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Completing the Hybrid Account: Awareness Is a Functionally Emergent Kind

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The Feeling of Embodiment

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Abstract

Carruthers considers a challenge to hybrid accounts of consciousness from recent arguments offered by Irvine to the effect that this concept of AWARENESS is not a scientifically respectable kind. From the fact that different measures of consciousness can provide contradictory answers to questions of what a subject is conscious of, Irvine concludes that each measure taps a different cognitive process rather than a unified phenomenon of consciousness. Carruthers argues that some explanations of awareness called “functional emergence” accounts are not threatened by her arguments as they predict the existence of mental states of which the subject is neither aware nor unaware. Responding to Irvine’s argument also has the added benefit of allowing us to explore how to further study awareness according to the hybrid account.

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  1. School of Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Port Macquarie, NSW, Australia

    Glenn Carruthers

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  1. Glenn Carruthers
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Correspondence to Glenn Carruthers .

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Carruthers, G. (2019). Completing the Hybrid Account: Awareness Is a Functionally Emergent Kind. In: The Feeling of Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14167-7_7

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