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14Conscious intentionalityIn Denis Fisette (ed.), Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution, Springer. pp. 33--49. 1999.
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1The constructed and the secret selfIn Andrew Brook & Richard Devidi (eds.), Self-Reference Amd Self-Awareness, Advances in Consciousness Research Volume 11, John Benjamins. 2001.
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62A note on the 'quantum eraser'Philosophy of Science 63 (1): 81-90. 1996.This note aims to make more familiar to philosophers yet another bizarre quantum mechanical effect with disturbing metaphysical implications. It is possible to modify the classic double-slit experiment so that one can register the path of a particle to determine which slit it passes through, and then erase this registered information so that the interference effects which would normally disappear upon registration of the "which path" information are reconstituted. Thus the "trajectory" of partic…Read more
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376Is self-representation necessary for consciousness?PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.Brook and Raymont do not assert that self-representing representations are sufficient to generate consciousness, but they do assert that they are necessary, at least in the sense that self-representation provides the most plausible mechanism for generating conscious mental states. I argue that a first-order approach to consciousness is equally capable of accounting for the putative features of consciousness which are supposed to favor the self-representational account. If nothing is gained the s…Read more
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17Fodor's Theory of Content: Problems and ObjectionsPhilosophy of Science 60 (2): 262-277. 1993.Jerry Fodor has recently proposed a new entry into the list of information based approaches to semantic content aimed at explicating the general notion of representation for both mental states and linguistic tokens. The basic idea is that a token means what causes its production. The burden of the theory is to select the proper cause from the sea of causal influences which aid in generating any token while at the same time avoiding the absurdity of everything's being literally meaningful. I argu…Read more
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27Review of Alexander batthyany, Avshalom Elitzur (eds.), Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (9). 2006.
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24Our knowledge forms a highly interconnected and dynamically changing body of propositions. One obviously important way that knowledge changes is via rational inference, based either upon new insight into the content of what we already know or upon new knowledge provided by the senses. The most obvious codification of the acceptability of inference driven knowledge growth is the so-called known entailment closure principle, the principle that if S knows that p and knows that p implies q then S kn…Read more
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70Externalism and token identityPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (169): 439-48. 1992.Donald Davidson espouses two fundamental theses about the individuation of mental events. The thesis of causal individuation asserts that sameness of cause and effect is sufficient and necessary for event identity. The thesis of content individuation gives only a sufficient condition for difference of mental events: if e and f have different contents then they are different mental events. I argue that given these theses, psychological externalism--the view that mental content is determined by fa…Read more
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47Higher Order Thought theories of consciousness contend that consciousness can be explicated in terms of a relation between mental states of different
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7The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism (edited book)Routledge. 2019.Panpsychism is the view that consciousness a sh the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe a sh is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the.
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2David Copp, ed., Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Disarmament Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 8 (11): 436-438. 1988.
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405The 'intrinsic nature' argument for panpsychismJournal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11): 129-145. 2006.Strawson’s case in favor of panpsychism is at heart an updated version of a venerable form of argument I’ll call the ‘intrinsic nature’ argument. It is an extremely interesting argument which deploys all sorts of high caliber metaphysical weaponry (despite the ‘down home’ appeals to common sense which Strawson frequently makes). The argument is also subtle and intricate. So let’s spend some time trying to articulate its general form
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190Concessionary Dualism and PhysicalismRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 67 217-237. 2010.The doctrine of physicalism can be roughly spelled out simply as the claim that the physical state of the world determines the total state of the world. However, since there are many forms of determination, a somewhat more precise characterization is needed. One obvious problem with the simple formulation is that the traditional doctrine of epiphenomenalism holds that the mental is determined by the physical (and epiphenomenalists need not assert that there are any properties except mental and p…Read more
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1Jeremy Butterfield and Constantine Pagonis, eds., From Physics to Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 20 (5): 318-319. 2000.
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250Thought and syntaxPhilosophy of Science Association 1992 481-491. 1992.It has been argued that Psychological Externalism is irrelevant to psychology. The grounds for this are that PE fails to individuate intentional states in accord with causal power, and that psychology is primarily interested in the causal roles of psychological states. It is also claimed that one can individuate psychological states via their syntactic structure in some internal "language of thought". This syntactic structure is an internal feature of psychological states and thus provides a key…Read more
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41Introspection and the Elementary Acts of MindDialogue 39 (1): 53-76. 2000.RésuméFred Dretske a développé, à titre de composante de sa théorie de la conscience, une théorie de I'introspection. Celle-ciprésente une plausibilityé indépendante, elle résiste à des objections qui affectent nombre d'autres théories et elle suggère des liens très féconds dans plusieurs domaines de la science cognitive. La version qu'en donne Dretske est restreinte à la connaissance introspective des états perceptuels. Mon objectif ici est d'étendre la théorie à tous les états mentaux. Le méca…Read more
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Representational theories of consciousness, parts I and IIIn William Seager (ed.), Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment, Routledge. 1999.
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89Weak supervenience and materialismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (June): 697-709. 1988.THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT WEAK SUPERVENIENCE IS\nSUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO ESTABLISH A REASONABLE AND PLAUSIBLE\nMATERIALISM. SUPERVENIENCE IS A RELATION BETWEEN FAMILIES\nOF PROPERTIES, SUCH THAT, ROUGHLY SPEAKING, FAMILY A\nSUPERVENES ON FAMILY B IF ANY OBJECTS WHICH ARE\nINDISCERNIBLE WITH RESPECT TO B ARE THEREBY INDISCERNIBLE\nWITH RESPECT TO A. WEAK SUPERVENIENCE IS SUPERVENIENCE\nRESTRICTED TO ONE POSSIBLE WORLD; STRONG SUPERVENIENCE IS A\n"NECESSARY" SUPERVENIENCE EXTENDING ACROSS SOME PRINC…Read more
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162Emergentist panpsychismJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (9-10): 9-10. 2012.There are many possible forms of panpsychism. In this paper, I discuss a type of panpsychism in which the complex mental states of higher-level entities emerge from a system, or organization, of fundamental entities which possess extremely simple forms of mentality. I argue that this sort of panpsychism is surprisingly plausible, especially in light of the notorious difficulties raised by consciousness. Emergentist panpsychism faces a distinctive challenge, however. In so far as panpsychism embr…Read more
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14The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. B. Alan WallaceIsis 92 (4): 771-772. 2001.
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45Metaphysics of ConsciousnessRoutledge. 1991._Metaphysics of Consciousness_ opens with a development of the physicalist outlook that denies the need for any explanation of the mental. This "inexplicability" is demonstrated not to be sufficient as refutation of physicalism. However, the inescapable particularity of modes of consciousness appears to overpower this minimal physicalism. This book proposes that such an inference requires either a wholly new conception of how consciousness is physical or a deep and disturbing new kind of physica…Read more
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10Theories of Consciousness: An IntroductionRoutledge. 1999.The most remarkable fact about the universe is that certain parts of it are conscious. Somehow nature has managed to pull the rabbit of experience out of a hat made of mere matter. Making its own contribution to the current, lively debate about the nature of consciousness, Theories of Consciousness introduces variety of approaches to consciousness and explores to what extent scientific understanding of consciousness is possible. Including discussion of key figures, such as Descartes, Foder, Denn…Read more
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12Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press1995. Pp. xvi + 208Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 83-109. 1997.
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242A philosophical zombie is a being physically indistinguishable from an actual or possible human being, inhabiting a possible world where the _physical_ laws are identical to the laws of the actual world, but which completely lacks consciousness. For zombies, all is dark within, and hence they are, at the most fundamental level, utterly different from us. But, given their definition, this singular fact has no direct implications about the kind of motion, or other physical processes, the zombie wi…Read more