Barry Francis Dainton

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.

In ordinary conscious experience, consciousness of time seems to be ubiquitous. For example, we seem to be directly aware of change, movement, and succession across brief temporal intervals. How is this possible? Many different models of temporal consciousness have been proposed. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness is confined to a momentary interval and that we are not in fact directly aware of change. Others have argued that although consciousness itself is momentary, we are nevertheless conscious of change. Still others have argued that consciousness is itself extended in time. In this entry, the motivations and merits of these and other positions will be expounded and assessed.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;We are mental beings whose identity is absolute, intrinsic and real. This conception of the self, which, it is argued, corresponds to our deeper beliefs about, and attitudes towards, ourselves and others, is a consequence of taking the experienced unity and continuity of consciousness as the key to self-identity. Some of the difficulties often taken as fatal to this "subjectivist" view of the self, considerations concerning private languages and the individuation of conscious beings from within pure consciousness, are disposed of in Chapter 2. The next two chapters focus on the stream of consciousness. It is shown that the unity and copersonality of intra-streamal experiences both at and over time is constituted by and experience of unity. Building on this result, in Chapter 5 an account of the self as a mental entity whose identity consists in the persistence of potential streamal experience is developed. The notion of the Pure Ego is then examined; the reasons for positing such an entity are found wanting; but the neoHumean account of the self which has by this point emerged is compatible with the intuition that the self is a simple and basic entity, distinct from its actual mental states. In Chapter 7 the alleged possibility of selves undergoing fission and fusion is investigated. This is found to be a genuine possibility, but the claim that we should conclude from this that self-identity is not a relation which deeply matters is rejected, on the grounds that when a self divides, the products of fission are identical with one another. The apparent absurdity of this result is reduced by taking seriously the notion of topologically deviant subjective time dimensions; our identity matters, but our lives need not be linear

Can we directly experience change? Although some philosophers have denied it, the phenomenological evidence is unambiguous: we can, and do. But how is this possible? What structures or features of consciousness render such experience possible? A variety of very different answers to this question have been proposed, answers which have very different implications for the nature of consciousness itself. In this brief survey no attempt is made to engage with the often complex (and sometimes obscure) literature on this topic. Instead, a largely schematic examination of the main options is conducted, with a view to determining the most promising avenues for further investigation.

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..