Towards a scientific understanding of consciousness.

Although the fact that we have conscious experiences is a fundamental feature of our everyday life, our scientific understanding of consciousness is very limited for a principled reason: according to the received view, consciousness falls outside the scope of scientific explanations. The main aspiration of my proposed research is to change this received view, and turn scientific approaches to consciousness into theories with real explanatory power that, over and above pinpointing which neural mechanisms are crucial for the occurrence of conscious experiences, are also able to tell why that is so by accounting for features of consciousness in terms of the characteristics of corresponding brain processes.

Keywords:CONSCIOUSNESS, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, COGNITIVE SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Disciplines:Artificial intelligence, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, General psychology