Terms
Glossary
Short definitions of the terms used on this site, with links to where they come up.
- Access consciousness
- Information being available for reasoning, report and the control of action. Contrasted by Ned Block with phenomenal consciousness.
- Attention schema
- Michael Graziano's name for the brain's simplified model of its own attention. On his theory, awareness is what this model depicts.
- Behaviourism
- The view that talk of mental states is really talk of behaviour and dispositions to behave. Ryle's version, logical behaviourism, is about the meaning of mental words.
- Blindsight
- The ability of some people with damage to the visual cortex to respond to things in their blind field, far better than chance, while insisting they see nothing.
- Cartesian Theatre
- Dennett's name for the idea that there is a place in the brain where everything comes together and is presented to consciousness. He argued that there is no such place.
- Category mistake
- Treating something as belonging to the wrong logical type, like looking for the University among its colleges.
- Change blindness
- The failure to notice large changes in a scene when each change is masked by a brief interruption.
- Combination problem
- The difficulty, for panpsychism, of explaining how many tiny subjects of experience add up to one larger subject. First posed by William James in 1890.
- Colour phi
- Two coloured dots flashed in quick succession are seen as one dot moving and changing colour mid-way. Reported by Kolers and von Grünau in 1976.
- Critical rationalism
- Karl Popper's philosophy: knowledge grows not by proof or induction but by bold conjectures and attempts to refute them.
- Dualism
- The view that the mental and the physical are fundamentally different. Substance dualism (Descartes) says they are different things; property dualism says one thing can have both physical and non-physical properties.
- Eliminative materialism
- The view that some everyday mental categories, such as belief and desire, may be eliminated by a mature neuroscience rather than explained by it.
- Epiphenomenalism
- The view that conscious states are caused by physical processes but have no effects of their own.
- Fame in the brain
- Dennett's later image for consciousness: a content is conscious when it wins enough influence over the brain's other processes.
- Figment
- Dennett's mocking name for the imagined stuff that phenomenal colours and sounds would have to be made of.
- Functionalism
- The view that mental states are defined by what they do, their causal roles, rather than by what they are made of.
- Global workspace theory
- Bernard Baars's theory, developed in neuroscience by Stanislas Dehaene and others, that consciousness is the broadcasting of information across the brain to many specialised processes at once. Close in spirit to Dennett's fame in the brain.
- Hard problem
- David Chalmers's name for the problem of explaining why physical processes are accompanied by experience at all, as opposed to the "easy problems" of explaining functions.
- Hard Question
- Dennett's counterpart to the hard problem: once a representation is in the brain, and then what happens? Who uses it, and for what?
- Heterophenomenology
- Dennett's method: collect everything subjects say about their experience and treat it as data to be explained, without assuming it is true or false.
- Higher-order theories
- Theories, associated with David Rosenthal and others, on which a mental state is conscious when it is the object of a suitable thought or perception about it.
- Homunculus
- A "little man" in the head who watches or controls. Explaining the mind by positing one leads to a regress, since the homunculus needs a mind too.
- Identity theory
- The view that each kind of mental state is identical with a kind of brain process.
- Illusionism
- The view that phenomenal consciousness, as philosophers define it, does not exist: introspection represents our brain states as having special qualities they lack.
- Intentional stance
- Predicting a system's behaviour by treating it as a rational agent with beliefs and desires. Contrasted with the physical and design stances.
- Integrated information theory
- Giulio Tononi's theory that consciousness is integrated information, measured by a quantity called phi. It implies that some simple systems are slightly conscious and some complex computers are not. Dennett regarded it as deeply mistaken.
- Ipsundrum
- Nicholas Humphrey's name for a self-sustaining sensory loop which, he argues, presents itself as having extraordinary phenomenal qualities.
- Jump to universality
- David Deutsch's name for the moment when a small improvement makes a system universal, as the alphabet can spell any word and a universal computer can run any program.
- Knowledge argument
- Frank Jackson's argument from Mary, who knows every physical fact about colour but seems to learn something new when she first sees it.
- Meta-problem
- Chalmers's name for the problem of explaining why we think there is a hard problem.
- Multiple drafts
- Dennett's model of consciousness: many parallel, revisable interpretations, none of them the final version presented to an inner viewer.
- Multiple realisability
- The idea that the same mental state can be realised in different physical systems.
- Panpsychism
- The view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
- Phenomenal consciousness
- Experience considered as having a "what it is like" character, often taken to be intrinsic, private and ineffable.
- Phenomenological fallacy
- U. T. Place's name for the mistake of thinking that describing how things look is describing objects on an inner screen.
- Popperian creatures
- Dennett's name for creatures that can test possible actions against an inner model before acting, letting their hypotheses die in their place.
- Predictive processing
- The theory that the brain constantly predicts its sensory input and perceives by correcting its predictions.
- Qualia
- The supposed intrinsic qualities of experience, such as the redness of red. Dennett argued there are no such things.
- Strange loop
- Douglas Hofstadter's term for a loop that, moving through levels of a system, ends up where it began, like Gödel's sentence about itself. He argues that the self is such a loop.
- Self-model
- The brain's model of the organism it belongs to, which on some views, such as Joscha Bach's and Thomas Metzinger's, is what we experience as the self.
- Stream of consciousness
- William James's image, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), for the continuous, flowing character of conscious life.
- Three worlds
- Popper's division of reality into physical things (World 1), mental states (World 2) and the objective products of minds, such as theories and arguments (World 3).
- Universal explainer
- Deutsch's term for a person: an entity able to create any explanation that can be created.
- Zombie
- In philosophy, a being physically identical to a person but with no experience. Dennett's "zimbo" is a zombie that monitors its own states and so talks just as we do.