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(2015) The science of subjectivity, Dordrecht, Springer.
Because the notion of unconscious thought plays a crucial explanatory role in cognitive neuroscience (and philosophy of mind generally), it deserves careful scrutiny. But the nature of unconscious mental states is rarely considered problematic today. Unconscious thoughts are widely understood to be information states that cause behavior. Consciousness, by contrast, is considered a hard problem because it exhibits features that information functions do not. Consciousness is qualitative, subjective, and strongly connected with agency. These dimensions of conscious thought are not found in the Swiss Army knife assortment of specialized computational mechanisms featured in mainstream cognitive neuroscience. Roughly, consciousness resists explanation because information can always be processed without it, as any zombie will surely tell you (Chalmers, 1996 & 1998; Levine, 2001).
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Full citation:
Neisser, J. U. (2015). Unconscious subjectivity, in The science of subjectivity, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 38-60.
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