Open Peer Commentary O'Brien & Opie: Connectionism and phenomenal experience
Consciousness should not mean, but be
Dan Lloyd a1 a1 Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106
dan.lloyd@trincoll.edu
Abstract
O'Brien & Opie's vehicle hypothesis is an
attractive framework for the study of consciousness. To fully embrace
the hypothesis, however, two of the authors' claims should be
extended: first, since phenomenal content is entirely dependent on
occurrent brain events and only contingently correlated with external
events, it is no longer necessary to regard states of consciousness as
representations. Second, the authors' insistence that only stable
states of a neural network are conscious seems ad hoc.
