Barry Francis Dainton

Given Bergson’s commitment to a dynamic conception of time and an open future it seems likely that he would not have welcomed developments in physics which suggest that we live in an eternal four-dimensional block-universe. The route from Einstein’s special theory of relativity to the eternalist conception of time has been thoroughly explored — and Bergson himself explored ways of reconciling his own doctrines with Einstein’s theory. But there is more than one route from physics to the block-universe. The route I am concerned with here may be less familiar than Einstein’s, but is potentially of considerable significance since some contemporary physicists believe it may well be the physics of the future. Denis Villeneuve’s recent movie Arrival — together with the science fiction story by Ted Chiang it is based upon — provide useful points of entry into the relevant science.

The notion of “phenomenal field” often occurs when philosophers attempt to characterize the unity of consciousness. The phenomenal unity relationship is distinct from the coinstantiation relation. There are grounds for supposing that experiences can be phenomenally unified in the absence of any higher‐order conscious state, and in the absence of any spatial relations of a phenomenal kind. There is a way in which phenomenal unity can be construed as a primitive feature of experience. Rather than starting off from the perspective of particular experiences and looking for what binds them into more complex states, we can start with the more complex states, and regard simpler token experiences as unified by virtue of being parts of such states. The phenomenal unity relationship can as easily be viewed as a relationship between experiential parts, as it can experiential wholes.

Barry Dainton’s controversial and highly original _Stream of Consciousness_ aroused considerable interest when it was first published. This new paperback edition includes a postscript in which Dainton responds to some of his critics. Despite the recent upsurge of interest in consciousness, most of this has been focused on the relationship between consciousness and the brain. This has meant that significant and intriguing questions concerning the fundamental characteristics of consciousness itself have not received the attention they deserve. _Stream of Consciousness_ is devoted to these questions by presenting a systematic, phenomenological inquiry into the most general features of conscious life: the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time-consciousness. Barry Dainton shows us that a stream of consciousness is not a mosiac of discrete fragments of experience, but rather an interconnected flowing whole. This compelling discussion about the structure of consciousness will interest anyone concerned with current debates on consciousness in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

The first edition (2001) of this title quickly established itself on courses on the philosophy of time and space. This fully revised and expanded new edition sees the addition of chapters on Zeno's paradoxes, speculative contemporary developments in physics, and dynamic time, making the second edition, once again, unrivalled in its breadth of coverage. Surveying both historical debates and the ideas of modern physics, Barry Dainton evaluates the central arguments in a clear and unintimidating way and is careful to keep the conceptual issues throughout comprehensible to students with little scientific or mathematical training. The book makes the philosophy of space and time accessible for anyone trying to come to grips with the complexities of this challenging subject. With over 100 original line illustrations and a full glossary of terms, the book has the requirements of students firmly in sight and will continue to serve as an essential textbook for philosophy of time and space courses.

The first edition (2001) of this title quickly established itself on courses on the philosophy of time and space. This fully revised and expanded new edition sees the addition of chapters on Zeno's paradoxes, speculative contemporary developments in physics, and dynamic time, making the second edition, once again, unrivalled in its breadth of coverage. Surveying both historical debates and the ideas of modern physics, Barry Dainton evaluates the central arguments in a clear and unintimidating way and is careful to keep the conceptual issues throughout comprehensible to students with little scientific or mathematical training. The book makes the philosophy of space and time accessible for anyone trying to come to grips with the complexities of this challenging subject. With over 100 original line illustrations and a full glossary of terms, the book has the requirements of students firmly in sight and will continue to serve as an essential textbook for philosophy of time and space courses.

The James‐Husserl thesis is potentially of great importance for the understanding of consciousness. While there may be a good deal of agreement on the need to posit a specious present in some form or other, there is profound disagreement over the correct way of conceiving of it. This chapter surveys some of the more important landmarks in this contentious territory. An account of what is the specious present was elaborated by Brentano in lectures in the 1860s. Brentano fully appreciated the importance to phenomenology – “descriptive psychology” – of understanding how people manage to perceive temporal succession. The Orthogonal and Extensional accounts of people's temporal experience are in two respects very similar. Both sides agree that change, succession, and persistence figure prominently and vividly in people's immediate experience, over short intervals of time; they also agree that this is possible in virtue of an abiding structural feature of people's consciousness.

Although many find it hard to believe that every physical thing—no matter how simple or small—involves some form of consciousness, panpsychists offer the reassurance that their claims are perfectly compatible with everything physics has to say about the physical world. This is because although physics has a lot to say about causal and structural properties it has nothing to say about the intrinsic natures of physical things, and if physics is silent in this regard it is perfectly possible that everything physical has an experiential intrinsic nature. Following in Thomas Nagel’s footsteps, panpsychists have also argued that by revealing that everything is composed of the same fundamental ingredients, physics provides grounds for holding that if any physical things (e.g. our neural processes) have an experiential intrinsic nature then all must. My main contention in this paper is that the relationship between physics and panpsychism is considerably more complex than panpsychists have tended to assume. Nagel’s reasoning may be sound in the context of simplistic atomic theories which posit just one kind of fundamental particle. However, it begins to look distinctly dubious in the context of the diverse range of primitive entities that are to be found in the Standard Model of particle physics. Galen Strawson has suggested that mass-energy interconvertibility should be regarded as evidence that everything physical has the same intrinsic nature. I suggest Strawson’s claim relies on a dubious construal of the nature of energy. Special relativity is another of the cornerstones of contemporary physics, and it too makes life difficult for panpsychists, a fact which emerges when we consider what it would like to be a ray of light. However in this case I suggest that there is an interesting—if radical—move open to the panpsychist: they can simply deny that light exists. To conclude I briefly consider whether what QCD has revealed about the nature of mass poses a problem for panpsychism.

Bringing together literary scholars, computer scientists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and scholars from affiliated disciplines, this collection of essays offers important and timely insights into the pasts, presents, and, above all, possible futures of Artificial Intelligence. This book covers topics such as ethics and morality, identity and selfhood, and broader issues about AI, addressing questions about the individual, social, and existential impacts of such technologies. Through the works of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Ann Leckie, Iain M. Banks, and Martha Wells, alongside key visual productions such as Ex Machina, Westworld, and Her, contributions illustrate how science fiction might inform potential futures as well as acting as a springboard to bring disciplinary knowledge to bear on significant developments of Artificial Intelligence. Addressing a broad, interdisciplinary audience, both expert and non-expert readers gain an in-depth understanding of the wide range of pressing issues to which Artificial Intelligence gives rise, and the ways in which science fiction narratives have been used to represent them. Using science fiction in this manner enables readers to see how even fictional worlds and imagined futures have very real impacts on how we understand these technologies. As such, readers are introduced to theoretical positions on Artificial Intelligence through fictional works as well as encouraged to reflect on the diverse aspects of Artificial Intelligence through its many philosophical, social, legal, scientific, and cultural ramifications.

The concept of force can seem comparatively unproblematic—forces are responsible for making things move. However, the history of both physics and metaphysics reveals considerable controversy concerning both the nature of forces, and their very existence. My survey takes in the Greek atomists, Aristotelian physics, the “mechanical” philosophy of the scientific revolution, the innovations of Descartes and Newton, Hume-inspired skepticism, the dynamism of Leibniz, Kant and Boscovich, the field theories of Faraday and Maxwell, and the impact of Einstein’s relativity theories and quantum mechanics. A recurring theme is the contrasting attitudes taken towards “action at a distance” causal influences by both philosophers and scientists.

Different conceptions of the nature of subjects of experience have very different implications for the sort of relationship which exists between subjects and their experiences. On my preferred view, since subjects consist of nothing but capacities for experience, the ‘having’ of an experience amounts to a subject’s producing it. This relationship may look to be problematic, but I argue that here at least appearances are deceptive. I then move on to consider some of the ways in which experiences can seem to have subjects or owners, and argue that those who take a ‘sense of self’ to be an essential feature of all forms of consciousness may well be mistaken.

Those who believe suitably programmed computers could enjoy conscious experience of the sort we enjoy must accept the possibility that their own experience is being generated as part of a computerized simulation. It would be a mistake to dismiss this is just one more radical sceptical possibility: for as Bostrom has recently noted, if advances in computer technology were to continue at close to present rates, there would be a strong probability that we are each living in a computer simulation. The first part of this paper is devoted to broadening the scope of the argument: even if computers cannot sustain consciousness (as many dualists and materialists believe), there may still be a strong likelihood that we are living simulated lives. The implications of this result are the focus of the second part of the paper. The topics discussed include: the Doomsday argument, scepticism, the different modes of virtual life, transcendental idealism, the Problem of Evil, and simulation ethics.

As is widely appreciated and easily demonstrated, the notion that we are essentially experiential (or conscious) beings has a good deal of appeal; what is less obvious, and more controversial, is whether it is possible to devise a viable account of the self along such lines within the confines of a broadly naturalistic metaphysical framework. There are many avenues to explore, but here I confine myself to outlining the case for one particular approach. I suggest that we should think of ourselves (or our essential cores) as being composed of experience-producing systems, and that such systems belong to the same self when they have the capacity to contribute to unified streams of consciousness. The viability of this proposal rests in turn on a particular conception of the structure of consciousness, both at and over time; this conception is defended in the first part of the paper..

These are just some of the fundamental questions addressed in Time and Space. Writing for a primary readership of advanced undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, Barry Dainton introduces the central ideas and arguments that make space and time such philosophically challenging topics. Although recognising that many issues in the philosophy of time and space involve technical features of physics, Dainton has been careful to keep the conceptual issues accessible to students with little scientific or mathematical training. Surveying historical debates and ideas at the forefront of contemporary thinking, the book is unrivaled in its coverage. Topics include McTaggart's argument for the unreality of change; static, tensed, and dynamic time; time travel and causal arrows; space as void, motion, and curved spac; as well as a non-technical introduction to the special theory of relativity and the key features of general relativity, spacetime, and strings. Dainton also addresses the relationship between the philosophy of time and broader human concerns involving actions, ethics, fatalism, and death.

The claim that we are subjects of experience, i.e. beings whose nature is intimately bound up with consciousness, is in many ways a plausible one. There is, however, more than one way of developing a metaphysical account of the nature of subjects. The view that subjects are essentially conscious has the unfortunate consequence that subjects cannot survive periods of unconsciousness. A more appealing alternative is to hold that subjects are beings with the capacity to be conscious, a capacity which need not always be exercised. But this view can itself be developed in more than one way. The option I defend here is that subjects are nothing more than capacities for consciousness, a view I call the. Although the C-theory supplies us with a potentially appealing account of the nature of subjects, there are challenges to be overcome. Olson has argued that identifying ourselves with what are, in effect, parts of human organisms leads to a variety of intolerable problems. I suggest that these problems are by no means insuperable. Bayne and Johnston have argued that identifying subjects with experience-producing systems is confronted with a different difficulty. What if these systems can produce multiple streams of consciousness at once. Whatever else they may be, aren't subjects the kind of thing that can have just one stream of consciousness at a time? In response I argue that this is true in one sense, but not in another. Once this is appreciated, the notion that a subject could have several streams of consciousness at once no longer seems absurd, or impossible.

Consciousness exists in time, but time is also to be found within consciousness: we are directly aware of both persistence and change, at least over short intervals. On reflection this can seem baffling. How is it possible for us to be immediately aware of phenomena which are not (strictly speaking) present? What must consciousness be like for this to be possible? In "Stream of Consciousness" I argued that influential accounts of phenomenal temporality along the lines developed by Broad and Husserl were fundamentally flawed, and proposed a quite different account: the overlap model. While recognizing that the latter has merits, Gallagher argues that it too is fundamentally flawed; he also takes issue with some of my claims concerning Broad and Husserl. My reply comes in three main parts. I start by clarifying my use of certain terms, in particular realism and anti-realism as applied to theories of phenomenal temporality in general, and the accounts of Broad and Husserl in particular. I then turn to Gallagher’s main criticisms of the overlap theory. Gallagher argues that the theory is sunk by a problem with ongoing contents, that if our experience possessed the structures I ascribe to it, we would be aware of contents as having longer durations than is actually the case. I suggest otherwise: the version of the overlap theory which is afflicted by this difficulty is not the version I put forward, as becomes clear when two distinct forms of overlap are distinguished. Gallagher is also concerned that the theory lacks phenomenological grounding, and has difficulties with experiential holism. The latter worry, I argue, is completely misplaced. While the former has more warrant, it too is rooted in a misconception: the overlap theory was intended only to provide an account of the most basic sensory components of our short-term experience of temporality, and can easily be expanded to accommodate other aspects. I supply a sketch an augmented theory to back up this claim. I conclude with an assessment of the intentional account of time-consciousness Gallagher ascribes to Husserl. A meaning-based account of this kind is incapable of accounting for experienced sensory continuity, or so I argue. I also suggest that both Broad and Husserl may have had leanings towards the Simple Conception of consciousness.

For those with an interest in the most fundamental components of reality, reflecting on the simplest of things can yield a rich harvest. Consider two buttons, of exactly the same shade of red, one round and made of plastic, the other square and made of wood. Each button is clearly a distinct object in its own right: each is composed of a different portion of matter, each has its own spatial location. But are the buttons completely distinct? It might seem so, but a little reflection can suggest otherwise. Both buttons are the same colour, they are each red. The buttons do not possess merely similar colours, they possess literally identical colours: one and the same colour, a particular shade of red, is found in both objects. This same colour can be also be found in many other objects. Colour, it seems, is not tied down to any specific time or place, in the way ordinary objects are. The same (literally identical) colour can exist at many times and places. And what holds for colour also holds for other shareable characteristics, such as shapes and sizes, and sounds. We are thus led to the (now familiar) distinction between particulars (spatially located objects) and universals (repeatable, multiply-located properties). Plato was no stranger to this line of reasoning, but he found himself driven to take several further steps. He observed that in ordinary life we never encounter a truly perfect circle (or square, or triangle, or straight line), but that we nonetheless have the concept of such a circle. Relying on the (no means absurd) assumption that meaningful terms must have referents – in order to be meaningful at all – he was led to the conclusion that the perfect circle must exist in a non-physical plane of reality, a dimension where perfection is possible. He called this changeless, timeless, realm the world of ‘Forms’. He further reasoned that since ‘circle’ is a universal, all other universals (such as redness) must inhabit this realm also. Resemblances among the familiar objects in the physical world are to be explained in terms of Forms ‘participating’, more or less adequately, in these objects..