A new paper “Neurophenomenal structuralism as a general theory of consciousness?” that I’ve co-written with my colleague Tomáš Marvan is now out in the Philosophy and the Mind Sciences journal. Read the abstract below or download and read the paper here.
According to neurophenomenal structuralism (NPS), the phenomenal character of experiences is individuated in terms of the structural features of these experiences and, moreover, these structures are mirrored in the experiences’ neural bases. While NPS is typically viewed as an account of specific phenomenal character of experiences, Sascha Fink (in Fink & Kob 2024) has suggested that NPS, suitably extended, might also account for why one has an experience (i.e. a conscious mental state) in the first place. According to Fink, the character-individuating structures are incorporated in larger (meta-)structures that make the incorporated structures conscious and contribute their own Gestalt-related phenomenology. We examine the theoretical commitments of such generalized NPS, which we label ‘NPS+’, formulating three challenges for Fink’s approach. According to the unconsciously perceived gist objection, there is empirical evidence for unconscious Gestalten, which suggests, against Fink, that the mechanism responsible for Gestalt-formation falls short of making the relevant mental states conscious. Moreover, the existence of Ganzfeld experiences suggests that some of our experiences lack Gestalt-structures. The mirroring dilemma rests on an observation that Fink’s proposal leaves it unclear how a consciousness-conferring (meta-)structure could ‘leave a phenomenal trace’, as Fink holds, which forces proponents of NPS+ into a dilemma between a vicious infinite regress of incorporating structures, and significantly compromising the methodological promise of NPS+. Having rejected Fink’s NPS+, we examine whether some version of NPS+ could do better, formulating two challenges for any two-factor form of NPS+: The more of the same challenge concerns the question of why if character-related structures can exist unconsciously, adding more structural features somehow makes them conscious, while the structure-selection challenge concerns the question of how it can be explained, in structural terms, that some neural structures, but not others, are selected for consciousness.
Jakub Mihálik 