Concept
3 readings
Conscious experience
Concept · 3 readings
What explains the felt character of hearing or seeing? That question is different from explaining how we discriminate and report.
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3 readings · Title A–Z
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 7 of 9
How can a possibility matter without being true?
For Whitehead, a proposition can engage us whether or not it is true. The lesson compares affirmation, denial and suspended judgment without making usefulness the test of truth.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 2 of 9
What becomes actual?
Whitehead begins with occasions of becoming rather than enduring things, and treats even nonconscious actuality as experiential. What does he gain by doing so, and what does he still owe?
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 82
What would explain conscious experience?
Does Mary learn something new when she first sees color? Jackson argues that she learns what the experience is like; Lewis’s ability hypothesis questions whether that is a new fact, and Chalmers separates explaining functions from explaining experience.
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Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.