Swimming against the stream of consciousness: Ian Phillips at TEDxUCL
Ian Phillips is a Lecturer in philosophy at
UCL and a Fellow by Examination at
All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous articles on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. He is especially interested in issues which lie at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive psychology.
Currently, he is working on a range of such issues in connection with our perception of time. Ian was recently awarded the
William James Prize for Contributions to the Scientific
Study of
Consciousness by
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
Talk:
Swimming against the stream of consciousness
Conscious experience provides our most basic perspective on the world. But how rich is that perspective? Is our experience at any moment replete with detail, like a high resolution digital photograph? Or is it sparse and indeterminate, like an impressionistic sketch? This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy and psychology. Remarkably, it remains the subject
of heated controversy. I will describe classic experiments which many have taken to settle the issue, and I will explain why they fail to do so. I will conclude by asking where we go from here.
About TEDx
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