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Mechanisms of Consciousness

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Philosophy of Olfactory Perception

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Abstract

There is no shortness of proposals about what the mechanisms of consciousness are. However, the proposed theories are rarely evaluated. Consciousness research is at a stage at which theory development is valued more than theory testing. In “Mechanisms of Consciousness”, Keller proposes an objective way of evaluating mechanistic theories of consciousness by testing how well the proposed mechanism correlates with the occurrence of conscious processes. This methodology reveals that, in olfaction, attention is strongly correlated with conscious processes. Attention is therefore a possible mechanism of consciousness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astoria, New York, USA

    Andreas Keller

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  1. Andreas Keller
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Keller, A. (2016). Mechanisms of Consciousness. In: Philosophy of Olfactory Perception. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33645-9_7

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