D. Chalmers

A number of popular arguments for dualism start from a premise about an epistemic gap between physical truths about truths about consciousness, and infer an ontological gap between physical processes and consciousness. Arguments of this sort include the conceivability argument, the knowledge argument, the explanatory-gap argument, and the property dualism argument. Such arguments are often resisted on the grounds that epistemic premises do not entail ontological conclusion. My view is that one can legitimately infer ontological conclusions from epistemic premises, if one is very careful about how one reasons. To do so, the best way is to reason first from epistemic premises to modal conclusions, and from there to ontological conclusions. Here, the crucial issue is the link between the epistemic and modal domains. How can one reason from theses about what is knowable or conceivable to theses about what is necessary or possible? To bridge the epistemic and modal domains, the framework of two-dimensional semantics can play a central role. I have used this framework in earlier work to mount an argument against materialism. Here, I want to revisit the argument, laying it out in a more explicit and careful form, and responding to a number of objections. In what follows I will concentrate mostly on the conceivability argument. I think that very similar considerations apply to the other arguments mentioned above, however. In the final section of the paper, I show how this analysis might yield a unified treatment of a number of anti-materialist arguments.

This chapter explores the conceptual landscape of the most important, current critique of panpsychism—the combination problem. He sets out from the ‘locus classicus’: William James’s presentation of the combination problem in his 1890 _The Principles of Psychology_. He discerns three ways of formulating the problem, which evolve around three distinct characteristics of phenomenal states: the subject combination problem, the quality combination problem, and the structural combination problem. Chalmers then turns to seven subversions of these three versions. The first four are connected to the subject combination problem. Subversion five and six are connected to the quality combination problem. And the final explication is connected to the structural combination problem. The chapter closes by presenting various solutions and answers to these explications of the combination problem.

This chapter analyzes aspects of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. It focuses on the phenomenal character and the intentional content of perceptual states, canvassing various possible relations among them. It argues that there is a good case for a sort of representationalism, although this may not take the form that its advocates often suggest. By mapping out some of the landscape, the chapter tries to open up territory for different and promising forms of representationalism to be explored in the future. In particular, it argues for a nonreductive, narrow, and Fregean variety of representationalism, which contrasts strongly with more widely explored varieties. It concludes with some words about the fundamental relationship between consciousness and intentionality.

At first glance, the first informed consent case to be decided by the High Court of Australia appears to be little more than a clear and simple description of the substantive law accepted in most American jurisdictions - although that is no small accomplishment in and of itself. In Rogers v. Whitaker, the highest court in Australia succinctly and persuasively rejected informed consent as a species of battery law, accepted it as a form, of ordinary professional negligence law, and adopted the “American” patient-oriented standard for measuring the breach of a healthcare professional's duty to her or his patients. On second look, however, the opinion is an even more significant one because it reveals that the law of informed consent is now based on principles broad enough to create a duty on the part of healthcare providers to offer adequate health education to all of their patients. In Implicitly recognizing the physician's duty to educate her or his patients, the High Court's judgment is consistent with a view increasingly held In the medical and ethical communities that teaching patients about how to maintain their health is just as much a part of the doctor's function as diagnosing and treating disease. It may have taken 2,500 years for medicine to progress from, the Hippocratic notion that physicians should apply treatment to patients who are kept in blissful Ignorance of their condition and Its remedy, but there Is little doubt that medicine finally has entered a post-Hippocratic era.

Entrepreneurship research has long privileged economic motivations - profit, market opportunities, and innovation - often sidelining the constitutive role of ideology. This article challenges that dominant paradigm by proposing a conceptual framework that foregrounds the ideological entrepreneur: an actor who strategically employs venture creation as a tool for political world-building. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialization, Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice, and loyalty, and Slobodian’s analyses of neoliberal zone-making, we delineate how ideologically motivated entrepreneurs construct alternative socio-technical systems to realize distinct, often competing, visions of the future. We examine three primary archetypes: right-accelerationist entrepreneurs leveraging technology to build enclaves facilitating exit from democratic oversight; left- accelerationists mobilizing automation for systemic post-capitalist transformation; and degrowth/decelerationist actors constructing alternative, ecologically-grounded, and human-centric economies. These ventures aim not only to disrupt markets but also reshape societal norms, ethical principles, and systems of governance. We contribute to emerging heterodox perspectives within entrepreneurship studies by recasting the entrepreneur as a potent ideological agent.

In this chapter, the author says that the standard view of brain‐in‐a‐vat scenario is endorsed by the people who created The Matrix. The author argues that the hypothesis that he is envatted is not a skeptical hypothesis, but a metaphysical hypothesis. That is, it is a hypothesis about the underlying nature of reality. According to the author, the Matrix Hypothesis is equivalent to a version of the following three‐part Metaphysical Hypothesis. First, physical processes are fundamentally computational. Second, our cognitive systems are separate from physical processes, but interact with these processes. Third, physical reality was created by beings outside physical space‐time. The Metaphysical Hypothesis combines the Creation Hypothesis, the Computational Hypothesis, and the Mind‐Body Hypothesis. It also adds a more specific claim: the computational processes underlying physical space‐time were designed by the creators as a computer simulation of a world.

This paper offers both a theoretical and an experimental perspective on the relationship between connectionist and Classical (symbol-processing) models. Firstly, a serious flaw in Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument against connectionism is pointed out: if, in fact, a part of their argument is valid, then it establishes a conclusion quite different from that which they intend, a conclusion which is demonstrably false. The source of this flaw is traced to an underestimation of the differences between localist and distributed representation. It has been claimed that distributed representations cannot support systematic operations, or that if they can, then they will be mere implementations of traditional ideas. This paper presents experimental evidence against this conclusion: distributed representations can be used to support direct structure-sensitive operations, in a man- ner quite unlike the Classical approach. Finally, it is argued that even if Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument that connectionist models of compositionality must be mere implementations were correct, then this would still not be a serious argument against connectionism as a theory of mind.

It's very interesting to see neurophysiological evidence brought to bear on the puzzling question of conscious experience. Many have observed that information-processing models of cognition seem to leave consciousness untouched; it is natural to hope that turning to neurophysiology might lead us to the Holy Grail. Still, I think there are reasons to be skeptical. There are good reasons to suppose that neurophysiological investigation contributes to cognitive explanation at best in virtue of constraining the information-processing structure of cognition. Of course this is a very large and significant role for it to play, but it may be over-optimistic to suppose that it can play some further explanatory role, taking us where information-processing theories cannot. If so, then neurophysiological accounts will be no more and no less successful at dealing with consciousness than information-processing accounts are.

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature. In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is posed most acutely in C. D. Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature. The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad’s exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation.1 On Broad’s taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent, as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance. The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a four-by-four matrix of views results. At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive.