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398How Can We Solve the Meta-Problem of Consciousness?Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6): 201-226. 2020.
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690Debunking Arguments for Illusionism about ConsciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6): 258-281. 2020.
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480Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6): 227-257. 2020.
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403Finding Space in a Nonspatial WorldIn Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan & Nick Huggett (eds.), Philosophy Beyond Spacetime: Implications From Quantum Gravity, Oxford University Press. 2021.
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5325Carnap's Second Aufbau and David Lewis's AufbauIn Denis Fisette, Guillaume Fréchette & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy: Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook Volume 24, . 2020.
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4348What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63. 2020.Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere.
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Facing up to the Problem of ConsciousnessIn John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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769Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2009.This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.
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57Availability: The cognitive basis of experienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 148-149. 1997.Although A-consciousness and P-consciousness are conceptually distinct, a refined notion of A-consciousness makes it plausible that the two are empirically inseparable. I suggest that the notion of direct availability for global control can play a central role here, and draw out some consequences.
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7Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?In John A. Keller (ed.), Being, Freedom, and Method: Themes From the Philosophy of Peter van Inwagen, Oxford University Press Uk. 2017.Is there progress in philosophy? A What might be called a glass-half-full view of philosophical progress is that there is some progress in philosophy. The glass-half-empty view is that there is not as much as we would like. Inspired in part by van Inwagen’s discussion of disagreement in philosophy, this paper articulates and argues for a thesis about the relative lack of progress in philosophy: there has been less convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy than on the big questi…Read more
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1264Panpsychism and PanprotopsychismAmherst Lecture in Philosophy 8. 2013.I present an argument for panpsychism: the thesis that everything is conscious, or at least that fundamental physical entities are conscious. The argument takes a Hegelian dialectical form. Panpsychism emerges as a synthesis of the thesis of materalism and the antithesis of dualism. In particular, the key premises of the causal argument for materialism and the conceivability argument for dualism are all accommodated by a certain version of panpsychism. This synthesis has its own antithesis in tu…Read more
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1987The Virtual and the RealDisputatio 9 (46): 309-352. 2017.I argue that virtual reality is a sort of genuine reality. In particular, I argue for virtual digitalism, on which virtual objects are real digital objects, and against virtual fictionalism, on which virtual objects are fictional objects. I also argue that perception in virtual reality need not be illusory, and that life in virtual worlds can have roughly the same sort of value as life in non-virtual worlds.
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8Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Bonython Hall, 2:30pm, Saturday 9 July, 2005. Chaired by Ian Henschke.
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14Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Brookman Hall, 1:45pm, Sunday 10 July, 2005. Chaired by Peter Goldsworthy.
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Toward a science of consciousness: the first Tucson discussions and debatesIn Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates, Mit Press. 1996.
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612The hard problem of consciousnessIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, th…Read more
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98Response to SearleNew York Review of Books 44 (8). 1997.In my book _The Conscious Mind_ , I deny a number of claims that John Searle finds "obvious", and I make some claims that he finds "absurd". But if the mind/body problem has taught us anything, it is that nothing about consciousness is obvious, and that one person's obvious truth is another person's absurdity. So instead of throwing around this sort of language, it is best to examine the claims themselves and the arguments that I give for them, to see whether Searle says anything of substance th…Read more
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442Précis of The Conscious Mind (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 435-438. 1999.Chapter 1: Two Concepts of Mind. I distinguish the phenomenal and psychological concepts of mind. I argue that every mental state is a phenomenal state, a psychological state, or a hybrid of the two. I discuss the two mind-body problems corresponding to the two concepts of mind, and discuss the various senses of the term “consciousness”. Chapter 2: Supervenience and Explanation. I distinguish varieties of supervenience, especially logical and natural supervenience, where supervening properties c…Read more
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3Toward a Theory of ConsciousnessDissertation, Indiana University. 1993.This work is a study of the place of conscious experience in the natural order. In the first part, I examine the prospects for a reductive explanation of consciousness of the kind that has proved successful for other natural phenomena. I develop a systematic framework centered on the notion of supervenience for dealing with the metaphysical and explanatory issues involved, and apply this framework to consciousness. I give a number of arguments to the conclusion that consciousness is not logicall…Read more
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1025Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2002.What is the mind? Is consciousness a process in the brain? How do our minds represent the world? Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of…Read more
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429The character of consciousnessOxford University Press. 2010.What is consciousness? How does the subjective character of consciousness fit into an objective world? How can there be a science of consciousness? In this sequel to his groundbreaking and controversial The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers develops a unified framework that addresses these questions and many others. Starting with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of c…Read more
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4956Extended Cognition and Extended ConsciousnessIn Matteo Colombo, Elizabeth Irvine & Mog Stapleton (eds.), Andy Clark and his Critics, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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5277Structuralism as a Response to SkepticismJournal of Philosophy 115 (12): 625-660. 2018.Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been mo…Read more
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1054The Combination Problem for PanpsychismIn Brüntrup Godehard & Jaskolla Ludwig (eds.), Panpsychism, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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31955Idealism and the Mind-Body ProblemIn William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, Routledge. pp. 353-373. 2019.
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866The components of contentIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. 2002.[[This paper appears in my anthology _Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings_ (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 608-633. It is a heavily revised version of a paper first written in 1994 and revised in 1995. Sections 1, 7, 8, and 10 are similar to the old version, but the other sections are quite different. Because the old version has been widely cited, I have made it available (in its 1995 version) at http://consc.net/papers/content95.html.
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New York UniversityDepartment of Philosophy
Center For Mind, Brain And ConsciousnessUniversity Professor
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
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