Consciousness Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective [Paperback]

Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. Together they develop, defend, and explore the implications of Carruthers's distinctive theory of experiential consciousness; they discuss the differences between conscious experiencing and conscious thinking; and, controversially, they consider what would follow, either for morality or for comparative psychology, if it should turn out that animals lack conscious experiences. This collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science.

1. Introduction
2. Reductive explanation and the 'explanatory gap'
3. Natural theories of consciousness
4. HOP over FOR, HOT theory
5. Phenomenal concepts and higher-order experiences
6. Dual-content theory: the explanatory advantages
7. Conscious thinking: language or elimination?
8. Conscious experience versus conscious thought
9. Sympathy and subjectivity
10. Suffering without subjectivity
11. Why the question of animal consciousness might not matter very much
12. On being simple minded