Archive for April, 2007

Intrinsic…but intentional?

Posted by Robert Howell on April 9th, 2007

In a thought provoking talk at the SSPP last weekend, Colin McGinn made a brief argument against “qualia” views of consciousness which hold that consciousness is an intrinsic property of the subject.Put simply, conscious necessarily has a relational structure, involving a subject and an object, so it cannot be a matter of a subject having an intrinsic property. This argument appears pretty straightforward and conclusive, but I have my doubts…