What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self.

Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects.

Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014).

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle (On Dreams) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them.

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957).

Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep.

It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach

By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

we need to live with a healthy dose of agnosticism concerning theodicy.

The New Testament boldly proclaims what is no less a mystery for all the boldness of the proclamation, that God has personally known the darkness. “God was in Christ,” asserts the apostle (2 Corinthians 5:19), poured out in compassion on behalf of the world, suffering with us and for us—bearing the weight of our own evil.3

This is true both in the Old Testament and in the New. For as the Gospels tell it, Jesus prayed on the cross a psalm of lament: “My God, my God, why have you for- saken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1) In the words of the Apostles’ Creed, he “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, buried, he descended into hell.” The passion of Jesus, as portrayed in the New Tes- tament, was a spiraling descent into the abyss of abandonment and suf- fering. And from the abyss Jesus, like the psalmists before him, looked to God. And three days after his lament—his cry of abandonment on the cross—God acted decisively, defeating the power of death and raising him from the grave.

But the hope intrinsic to lament is found in the fact that even at the extremity, the psalmist refuses to give up on God. Having looked fully into the abyss, the psalmist now looks to God—/rom the abyss. Lament thus combines, paradoxically, both uncompromising honesty about evil—in- cluding the suspicion that God, because God is sovereign, might be at fault—and trust in that same God.

Whereas in classi- cal theodicy God is discussed abstractly in the third person and the apolo- gist is expected to answer to others about God, in biblical theodicy God is addressed in direct second person speech and is expected to answer the supplicant. Whereas classical theodicy results, I have argued, in decep- tion about the nature of evil and leads to passivity vis-a-vis the status quo, biblical theodicy is radically honest about evil, is rooted in passion, and questions the present social arrangements in the world.3

his is not to say that there is no continuity whatsoever between the Bible and classical theodicy. One point of overlap which they do share (and that distinguishes them from process theodicies) is that in both the om- nipotence or sovereignty of God is affirmed. The genre of lament is predi- cated on the expectation that God can and will rescue the supplicant.

he second problem, therefore, with the greater good defense is that it does not take the Scriptures seriously enough. At least it does not take seriously that strand within Scripture which articulates and embraces pain and is ruthlessly honest about suffering.?

Indeed, if there is an aesthetic correspondence of form and content here, the very length and repetitiveness of the dialogue may indicate that the book of Job is about the torturous process of moving from the disori- enting shock of experienced evil, through its articulation in lament (with its dimensions of grief and complaint), to a new orientation that neither denies. nor forgets evil, yet does not allow it to have the final word.

Although this is a notoriously difficult verse to inter- pret, it has been suggested that its meaning is that Job changed his mind about his stance of dust and ashes, that is, about his complaining or la- ment, and moved on to praise and thanksgiving—though only after a pro- foundly personal, yet numinous encounter with God.2

The way of wisdom, however, is the way of lament. Far from being condemned here, prayerful struggle with God about perceived injustice is vindicated—even if it means persistently questioning God’s justice in the context of a faithful relationship of trust. The question of Job, as Gustavo Gutierrez frames it in his insightful commentary on the book, is “the ques- tion of how we are to talk about God. More particularly: how we are to talk about God from within a specific situation—namely, the suffering of the innocent” (Gutierrez 1987:xviii; his emphasis).

While it is clear that the option of curs- ing God is illegitimate and therefore not much attention is paid to it, the book of Job makes the profound statement that a rationalistic orthodoxy which seeks to have the relationship of God’s justice to suffering and evil neatly packaged is also inappropriate.?3 Could the greater good defense be considered a variety of this rationalistic folly?

In most Christian circles it would not be regarded as theologically cor- rect to ascribe such deception and terror (in other words, evil) to God, yet such ascriptions are typical of the so-called “complaints” or “confes- sions” of Jeremiah which intersperse his prophetic oracles throughout the middle part of the book. These complaints fall into the literary genre of lament, a genre common also in the book of Job and in the Psalter. In- deed, more that one-third of all biblical psalms are either entirely or largely constituted by this genre.2

hat these two prophets have done is first to affirm, respectfully, what is true about the God with whom they have to do, and then Seon that experience of evil

The case against actively opposing evil is similar. If evil is necessary to some good, from whence would the motivation to oppose it come? If I really believed the greater good defense, what would generate the sort of holy dissatisfaction with the way things are that is the sine qua non of redemptive action? Believing the greater good defense would result in nothing less than ethical paralysis.

f the greater good defense were truly believed, it would undercut motivation for both petitionary prayer and redemptive opposi- tion to evil by generating a self-deceptive apathy instead of a biblically in- flamed passion for justice and shalom. My question about the greater good defense, therefore, is not whether you can preach it, but whether you can believe it.

“That's all well and good, but can you preach it, brother?’”!

This criticism concerns, in other words, the inner logic of the po Hon. The greater good defense simply cannot account for human experiene of irreducible evil.

She said after some hesitation: “Yes.” He said, “Fuck you,” picked up his knapsack, and walked out.

But, further, if we were to interrogate contemporary proponents of the greater good defense, the claims become quite explicit. Yandell, for ex- ample, grants the psychological forcefulness of appeal to infant mortal- ny and geriatric disability,” yet he maintains that this detracts in no way rom the logic . his theodicy. In fact, the problem with such appeals, he Tgues, 1s that they obscure clear philosophi inki 1 (Yandell 1974:13)48 p ophical thinking on the matter

To put it rather bluntly, the greater good defense, in Augustine or elsewhere, requires us to affirm as good (all things considered) not just Christ’s death, an amputation to save a life or parental discipline, but also three hundred years of the West Afri- can slave trade, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, tribal slaughter in Rawanda, and the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau. If the greater good defense is true, although we might feel sorrow over these events when viewed in isolation, nevertheless we ought ultimately to praise God for them, since seen in their proper perspective they are necessary to some greater good which could not be accomplished without them.

Without denying Jesus’ suffering or taking away any of the pain of his death, the Christian tradition has judged that, .in view of what his death accomplished (the reconciliation of the world to God), Christ’s death was ultimately good.

Note, however, that in the case of a merely prima facie evil, although sorrow might be quite appropriate, we ought not attempt to prevent it from occurring. This is illustrated in Jesus’ rebuke of Peter for suggesting that he try to avoid the cross, notwithstanding his own agony over his ap- proaching death, or the weeping of the women at the foot of the cross.

hereas the motivation of the greater good defense is admirable in that it attempts to retain an orthodox doctrine of God as both good and provi- dentially sovereign in the face of evident evil, it is the strategy that is prob- lematic. For to claim that every evil in the world contributes to some equal or greater good which would be otherwise unattainable means quite sim- ply that there is no genuine evil.

Building explicitly on both Plantinga and Hick, (and also Richard Swinbourne) Stump argues that the significant exercise of free will is logi- cally necessary for the process of being redeemed from one’s own evil and thus for attaining union with God. The required sort of exercise of free will, Stump asserts, the sort that results in union with God, “is of such great value that it outweighs all the evils of the world”

In both cases, however, no actual instance of evil in the world can in fact make the world worse, since either it will be “counterbalanced” by an equal good which results from it (Augustine’s position in De Libero Arbitrio) or it will be sometimes counterbalanced and sometimes “over- balanced” by a surpassing good which results from it (the later Augustine of the Enchiridion).

What is crucial to Augustine’s argument in De Libero Arbitrio is not simply that he appeals to human freedom as the “cause” of evil (De Libero Arbitrio, TI1.22.63). Rather, central to Augustine’s early theodicy is his claim that the misuse of freedom (a putative evil) is bal- anced by God’s retributive punishment, resulting in the “just” suffering of the soul (De Libero Arbitrio, 11.16.43), which guarantees a good outcome overall in God’s providential ordering of the cosmos. It is the punishment of evil by the imposition of suffering that serves, in Augustine’s theodicy, to rectify this evil and thus to justify God.

Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? (Hume 1947:198)

I grant the psychological forcefulness of appeal to infant mortality and geriatric disability. Perhaps it is just that forcefulness which not only often prevents us from looking at such matters clearly but makes any such attempt seem crass. It might indeed be crass (and that is charitable) to offer philosophical reflection to a bereaved parent or a grieving child when their need is so clearly for simple kindness. But no good is done by confusing appraisal of putative evidence with counsel to the griefstricken, and each has its proper place.

his view of moral agency, of course, assumes (what seems to me true) that moral agents are necessarily free agents, and that free agents are necessarily not determined.

As we have seen, other fears or pains might have served as well, and other equally lamentable stimuli might have produced other equally valuable virtues, quite compatibly with the truth of (A) or (B)

Nonetheless, as we noted, (1) entails (3) but not (3'). That (3') is false says nothing about (1). But if (3) is false, (1) is also false. Put differently (3) is entailed by orthodox theism, while (3') is certainly not. Thus while use of (3) in showing that (1) and (2) are logically compatible is perfectly legitimate, the theist is committed to (3) in a stronger sense than that in which (3) is one of various propositions he may adopt for legitimate logical manoeuvres, and I think this is worth emphasizing.

5) Every evil that God allows is logically necessary to some at least counterbalancing good state of affairs, and some evil is overbalanced by the good to which it is logically necessary, where one applicable criterion for a state of affairs being good is that it furthers the growth to moral maturity of some moral agent, and where the evils occurring to each agent are so arranged as to provide him maximal opportunity for moral maturity.

4) Every evil is logically necessary to some good which either counterbalances or overbalances it, and some evil is overbalanced by the good to which it is logically necessary.

Every evil is such that God has a morally sufficient reason for creating or allowing it.

As I understand the theistic tradition, (2)-that there is evil in the world-is what gives point to talk of repentance and forgiveness, judgement and mercy, damnation and redemption, and hell and heaven. Central, then, if not exhaustive among the evils with which this tradition is concerned are those which seem to frustrate, or actually do frustrate, man's attaining the greatest good available to him, for it is after all the forgiveness, redemption, and attainment of heaven by men which is most in view in theistic thinking and preaching.

God controls the course of history so that each man has maximal opportunity to attain his greatest good.

The orthodox theist is committed to the truth of at least these claims: (1) God exists, and is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good Creator and Providence; (2) There is evil in the world

We pro-pose that neurophenomenology of dreaming is a nascent discipline that requires rethinking the relative role of third-, first- and second-person methodologies, and that a paradigm shift is required in order to investigate dreaming as a phenomenon on a continuum of conscious phenomena as opposed to a break from or an alteration of consciousness

Prominent phenomenologists have offered an extremely valuable interpretation of the dream asan inten-tional process, stressing its relevance in understanding the complexity of the mental life of subject, the continuous interplay between reality and unreality, and the possibility of building parallel spheres of expe-rience influencing the development of personal identity.

Our adaption of the GW model dichotomizes consciousness into conscious perception of the external environment (PE = percep-tual environment) and the conative aspects of conscious cognition (CC). This diagram illustrates potential pathways of information flow operating at either conscious or unconscious levels of neuro-cognitive processing. See text for details

Memory systems a. episodic memory b. semantic memory c. action/skill memory d. working memory

The conscious output of the perceptual and cognitive generators is mediated by a host of unconscious neurocognitive processes.

The “stream of consciousness” is clearly a compos-ite of many facets including perceptions, imaginings, recollections, attention, emotions, thoughts, metacogni-tions and volitions. Baars suggests that conscious opera-tions can be divided into three areas. Conscious ex-periences are perceptual or “quasi-perceptual” and are the direct, immediate content of our consciousness: sen-sory-based perceptions, internal imagery, emotions, thoughts, recollections and so forth. Consciously-mediated access involves access to contents that are not currently conscious, but can be made so readily. This suggests a type of “penumbra” surrounding focal consciousness, an area of “preconsciousness” to which consciousness can immediately shift (Baars, 1996a; La-Berge & Rheingold, 1990). Conscious access opera-tions are closely associated with voluntary attention, voluntary memory access, and imagery operations (Baars, 1997b). Conscious-mediated control is, es-sentially, volition, the ability to consciously initiate ac-cess and action operations

CASE 2: DREAMING

Fig. 1. The structures of sleep conscious experiences in terms of a dual representation of the dreamer (self) and the dream perceptual environment (PE). [A]. The normative types of sleep experience. The transition from thought-like mentation to dreamer-as-actor dreams shows a series of increasing activity in both generators in terms of the com-plexity of the representations and their interactions. [B]. Illustration of changes in consciousness during a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD). See text for details

A consequence of our thinking is that dreaming results in a “mental recombination” of cerebral information networks, which contributes to the ability of waking consciousness to generate novel and adaptive responses.

REMsleep

Ourcentralaiminthispaperhasbeentoarguethatthenotionofalevelofconsciousnessisill-suitedforthisfunction,foritimpliesthatglobalstatesofconsciousnesscanbeorderedintermsofasingledimension–animplicationthatwehavearguedisatbestuncertainandatworstfalse.Globalstatesofconsciousness,wehaveargued,arebestunderstoodasregionsinamultidimensionalspace.Thetaskofidentifyingthedimensionsofthisspaceisanurgentandnecessaryonethatwillleadultimatelytoabetterunderstandingofconsciousnessitself

Instead,theyaretypicallydistinguishedfromeachotheroncognitive,behavioural,andphysiologicalgrounds.

Localstatesofconsciousnessincludeperceptualexperiencesofvariouskinds,imageryexperiences,bodilysensations,affectiveexperiences,andoccurrentthoughts.Inthescienceofconsciousnesslocalstatesareusuallyreferredtoas‘consciouscontents’,fortheyaretypicallydistinguishedfromeachotheronthebasisoftheobjectsandfeaturesthattheyrepresent.

Indeed, in theConfessions,Augustine’s relation to God is both the source of hisrestlessness and the ground of his philosophical inquiry. Far from being a‘lullingnarcotic’, openness to the judgment of God prepares the space of self-reflection thatAugustine’s philosophical questioning inhabits, indeed it compels that questioning.

There are, however, theological objections to this phenomenological project thatdeserve to be mentioned. The most obvious worry, which will occur to any studentof Karl Barth, is that it might tip over into an anthropological reduction of theologyas a whole. This would be the case if the phenomenological analysis is taken to yieldall there is to say about religion, eliminating any need to posit a God who truly exists(or a God‘beyond’or‘without’being, if you prefer) as the origin and end of thereligious life.

At the same time, insofar as Heidegger’s entire career is occupied with thecritique ofmetaphysical theismin its various guises, his work has every right to becalled philosophy of religion. The question of God re-enters into Heidegger’sthinking via the destruction of the history of Western metaphysics as‘onto-theology’. As a whole, it represents a caseagainstthe God of onto-theology. Andthis, in turn, has bequeathed to philosophers after Heidegger a rather unexpected andno doubt controversial way of thinking the phenomenon of religion, and especiallymetaphysical theism, namelydestructively, from the perspective of the question ofbeing or ontological difference.

Heidegger’s philosophy,therefore, cannot be properly described as theistic, atheistic or agnostic; it suspendsall doxastic attitudes. Its atheism is methodological.

Moreover, Heidegger is evidently more reticent than Schleiermacher aboutconstructing a general account of‘the essence of religion’; he stays close to theparticularity of his Christian sources. To the extent that his phenomenology ofreligious lifedoesprepare the way for the account of human Dasein offered inBeingand Time, nothing essentially‘religious’remains in it. The existential analyticpresaged by the 1920/21 lectures will be rendered by Heidegger in 1927 in entirelynon-religious terms. Schleiermacher’s‘intuition of the infinite’will be re-interpretedas‘transcendence’towards the being of beings (‘being-in-the-world’); and, as wehave seen, the latter, for Heidegger, is emphatically not to be confused with God orwith a religious intuition of any kind. Heidegger’s existential analytic appropriatesall the main structures of Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology without seeingany need to think of these structures as a‘being towards God’.

A Christian modeof being is of course still possible, but only because it is made possible by theexistential structures of being-in-the-world as such, structures which bear nonecessary reference to the divine.

Religious experience discloses something that is essential if theory and praxis are tobe properly oriented: a sense of theinfinitewhole, and of our human being as afinitepart of this whole. Without it, morality is stale and metaphysics is empty.

ut to correlate belief in God with practical reason is tointroduce a new distortion and reduction of faith. As an existential modality, faith issomething more primordial than either theoretical or practical reason

This connection between proclamation and factical life experience, Heideggerargues, is often missed by theologians and philosophers of religion who insist onabstracting away from the factical-lived stratum to isolate what they consider to bethe essential content or object of faith. In truth, the existential stratum itselfistheessential content of faith; or, put more precisely, faith is nothing other than anexistential modality.

Paul’s letters are aimed at heightening the consciousness of this existential situation,not lessening it. His articulation of self, world and others, as they are disclosed to faith, isintended to form the same‘mind’in his auditors (and not merely to communicate facts)so that they too willenactorperformthe faith

Such faith is what Heidegger elsewhere calls a‘believing-understanding mode ofexisting’. It has intelligible content that can be expressed; but it is not, he stresses,‘some more or less modified type of knowing’. Faith is, rather,‘an appropriation ofrevelation that co-constitutes the Christian occurrence, that is, the mode of existencethat specifies a factical Dasein’s Christianness as a particular form of destiny.Faith isthe believing-understanding mode of existing in the history revealed, i.e., occurring,with the Crucified’(Heidegger1998,pp.44–45). Through the appropriation of theChristian revelation (i.e. the cross), this faith discloses being as a totality, as acontext, as a situation.

Heidegger emphasizes therestlessness of this mode of being; it is troubled, tempted, and fragile. The hope ithas is not certitude; it is not a guarantee but a challenge to be found faithful. Thus thehope that it possesses is as much a provocation as a comfort—acalltowakefulness.Itis a mode of‘becoming’and of appropriating one’salready‘having-become’what onewas not

e looks first to how Paul expresses his own Christian existence.Heidegger highlights in Paul’s writings the theme ofstruggleandsuffering:thewayofPaul’s existing is not one of quiet contemplation but of tension and struggle to achieveand maintainmetanoia(repentance or conversion) from the life of the law to the life offaith. The life of the law and the life of faith denote, according to Heidegger, twodistinctexistentiellmodes of being; the‘how’of living-according-to-law is opposed tothe‘how’of living-according-to-faith (just as the‘how’of philosophy and the‘how’offaith are opposed, as we observed above)

In the Winter Semester of 1920/21, Heidegger delivered a lecture course entitled‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’. In it, he followed the lead ofSchleiermacher and Kierkegaard by redirecting philosophical study of religion away fromquestions concerning God (the object of faith) and towards religious experience (faithitself).

In 1927 he even defends the possibility, legitimacy and dignity of theology as a‘science of faith’(Heidegger1998,pp.43–50)14; and as late as 1949 he continues toplead:‘Will Christian theology one day resolve to take seriously the word of theapostle [Paul] and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?’(Heidegger1998, pp. 287–88). Texts such as these intimate that, while he evidently regards someforms of theology as little more than bad philosophy, there is for Heidegger a‘scienceof faith’that does engage in a well-founded form of thinking, a form of thinking that isnot only non-philosophical but even necessarily (and legitimately?)anti-philosophical.In these remarks, the spirit of Luther abides, albeit tenuously.

What is‘prior’is precisely the opposition between the radical self-disclosingquestionableness of authenticity and the commitment of lived faith—an antagonismwritten into the constitution of philosophical questioning and Christian faithrespectively. The attitude of primordial faith is a non-philosophical attitude; theattitude of philosophy is non-faithful

Faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its inner most core the mortalenemy of theform of existencethat is an essential part ofphilosophyand that isfactically ever-changing. Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy thatphilosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it. Thisexistentiell oppositionbetween faithfulness and the free appropriation of one’swhole Dasein is not first brought about by the sciences of theology andphilosophy but ispriorto them.

First, we must not overlook the crucial fact that authenticity inBeing and Timeisnot a‘formalization’of the structure of Christian faith, since it is itself anexistentiellpossibility of Dasein, just as faith is anexistentiellpossibility of Dasein. This isHeideggerian jargon meaning that authenticity and Christian faith are two alternativeways to be. Though they may share a family resemblance, they are nonethelessdiscrete possibilities that cannot both be enacted at the same time.

God and being are not the same; God is a being, not being

In both contexts, the comportment inquestion is interpreted as a form of inauthenticity, a falling away, insofar as it abstractsfrom the temporality and facticity of existence (Da-sein; later,das Ereignis), and servesto distract us from the concrete horizon of our historical situation, our temporal having-to-be. This is the existential motive for the‘forgetting of being’that Heideggerfamously takes to be native to Western philosophy and philosophical theology.

The first matter that requires reflection is this: if it is such a trap for metaphysics, whyis the theological pseudo-answer to the question of being so appealing? Heidegger locatesthe root cause in the‘inauthenticity’of everyday Dasein. The positing of a first cause, astable ground, anunc stans(standing‘now’), is seen by Heidegger as a reactivemechanism of flight, calculated to curb the anxiety of life, to secure ourselves againstthe contingency and fluidity of life itself

lulling narcotic

highest object of thought is only a dream, an illusion—not necessarily because thereis no God, but because the desire to contemplate the absolute, to achieve absoluteknowledge, is a chimera and an idol

Nonetheless, Heidegger’s critical reflections on this tradition lead him to the viewthat the entanglement of ontology with theology has only served to obscure the mostfundamental meaning of being. For Luther, the theological tradition that attempted tothink the meaning of Christian faith via philosophical theology systematically failed tounderstand the meaning of Christian faith; conversely, for Heidegger, the philosophicaltradition that attempted to think the meaning of being via the idea of God systematicallyfailed to think the meaning of being in an authentic fashion.

God isdefined(paradigmatically in Aristotle)asthe highest being and theground of being; God is thus understood by reference to being. (ii) But equally, beingisaccounted forby appeal to the highest being and the ground of being. The reason,ground or account (logos) for being (on) is found in the highest being (theos); hencethe description of metaphysics as‘onto-theologically constituted’.7

From the time of the ancient Greeks at least until the Enlightenment, Heidegger asserts,Western philosophy has treated the question of being in such a way that it enfolds andappeals to the idea of God—whether in the guise of‘the good’,‘the first cause’,‘theself-caused cause’,‘the eternal’,‘the absolute’, or any number of other philosophemes

‘forgetting of being’

One of Heidegger’s most readily demonstrable debts to Luther is the idea thatphilosophy should take the form of a destruction ordestructio(Luther’s term) of thehistory of Western metaphysics, that it should break through the crust of an ossifiedtradition to reveal a hidden, pulsating core.

Did his renunciation of the Catholic faith in fact represent a Protestantconversion of sorts? The answer to this question is complex, as we shall see below.

‘extra-philosophical allegiances’.

calling them to do without God in an unfettered pursuit of the question of being (throughhis‘destruction of onto-theology’); and, second, that this exclusion nonetheless leavesroom for a form of philosophical reflection upon the nature of faith and discourseconcerning God, namely for a philosophy of religion in aphenomenological mode

AI has had little to tell us about thinking,since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition,it is about programs, and programs are not machines.

Unless you believe that the mind is separable from thebrain both conceptually and empirically -- dualism in a strong form --you cannot hope to reproduce the mental by writing and running programssince programs must be independent of brains or any other particularforms of instantiation. If mental operations consist in computationaloperations on formal symbols, then it follows that they have nointeresting connection with the brain; the only connection would bethat the brain just happens to be one of the indefinitely many types ofmachines capable of instantiating the program.

Ifthe latter, then, though the computer does information processing, itis only doing so in the sense in which adding machines, typewriters,stomachs, thermostats, rainstorms, and hurricanes do informationprocessing; namely, they have a level of description at which we candescribe them as taking information in at one end, transforming it, andproducing information as output.

That is all the computer has for anything it does. To confusesimulation with duplication is the same mistake, whether it is pain,love, cognition, fires, or rainstorms

Third, as I mentioned before, mental states and events are literally aproduct of the operation of the brain, but the program is not in thatway a product of the computer

Second, the program is purely formal, but the intentional states arenot in that way formal. They are defined in terms of their content, nottheir form. The belief that it is raining, for example, is not definedas a certain formal shape, but as a certain mental content withconditions of satisfaction, a direction of fit (see Searle 1979), andthe like. Indeed the belief as such hasn't even got a formal shape inthis syntactic sense, since one and the same belief can be given anindefinite number of different syntactic expressions in differentlinguistic systems

First, the distinction between program and realization has theconsequence that the same program could have all sorts of crazyrealizations that had no form of intentionality. Weizenbaum (1976, Ch.2), for example, shows in detail how to construct a computer using aroll of toilet paper and a pile of small stones. Similarly, the Chinesestory understanding program can be programmed into a sequence of waterpipes, a set of wind machines, or a monolingual English speaker, noneof which thereby acquires an understanding of Chinese. Stones, toiletpaper, wind, and water pipes are the wrong kind of stuff to haveintentionality in the first place -- only something that has the samecausal powers as brains can have intentionality -- and though theEnglish speaker has the right kind of stuff for intentionality you caneasily see that he doesn't get any extra intentionality by memorizingthe program, since memorizing it won't teach him Chinese.

I see no reason in principle why we couldn't give a machine thecapacity to understand English or Chinese, since in an important senseour bodies with our brains are precisely such machines. But I do seevery strong arguments for saying that we could not give such a thing toa machine where the operation of the machine is defined solely in termsof computational processes over formally defined elements; that is,where the operation of the machine is defined as an instantiation of acomputer program. It is not because I am the instantiation of acomputer program that I am able to understand English and have otherforms of intentionality (I am, I suppose, the instantiation of anynumber of computer programs), but as far as we know it is because I ama certain sort of organism with a certain biological (i.e. chemical andphysical) structure, and this structure, under certain conditions, iscausally capable of producing perception, action, understanding,learning, and other intentional phenomena. And part of the point of thepresent argument is that only something that had those causal powerscould have that intentionality.

VI. The many mansions reply (Berkeley). "Your whole argumentpresupposes that AI is only about analogue and digital computers. Butthat just happens to be the present state of technology. Whatever thesecausal processes are that you say are essential for intentionality(assuming you are right), eventually we will be able to build devicesthat have these causal processes, and that will be artificialintelligence. So your arguments are in no way directed at the abilityof artificial intelligence to produce and explain cognition."

V. The other minds reply (Yale). "How do you know that other peopleunderstand Chinese or anything else? Only by their behavior. Now thecomputer can pass the behavioral tests as well as they can (inprinciple), so if you are going to attribute cognition to other peopleyou must in principle also attribute it to computers.

The combination reply

III. The brain simulator reply (Berkeley and M.I.T.). "Suppose wedesign a program that doesn't represent information that we have aboutthe world, such as the information in Schank's scripts, but simulatesthe actual sequence of neuron firings at the synapses of the brain of anative Chinese speaker when he understands stories in Chinese and givesanswers to them. The machine takes in Chinese stories andquestions about them as input, it simulates the formal l structure ofactual Chinese brains in processing these stories, and it gives outChinese answers as outputs. We can even imagine that the machineoperates, not with a single serial program, but with a whole set ofprograms operating in parallel, in the manner that actual human brainspresumably operate when they process natural language. Now surely insuch a case we would have to say that the machine understood thestories; and if we refuse to say that, wouldn't we also have to denythat native Chinese speakers understood the stories? At the level ofthe synapses, what would or could be different about the program of thecomputer and the program of the Chinese brain?"

Now in this case I want tosay that the robot has no intentional states at all; it is simplymoving about as a result of its electrical wiring and its program. Andfurthermore, by instantiating the program I have no intentional statesof the relevant type. All I do is follow formal instructions aboutmanipulating formal symbols

II. The Robot Reply (Yale). "Suppose we wrote a different kind ofprogram from Schank's program. Suppose we put a computer inside arobot, and this computer would not just take in formal symbols as inputand give out formal symbols as output, but rather would actuallyoperate the robot in such a way that the robot does something very muchlike perceiving, walking, moving about, hammering nails, eatingdrinking -- anything you like. The robot would, for example have atelevision camera attached to it that enabled it to 'see,' it wouldhave arms and legs that enabled it to 'act,' and all of this would becontrolled by its computer 'brain.' Such a robot would, unlike Schank'scomputer, have genuine understanding and other mental states."

stomach

Furthermore, the systems reply would appear to lead to consequencesthat are independently absurd. If we are to conclude that there must becognition in me on the grounds that I have a certain sort of input andoutput and a program in between, then it looks like all sorts ofnoncognitive subsystems are going to turn out to be cognitive.

But, I want to reply, not only do they have littleto do with each other, they are not even remotely alike. The subsystemthat understands English (assuming we allow ourselves to talk in thisjargon of "subsystems" for a moment) knows that the stories are aboutrestaurants and eating hamburgers, he knows that he is being askedquestions about restaurants and that he is answering questions as besthe can by making various inferences from the content of the story, andso on. But the Chinese system knows none of this. Whereas the Englishsubsystem knows that "hamburgers" refers to hamburgers, the Chinesesubsystem knows only that "squiggle squiggle" is followed by "squogglesquoggle." All he knows is that various formal symbols are beingintroduced at one end and manipulated according to rules written inEnglish, and other symbols are going out at the other end.

The systems reply (Berkeley). "While it is true that the individualperson who is locked in the room does not understand the story, thefact is that he is merely part of a whole system, and the system doesunderstand the story. The person has a large ledger in front of him inwhich are written the rules, he has a lot of scratch paper and pencilsfor doing calculations, he has 'data banks' of sets of Chinese symbols.Now, understanding is not being ascribed to the mere individual; ratherit is being ascribed to this whole system of which he is a part.

I understand stories in English; to a lesser degree I can understandstories in French; to a still lesser degree, stories in German; and inChinese, not at all. My car and my adding machine, on the other hand,understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. We oftenattribute "under standing" and other cognitive predicates by metaphorand analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothingis proved by such attributions. We say, "The door knows when to openbecause of its photoelectric cell," "The adding machine knows how)(understands how to, is able) to do addition and subtraction but notdivision," and "The thermostat perceives chances in the temperature."

One of the claims made by the supporters of strong AI isthat when I understand a story in English, what I am doing is exactlythe same -- or perhaps more of the same -- as what I was doing inmanipulating the Chinese symbols. It is simply more formal symbolmanipulation that distinguishes the case in English, where I dounderstand, from the case in Chinese, where I don't.

Let us also suppose that my answers to the English questions are, asthey no doubt would be, indistinguishable from those of other nativeEnglish speakers, for the simple reason that I am a native Englishspeaker. From the external point of view -- from the point of view ofsomeone reading my "answers" -- the answers to the Chinese questions andthe English questions are equally good. But in the Chinese case, unlikethe English case, I produce the answers by manipulating uninterpretedformal symbols. As far as the Chinese is concerned, I simply behavelike a computer; I perform computational operations on formallyspecified elements. For the purposes of the Chinese, I am simply aninstantiation of the computer program

Gedankenexperiment

I have no objection to the claims of weak AI, at least as far as thisarticle is concerned. My discussion here will be directed at the claimsI have defined as those of strong AI, specifically the claim that theappropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states andthat the programs thereby explain human cognition.

In strong AI, because the programmedcomputer has cognitive states, the programs are not mere tools thatenable us to test psychological explanations; rather, the programs arethemselves the explanations.

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore theconsequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in humanbeings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain Iassume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relationsbetween mental processes and brains It says simply that certainbrain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2)Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficientcondition of intentionality The main argument of this paper isdirected at establishing this claim The form of the argument is toshow how a human agent could instantiate the program and still nothave the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have thefollowing consequences (3) The explanation of how the brainproduces intentionality cannot be that it does it by instantiatinga computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must havecausal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be atrivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to createintentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just bydesigning programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers ofthe human brain. This follows from 2 and 4

Molina, Ainsworth, and Wittig’s (2003) Feelings of Threat vs. Opportunity

Peer prosocial norms. This 5-item measure asked youth to report the prevalence of prosocial behaviors among their peers at school; for exam-ple, “How many students in your school help other kids even if they don’t know them well?” and “How many students in your school help resolve arguments between other kids?” Students responded on a 5-point scale(1 =almost all the students, 3 =some, and 5 =hardly any). Items were reverse coded prior composite scores being calculated, with higher scores indicating prosocial behavior as more normative among peers (α= .79, range .75–.81 across ethnic/racial groups).

Phinney’s (1992) Other Group Orientation and Ethnic Identity scales:

“I stand up for kids who are made fun of or bullied,” “I help other kids even if I don’t know them well,” and “I help resolve arguments between other kids.” The 3 items were based on focus-group findings that measured the prosocial behav-iors that diverse early adolescents (11- to 13-year-olds) reported as impor-tant and valuable (Bergin, Tally, & Hamer, 2003).

Youths’ prosocial behavior was marginally associated with their perceptions of greater representation of same-ethnicity peers at school but not associated with their perceptions of school support of ethnic diversity. Furthermore, prosocial behavior was significantly related to adolescents’ reported engagement in and valuing of cross-ethnic contact in circumstances of relatively lower and average school diversity but not relatively higher school diversity. The significant associations were found even when controlling for the contribution of prosocial peer norms at school, which as expected were associated with youths’ prosocial behavior.

Dpc

School Interracial Climate scale developed by Green, Adams, and Turner (1988)

For the current analyses, 2,369 participants met the selection criteria. The racial/ethnic composition of the subsample was 45% Latino(n= 1,065), 20.5% White (n= 485), 20.1% Asian (n= 478), and 14.4% Black/African American (n= 341). Approximately half of the participants were girls (52%)

Participants in this study were drawn from a larger sample of 5,085 sixth-grade students taking part in a 3-year longitudinal study of peer relations in 20 diverse urban public middle schools in the Greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

Prosocial peer norms. The degree to which adolescents engage in prosocial behavior is likely influenced by the prosocial norms of their peers. Peers provide information regarding behavioral expectations by communicating, modeling, and reinforcing norms for how to treat oth-ers and thereby serve as guides for prosocial behavior (

Advancing a more balanced perspective, perhaps the presence of more same-ethnic peers in schools with diversity offers a secure base and provides comfort when crossing ethnic boundaries. Same-ethnic peers may provide social support, protect against discrimination, and shift the balance of social power (Felix & You, 2011). It has been suggested that a critical mass of same-ethnicity/race peers might mitigate the challenges of fitting in within a school community (Graham, Taylor, & Ho, 2009).

Although studies conducted with child or adolescent populations have not explored the relationship of engagement in and receptiveness to ethnic diversity with prosocial behavior, research with older samples suggests such a relationship. Empirical investigations have found that the actual experiences that university students have with diverse peers affect learning and democracy outcomes such as increased citizenship engage-ment (e.g., helping others in difficulty)

nteracting with people from another cultural group exposes individuals to diverse perspec-tives and beliefs. This valuable cognitive exercise can provide youth the opportunity to see similarities between themselves and demographi-cally dissimilar individuals. As a result of these self–other experiences, perspective-taking skills are likely to mature as well as lead to better understanding of and empathy for others who are different

School support of ethnic diversity. It also may be that schools with a positive diversity climate that fosters pluralism and inclusion enhance stu-dents’ positive behavior and psychosocial adjustment. Theory in this area suggests that the degree to which schools support a culture of respect, equal-ity, and diversity plays a key role in influencing students’ positive social and emotional adjustment, particularly for ethnic minorities

We focus on two dimensions of youths’ perceptions of ethnicity-related context variables—how experiences of ethnic similarity and diversity are perceived. While perceptions of expe-riences of similarity and diversity do not necessarily go hand in hand, and potentially there might be tension between them, we suggest that both may have significance for prosocial behavior. Briefly, we turn next to research and theory that support the links between some subjective experiences of similarity and diversity and prosocial action.

It is equally important to bear in mind that experiences that emphasize communalities (e.g., shared/similar values, beliefs) and inclusiveness may reduce the salience of ingroup–outgroup distinctions.

Yet, at the same time, research suggests benefits of attending diverse schools, such as lower levels of perceived social vulnerability (Juvonen, Nishina, & Graham, 2006) and more diverse social ties in later life

Tensions also may arise from social categorization processes (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) that impact social behaviors of early adolescents in eth-nically/racially diverse contexts. For instance, social and psychologi-cal connections with others in ethnically/racially diverse settings may be attenuated. Studies show that adolescents report a lowered sense of school belonging and more discrimination in diverse schools

Furthermore, prosocial behavior may beget more prosocial behavior: Research on peer-group processes suggests that there is a propensity for patterns of social behaviors and interactions to become synchronized in a context

Quintana’s (1998) research

The emerging salience of ethnicity in intergroup and intragroup social relations in early adolescence suggests that it is a critical developmental period in which to examine how perceptions of ethnicity relate to prosocial behavior.

Social identity theory proposes that individuals are likely to perceive differences between themselves and others and classify themselves and oth-ers into different social categories. These self–other categories may shape the way individuals interact with others such that to enhance their social identity people will be more likely to behave prosocially toward members of their own social group than toward members of other groups (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Ingroup preference in prosocial behavior may extend to cat-egorizations of ethnicity/race. Some studies, for example, show that adults are more likely to help members of their own racial group than members of a different racial group (Benson, Karabenick, & Lerner, 1976; Brigham & Richardson, 1979; Wegner & Crano, 1975).

In early adolescence, sociocultural contexts outside the home, such as peer groups, ethnic/racial groups, schools, and communities, become especially important influences on attitudes and behavior (Lerner, 2005). This influence shifts in part because youth are forming their social identi-ties and developing a greater awareness of social norms and perspectives of others (Erikson, 1968).

Moreover, prosocial relationships may serve as protec-tive factors for youth at risk for social and academic difficulties (Catalano, Haggerty, Oesterle, Fleming, & Hawkins, 2004). Prosocial behavior may not only be beneficial to the helper and recipient but may also be a source of social harmony (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007).

Prosocial behavior represents a broad category of voluntary acts intended to help or benefit others (Eisenberg & Mussen, 1989). The results of many studies suggest the importance of identifying factors that relate to ado-lescents helping their peers and engaging in other prosocial behaviors.

ultilevel analyses indicated that prosociability in a sample of 2,369 sixth-grade students in 20 ethnically/racially diverse middle schools was associated with student engagement in and valuing of cross-ethnic contact in circumstances of relatively lower and average school ethnic/racial diversity but not higher diversity. In addi-tion, prosocial behavior was marginally associated with greater representation of same-ethnic peers at school but not associated with school support for ethnic diversity.

Another plausible explanation isthat being a student in a more diverse school setting couldraise White students’ awareness of and sensitivity toinequitable treatment when it is present.

As with perceivedteacher caring, we found that Black students reported sig-nificantly lower equity on average as compared with Whitestudents and furthermore observed that the Black–Whitegap was most discordant in schools that were majorityWhite or majority Black (i.e., the most racially and ethni-cally homogenous schools), however, the disparityreversed depending on the majority race of the school.Specifically, Black students had less favorable perceptionsof equity in majority White schools relative to White stu-dents, whereas White students had less favorable percep-tions of equity in majority Black schools relative to Blackstudents.

However, it ispossible that student-reports of teacher expectations areless informative in addressing research questions on deficitthinking relative to teacher-reports or observational mea-sures, as teachers’ success expectancies may be less easilydiscerned by students (which could explain why we foundgaps for caring and equity, but not high expectations).

The significant finding of lower perceived teacher caringamong Black students is noteworthy in this study because itwas found even when accounting for maternal education (aproxy for socioeconomic status) and regardless of changesin school socioeconomic context or diversity, suggestingfurther exploration of potential contributing factors ismerited.

however, we did findthat this dimension of support decreased for both Black andWhite youth as the diversity of the student body in theirschool increased. Consistent with our hypotheses, we foundlower levels of perceived equity among both Black andWhite students in more racially and ethnically diverseschools.

Our findings demon-strated that racial disparities were present in Black andWhite students’ perceptions of caring, such that Blackstudents perceived significantly lower caring relative totheir White peers. This gap did not vary significantly by thediversity of their peers or school socioeconomic context.

Supportive school contexts in which adults are caring, fair,and set high expectations have been recognized as essentialto adolescents’ healthy cognitive, social, and emotionaldevelopment (Eccles and Roeser2011). Persistent racialdisparities in students’ school outcomes (e.g., academicperformance, school discipline; Aud et al.2012; Skibaet al.2011) mirror the available research on youth per-ceptions of school support by race, which show that Blackyouth perceive lower levels of supportive relationshipswith adults and connectedness at school relative to theirWhite peers (Furlong et al.2011; Hamre and Pianta2001;Hughes and Kwok2007).

Twelve survey items using a four-point Likert scale wereselected from the California Healthy Kids Survey (Hansonand Kim2007) and the School Development School Cli-mate Survey

To advance our knowledge of whether racial disparities instudents’ perceptions of school support are influenced by theracial and ethnic diversity and socioeconomic status of theschool, this study employed multi-level and multiple grouplatent variable approaches to model school equity, caring, andhigh expectations as a 3-dimensional model of school support.

In schools marked by higherpercentage of students on free and reduced price meals andhigher concentration of Black youth, staff burnout and stresslevels are likely elevated (Bottiani et al.2014; Collie et al.2012); stress, in turn, has been linked to expression ofimplicit prejudicial biases (Kang et al.2014). Therefore, it isplausible that student report of equity may be lower overall inthese schools and that disparities in students’ report of schoolsupport might be larger in such school settings

Although research examiningthe role of school diversity in inequalities in Black boys’report of school support is scant overall, a handful of studiessuggest that youth of color perceive poorer racial climate andgreater discrimination in more racially/ethnically heteroge-neous schools

yet alsosuggests that Black students experience less supportiverelationships with their teachers and less school connected-ness relative to their White peers

Although school support is linked with positive outcomesacross diverse racial and ethnic groups (e.g., Garcı ́a-Reidet al.2005; Tyler and Boelter2008), educators have theo-rized that Black students in particular may benefit fromteacher support to help navigate sociocultural boundariesbetween school, home, and neighborhood and to cope withexperiences of discrimination at school

Existing conceptualizations of school support suchas the dynamic model of motivational development(Skinner and Pitzer2012) and the youth development andresiliency model (Hanson and Kim2007) have not inclu-ded dimensions reflecting students’ perceptions of equity.

Among Black students,perceived discrimination is inversely associated withvaluing of education and academic persistence (e.g., Dot-terer et al.2009; Smalls et al.2007; Wong et al.2003).Conversely, research on school climate suggests that per-ceived school equity, which includes dimensions of fair-ness and inclusiveness

Adolescents’ perceptions of fairness in the school envi-ronment can enhance both students’ sense of competence(Elliot and Dweck2005) and connectedness

School support is an emerging construct theorized to fulfillyouth needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy(Hanson and Kim2007; Skinner and Pitzer2012) andconceptualized as an aspect of school climate shaped bystudents’ relationships with adults at school. Researchindicates that supportive relationships with adults at schoolpredict students’ academic engagement and social-emo-tional well-being (Roeser et al.2000), particularly forbehaviorally at-risk Black youth (Decker et al.2007)

mul-tilevel, latent variable methods

The results indicated that Black students perceived lesscaring and equity relative to White students overall, andthat equity and high expectations were lower in diverseschools for both Black and White students. Nonetheless,racial disparities were attenuated in more diverse schools.The findings point to the need for intervention to improve

Supportive relationships with adults at schoolare critical to student engagement in adolescence. Addi-tional research is needed to understand how students’ racialbackgrounds interact with the school context to shape theirperceptions of school support.

This leads to a natural hypothesis: that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect.

The double-aspect principle stems from the observation that there is a direct isomorphism

3The double-aspect theory of information. The two preceding principles have been nonbasic principles. They involve high-level notions such as “awareness” and “organization”, and therefore lie at the wrong level to constitute the fundamental laws in a theory of consciousness. Nevertheless, they act as strong constraints. What is further needed are basic principles that fit these constraints and that might ultimately explain them

20appealed to inexplicitly. It is so familiar that it is taken for granted by almost everybody, and is a central plank in the cognitive explanation of consciousness.The coherence between consciousness and awareness also allows a natural interpretation of work in neuroscience directed at isolating the substrate (or the neural correlate) of consciousness. Various specific hypotheses have been put forward. For example, Crick and Koch (1990) suggest that 40-Hz oscillations may be the neural correlate of consciousness, whereas Libet (1993) suggests that temporally-extended neural activity is central. If we accept the principle of coherence, the most direct physical correlate of consciousness is awareness: the process whereby information is made directly available for global control. The different specific hypotheses can be interpreted as empirical suggestions about how awareness mightbe achieved. For example, Crick and Koch suggest that 40-Hz oscillations are the gateway by which information is integrated into working memory and thereby made available to later processes. Similarly, it is natural to suppose that Libet’s temporally extended activity is relevant precisely because only that sort of activity achieves global availability. The same applies to other suggested correlates such as the “global workspace” of Baars (1988), the “high-quality representations” of Farah (1994), and the “selector inputs to action systems” of Shallice (1972). All these can be seen as hypotheses about the mechanisms of awareness: the mechanisms that perform the function of making information directly available for global control.Given the coherence between consciousness and awareness, it follows that a mechanism of awareness will itself be a correlate of conscious experience. The question of just whichmechanisms in the brain govern global availability is an empirical one; perhaps there are many such mechanisms. But if we accept the coherence principle, we have reason to believe that the processes that explain awareness will at the same time be part of the basis of consciousness.2The principle of organizational invariance. This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functionalorganization will have qualitatively identical experiences. If the causal patterns of neural organization were duplicated in silicon, for example, with a silicon chip for every neuron and the same patterns of interaction, then the same experiences would arise. According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system, but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components.

1The principle of structural coherence. This is a principle of coherence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness. Recall that “awareness” was used earlier to refer to the various functional phenomena that are associated with consciousness.

(A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g., Hill 1991, Levine 1983, Loar 1990).

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain howexperience arises from physical processes.

We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also knowthat this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental.

The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination

The moral of all this is that you can’t explain conscious experience on the cheap. It is a remarkable fact that reductive methods—methods that explain a high-level phenomenon wholly in terms of more basic physical processes—work well in so many domains.

But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

A fifth and reasonable strategy is to isolate the substrate of experience.

A fourth, more promising approach appeals to these methods to explain the structure of experience.

In a third option, some researchers claim to be explaining experience in the full sense.

he second choice is to take a harder line and deny the phenomenon.

The first strategy is simply to explain something else.

According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace, a central processor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized nonconscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors.

Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways.

Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation.

Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g., Newell 1990; Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier.

As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience.

Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems.

The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

It's boom and gloom, a housing market that reflects America's increasing inequality. Ugh, that's a super-depressing way to end this. On the bright side, 2020 has fewer than four months to go?

When Tucker, the economist at Zillow, looks at the lopsided housing market, he sees more evidence for a "K-shaped recovery." The rising, top-right part of the K is the America that is buying new homes or that already owns one and is seeing its value increasing. Those Americans have stock portfolios and retirement accounts that have been doing shockingly well. And they have good jobs that they can remote into with safety and flexibility. The descending, bottom-right part of the K is the America that is showing up in record-high unemployment numbers and mounting bankruptcy statistics. It's the America that rents, has huge student loans, doesn't have retirement savings and is now dependent on the government or family for an affordable place to live.