suitable methodology can be developed. As a framework for such inquiry, this paper distinguishes two structures that give rise to conscious contents: narrative and story. While narratives are told, stories are inhabited. Stories are fundamental to conscious experience: an event is conscious only if it fits the presently unfolding story. While third-person inquiry relies on withdrawing from story into narrative, first-person inquiry can take place within the story. In place of the reductive objectivity of third-person science, first-person inquiry can cultivate an engaged objectivity, immersed in the story but not bound to it, that makes the phenomenon of consciousness available to be known. Communities of inquiry practising such a first-person style of inquiry could develop criteria for assessing advances in knowledge and for research programmes appropriate to furthering such advances.

Correspondence: Jack Petranker, Center for Creative Inquiry, 2425 Hillside Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA. Email: petranker@att.net

Max Velmans

Preconscious Free Will

Abstract: This paper responds to continuing commentary on Velmans (2002a) ‘How could conscious experiences affect brains’, a target article for a special issue of JCS. I focus on the final question dealt with by the target article: how free will relates to preconscious and conscious mental processing, and I develop the case for preconscious free will. Although ‘preconscious free will’ might appear to be a contradiction in terms, it is consistent with the scientific evidence and provides a parsimonious way to reconcile the commonsense view that voluntary acts are freely chosen with the evidence that conscious wishes and decisions are determined by preconscious processing in the mind/brain. I consider alternative interpretations of how ‘conscious free will’ might operate by Libet and by Mangan and respond to doubts about the extent to which the operations of mind are revealed in consciousness, raised by Claxton and Bouratinos. In reconciling commonsense attributions of freedom and responsibility with the findings of science, preconscious free will can be shown to have practical consequences for adjudications in law.

Correspondence: Max Velmans, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK.
Edward Subitzky

Edward Subitzky

I Am a Conscious Essay

Abstract: Though merely an essay, I challenge you, gentle reader, by attempting to demonstrate that my own words are not fundamentally different from the conscious thoughts in your own mind: I thus claim to have consciousness and qualia.

Correspondence: edsubz@earthlink.net


 
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