Perplexities of Consciousness

Perplexities of Consciousness - Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology

Paperback (01 Nov 2013)

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Publisher's Synopsis

A philosopher argues that we know little about our own inner lives.

Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience.

Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

Book information

ISBN: 9780262525220
Publisher: The MIT Press
Imprint: The MIT Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 128.2
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 318g
Height: 218mm
Width: 148mm
Spine width: 14mm