Abstract
In Chapter 4 Carruthers offers a well-motivated hypothesis to explain the phenomenology of the feeling of embodiment that has received some independent and direct empirical support. But, is this an account of our consciousness of this feeling or just how the content is represented? In this chapter Carruthers considers what Dennett has called the “Hard Question” of consciousness. The account offered in Chapter 4 undoubtedly does a good job of explaining how the representations of our own embodiment are elicited. But, how are we to distinguish conscious and unconscious representations of our own embodiment? Carruthers considers two possible answers to this problem known as vehicle and functionalist accounts of consciousness. The explanation offered so far is classified as a vehicle theory.
This chapter makes use of substantially altered text previously published as: Carruthers, G. (2014).
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Notes
- 1.
There are differences between ‘potentially explicit ’ and ‘tacit ’ representations. These differences become important when we consider the kinds of computations being performed within a cognitive system, but won’t play a role in this short statement of O’Brien and Opie’s hypothesis regarding consciousness (indeed O’Brien and Opie argue that a Vehicle Theory could only be true for connectionist systems and that the ‘potentially explicit ’ versus ‘tacit ’ distinction does not apply to such systems).
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Carruthers, G. (2019). …And Then What Happens?. In: The Feeling of Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14167-7_5
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