Name: Experiencing Inner Awareness
Start: 2026-07-07T16:30:00+1200
End: 2026-07-07T17:25:00+1200

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

Many philosophers claim that a special inner awareness persists in the background of all our conscious states. However, various attempts to gather phenomenological evidence for this view have yielded conflicting results. The dominant alternative strategy involves considerations of a more theoretical nature, such as appealing to inner awareness as the best explanation for things like memory, attention, self-knowledge, and disorders of consciousness. But this theoretical strategy has failed to convince the sceptics since they always find alternative (and in their view, better) explanations of the target phenomena. The result is a dialectically deadlocked debate over what is supposed to be a central dimension of consciousness. This talk motivates a return to the phenomenological strategy and makes an initial case for a hitherto underutilized technique in the contemporary debate—meditation—as a way to establish the ubiquity of inner awareness.

Speakers

Darryl Mathieson

PhD Student, Australian National University

I am a fourth year PhD student and Associate Lecturer at ANU, where I am supervised by Victoria McGeer, Frank Jackson, and Daniel Stoljar. My main area of specialization is the philosophy of mind, and more specifically on various issues about consciousness and self-consciousness... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Darryl Mathieson

Attendees (18)

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AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Darryl Mathieson

Attendees (18)

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