Brandon Sergent

This book develops an original version of presentism and defends it against numerous objections. Most notably, it is argued here that (i) presentists can respond to the ontological-commitment objection by endorsing a very general error theory about much of our ordinary and scientific discourse about the past and future. And it’s argued that (ii) presentists can plausibly and defensibly respond to the truthmaking objection by rejecting the relevant truthmaking principles (more specifically, by arguing that the sentences about the past and future that presentists think are true don’t have truthmakers, and aren’t made true by reality, because they don’t make claims about reality). And it’s argued that (iii) presentists can respond to the special-relativity objection not by endorsing the existence of a privileged frame of reference but by relativizing their view—i.e., by constructing a version of presentism that’s compatible with the relativity of simultaneity (and the non-existence of a privileged frame of reference). This book also argues for the metaphilosophical view that the presentism-vs-eternalism question is (if factual at all) an ordinary empirical question about (a contingent aspect of) physical reality that can’t be settled by a priori philosophical arguments. And it argues that presentists should reject the existence of time, and times (including the present time), and temporal passage—and, hence, that they should reject standard versions of the A-theory. The version of presentism developed in this book is highly original. It is a metaphysically thin, ontologically parsimonious view that can be thought of as an ordinary empirical hypothesis.

'Consciousness', they say, 'is a mystery'. 'We have no idea what consciousness is.' 'The great intellectual task of our time is to explain the existence of consciousness.' This paper argues that these claims are false. Using 'ψ' to denote consciousness, it argues [1] that we know what ψ is (it's not a mystery); [2] that the idea that we need to explain the existence of ψ begs the question; [3] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality that we know for certain to exist; [4] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality whose qualitative nature we know; [5] that in experiencing ψ we know something of the nature of concrete reality as it is in itself; [6] that there is no other case in which we know something of the qualitative nature of concrete reality as it is in itself. It argues further [7] that [1] - [6] are fully compatible with physicalism in the original Vienna-Circle sense of the term; [8] that physicalism is compatible with panpsychism; and [9] that panpsychist physicalism is the most plausible (or if you prefer least implausible) view of the nature of concrete reality.

I argue here that progress in understanding the lessons of quantum physics has been hindered by the tendency to cast Niels Bohr as a villain. Building on the work of Favrholdt, Faye, and Howard, I present a more accurate view of Bohr's proposal for the "epistemological lesson" of quantum physics. I then argue that several interpretive programs -- often presented as alternatives to Copenhagen -- are, after substantial conceptual work, arriving at a view that is notably similar to Bohr's. Using Maudlin’s formulation of the measurement problem as a foil, I argue that it relies on a notion of wave-function completeness that is inappropriate for a genuinely indeterministic theory, and one that Bohr consistently rejected. On Bohr's view, quantum theory permits concrete agents, situated within specific experimental contexts, to make objective descriptions, while refusing the demand for a single, context-free "description from nowhere".