Brandon Ashby

Philosophers often discuss zombies and inverts, hypothetical cases in which perfect physical/functional duplicate of us either lack conscious experience or else have their experiences “shuffled” such that they correlate with different stimuli and physiological states. The idea that there may also be physical/functional duplicates of us who have more kinds of experiences than we do, however, has gone unnoticed. These phenomenal smugglers, as I call them, raise novel questions on what sorts of restrictions there may be on how many or what sorts of extra experiences our smuggler counterparts could conceivably have. I appeal to the dimensional structure, the precision structure, the combinatorial structure, the syntactic structure, and the integration structure of consciousness in order to clarify and answer the questions raised by smugglers about the conceivable upper bounds of consciousness.

Perceptual liberals have offered numerous arguments claiming to show that kind-representing perceptual phenomenology exists, which raises questions about what it is like to perceive objects as belonging to different kinds. Yet almost no effort has been made to answer these questions. This quietism invites the concern that liberalism may be a defunct research program: unable to answer the questions raised by its own development. Building on work by P.F. Strawson, a recent surge of empirical research, and theoretical considerations from the Helmholtzian paradigm of perceptual psychology, I argue that perceptual experience can complete the stereotypical features, behaviors, and affordances of kinds of objects even when only some of those features/behaviors/affordances are “on display”, just as it can complete the shape of a cat behind a picket fence in amodal completion. The phenomenal character of high-level kind perception, I argue, is grounded in stereotype completion.

I argue that physicalists have been too conciliatory in granting that certain classic thought experiments about consciousness like Mary the colour scientist, colour spectrum inversion, and zombies provide strong prima facie support for epiphenomenal anti-physicalism. While these thought experiments may suggest that we are intuitive epiphenomenal anti-physicalists when taken individually, when they are appropriately combined, they suggest that epiphenomenal anti-physicalism leads to a version of phenomenal scepticism according to which (i) we cannot know how our states of phenomenal consciousness compare and contrast and (ii) we cannot know how our first-order beliefs about our states of consciousness compare and contrast. Insofar as comparative phenomenal scepticism is a deeply counter-intuitive view, our intuitions about consciousness are far more equivocal than they are widely thought to be. There simply may be no one metaphysical view that should qualify as their obvious champion.

Liberals about perceptual contents claim that perceptual experiences can represent kinds and specific, familiar individuals as such; they also claim that the representation of an individual or kind as such by a perceptual experience will be reflected in the phenomenal character of that experience. Conservatives always deny the latter and sometimes also the former claim. I argue that neither liberals nor conservatives have adequately appreciated how the content internalism/externalism debate bears on their views. I show that perceptual content internalism entails conservativism when conjoined with one other, extremely plausible premise. Hence, liberals are committed to perceptual contents externalism, yet they have failed to fully address the consequences that this has for their view. Moreover, the argument is easily adapted to perceptual experiences of Twin Earthable properties, like colour and shape. I use this last result to show why existing conservative arguments that appeal to Twin Earth plausibly overgeneralize.

Separatism, representationalism, and phenomenal intentionalism are the primary views on the relationship between the phenomenality and intentionality of experience. I defend a novel position that is incompatible with separatism, can enrich representationalism and phenomenal intentionalism, but can also be accepted independently of those views. I call itphenomenal schematics: The phenomenal characters of our experiences have structures that place a priori, formal, and sometimes semantic constraints on our experience's possible intentional contents. Phenomenal structures are like the grammar of a language (or the compositional rules governing maps, models, and diagrams). Unlike words, however, phenomenal characters possess their “grammatical properties” essentially.