How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument

Journal article

Abstract:: The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure.

Files:: Mogensen_2025_How_to_resist.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: consciousness

substrate-independence

vagueness

transparency of consciousness

holism
Pubs id:: 2305754
Local pid:: pubs:2305754
Deposit date:: 2025-10-30
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_12beef7f67694066ac0184cb2a707535

Copyright holder:: Andreas L. Mogensen
Rights statement:: Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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