One commitment in all this, to which there is an index, is to mainstream philosophy, which is a greater concentration than that of science on the logic of ordinary intelligence -- (i) clarity, usually analysis, (ii) consistency and validity, (iii) completeness, (iv) generalness. In short, thinking about facts rather than getting to them? Another commitment of these pages, about what is right, is to the Principle of Humanity.   


Philosophers of Our Times -- Introductory Lecture, Edinburgh Festival, by Ted Honderich

A Hay-on-Wye festival event:   Humanity, Conservatism, David Aaronovitch, Edwina Currie. Ted Honderich


A NEW BOOK BY PROF. HONDERICH
ACTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Oxford University Press

          To understand what it is to be conscious, don’t start with any of five leading philosophical ideas -- qualia, what it’s like to be something, traditional subjectivity, intentionality, phenomenality, or any bundle of them. Start with a large figurative database. It leads to ordinary consciousness in the primary or core sense being initially adequately clarified, which kind of clarification is essential to inquiry and real agreement and disagreement. This consciousness, speaking as figuratively, is something's being actual.  

The resulting wholly literal and explicit theory of consciousness, Actualism, first is that with consciousness in perceiving, what is actual is a spatio-temporal piece or stage out there of a physical world, usually a room, certainly not a room in a head. Not sense data, any other representations, a self, functional or cognitive-science relations, some constitution or structure of consciousness, or whatever else from the histories of philosophy and science. No matter what roles such things or related ones play in the associated unconscious mentality. 

With thinking and with wanting as against perceiving, what is actual, to be briefer than brief, is only representations-with-attitudes.

Being actual, in all cases, is being subjectively physical, differently so with perceptual consciousness as against each of cognitive and affective consciousness. No representationism by itself, and not the representationism in Actualism, is a sufficient account of cognitive and affective consciousness. Representations being actual have to be in a sufficient account.

The subjectively physical as a whole, its parts being open to full and explicit characterization, no gesturing, is one great category of all physicality, the other being objective physicality. 

Actualism, right or wrong, is therefore a wholly different  physicalism from predecessors. It is different too in being partly an externalism and partly an internalism or cranialism. 

It deals exclusively with the prime subject with respect to the philosophy and science of mind, the necessary subject. It is argued to satisfy assembled criteria better than any competing theory. It denies absolutely any really unique mystery about mind. It claims to explain the fact of subjectivity fully, which is essential to any theory of consciousness, only partly by having a real physical world dependent not only on the objective physical world but also on you neurally. 

Despite being persistently worked out, is it also a programme? It may be philosophically as well as scientifically fertile. Certainly it is wholly consistent with, and respects, and registers the past progress of the science of consciousness. It is a full partner to science, as science is to it.

Long Review by Dale Jacquette, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews  

Long review by Alastair Hannay, in Philosophy

Author summary of Actual Consciousness

Author talk, launch party

On Why Actual Consciousness is Wholly a Subject for More Science -- and on Some Other Relations Between Philosophy and Science With Respect to Actual Consciousness

Lecture -- Actual Consciousness: Database, Physicalities, Theory, Criteria, No Unique Mystery

Lecture audience handout

Lecture UCL undergraduate Philosophy Society handout / Powerpoint

Actual Consciousness on Twitter

Oxford University Press Catalogue

Review by Roberta Locatelli, in Times Higher Education

Author's comments on 2006 papers by others on his earlier stuff that issued in Actual Consciousness --- papers by Harold Brown, Tim Crane, James Garvey, Stephen Law, E.J. Lowe, Derek Matravers, Paul Noordhof, Ingmar Persson, Stephen Priest, Barry Smith, Paul Snowdon. In Radical Externalism: Honderich's Theory of Consciousness Discussed, edited by Anthony Freeman, and also Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006.