•  218
    The Many-Subjects Argument against Physicalism
    In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the …Read more
  •  29
    Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Reflections
    with Matthew J. Gaudet, Paul Scherz, Noreen Herzfeld, Jordan Joseph Wales, Nathan Colaner, Jeremiah Coogan, Mariele Courtois, David E. DeCosse, Justin Charles Gable, Brian Green, James Kintz, Cory Andrew Labrecque, Catherine Moon, Anselm Ramelow, John P. Slattery, Ana Margarita Vega, Luis G. Vera, Andrea Vicini, and Warren von Eschenbach
    Pickwick Press. 2023.
    What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for bette…Read more
  •  319
    From Moral Realism to Axiarchism
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 73-101. 2023.
    Moral realism faces a well known genealogical debunking challenge. I argue that the moral realist’s best response may involve abandoning metaphysical naturalism in favor of some form of axiarchism—the view, very roughly, that the natural world is “ordered to the good.” Axiarchism comes in both theistic and non-theistic forms, but all forms agree that the natural world exists and has certain basic features because it is good for it to exist and have those features. I argue that theistic and non-t…Read more
  •  668
    Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate solutions and identify some of their virtues and vices. Candidate solutions invoke the li…Read more
  •  497
    The AI Ensoulment Hypothesis
    Faith and Philosophy. forthcoming.
    According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a soul, where very roughl…Read more
  •  65
    The mind-body problem and the color-body problem
    Philosophical Studies 180 (3): 725-744. 2022.
    According to a familiar modern view, color and other so-called secondary qualities reside only in consciousness, not in the external physical world. Many have argued that this “Galilean” view is the source of the mind-body problem in its current form. This paper critically examines a radical alternative to the Galilean view, which has recently been defended or sympathetically discussed by several philosophers, a view I call “anti-modernism.” Anti-modernism holds, roughly, that the modern Galilea…Read more
  • Pain and representation
    In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. pp. 290-39. 2017.
    This chapter focuses specifically on the case of pain. Despite traditional opposition to the representational thesis, the latter has won widespread assent. The most important early proponents of the representational thesis were David Armstrong and George Pitcher, both of whom held that pain is a form of perception. Following Armstrong and Pitcher, intentionalists have traditionally held that the experience of pain has a content with roughly the following form: there is a disturbance with such-an…Read more
  •  675
    The Inconceivability Argument
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    This paper develops and defends a new argument against physicalist views of consciousness: the inconceivability argument. The argument has two main premises. First, it is not (ideally, positively) conceivable that phenomenal truths are grounded in physical truths. (For example, one cannot positively conceive of a situation in which someone has a vivid experience of pink wholly in virtue of the movements of colorless, insentient atoms.) Second, (ideal, positive) inconceivability is a guide to fal…Read more
  •  9183
    Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. forthcoming.
    This paper develops a new argument from consciousness to theism: the argument from psychophysical harmony. Roughly, psychophysical harmony consists in the fact that phenomenal states are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. For example, phenomenal states are correlated with behavior and functioning that is justified or rationalized by those very phenomenal states, and phenomenal states are correlated with verbal reports and judgments that are made tr…Read more
  •  125
    Perceptual illusionism
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (4): 396-417. 2021.
    Perceptual illusionism is the view that perceptual experience is, in general, radically illusory. That is, perceptual experience presents objects as having certain sensible properties and standing in certain sensible relations, but nothing in the subject’s environment has those properties or stands in those relations. This paper makes the case for perceptual illusionism by showing how a broad set of philosophical and scientific considerations converge to support illusionism about the full range …Read more
  •  525
    The modal argument improved
    Analysis 80 (4): 629-639. 2020.
    The modal argument against materialism, in its most standard form, relies on a compatibility thesis to the effect that the physical truths are compatible with the absence of consciousness. I propose an alternative modal argument that relies on an incompatibility thesis: The existence of consciousness is incompatible with the proposition that the physical truths provide a complete description of reality. I show that everyone who accepts the premises of the standard modal argument must accept the …Read more
  •  376
    Unknowable Colour Facts
    Mind 130 (519): 909-941. 2021.
    It is common for an object to present different colour appearances to different perceivers, even when the perceivers and viewing conditions are normal. For example, a Munsell chip might look unique green to you and yellowish green to me in normal viewing conditions. In such cases, there are three possibilities. Ecumenism: both experiences are veridical. Nihilism: both experiences are non-veridical. Inegalitarianism: one experience is veridical and the other is non-veridical. Perhaps the most imp…Read more
  •  570
    A puzzle about the experience of left and right
    Noûs 55 (3): 678-698. 2020.
    Imagine your mirror‐inverted counterpart on Mirror Earth, a perfect mirror image of Earth. Would her experiences be the same as yours, or would they be phenomenally mirror‐inverted? I argue, first, that her experiences would be phenomenally the same as yours. I then show that this conclusion gives rise to a puzzle, one that I believe pushes us toward some surprising and philosophically significant conclusions about the nature of perception. When you have a typical visual experience as of somethi…Read more
  •  128
    Color and a priori knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 178 (1): 293-315. 2021.
    Some truths about color are knowable a priori. For example, it is knowable a priori that redness is not identical to the property of being square. This extremely modest and plausible claim has significant philosophical implications, or so I shall argue. First, I show that this claim entails the falsity of standard forms of color functionalism, the view that our color concepts are functional concepts that pick out their referents by way of functional descriptions that make reference to the subjec…Read more
  •  460
    Why Nearly Everything Is Knowable A Priori
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (1): 80-100. 2019.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  93
    Indeterminate perception and colour relationism
    Analysis 79 (1): 25-34. 2019.
    One of the most important objections to sense data theory comes from the phenomenon of indeterminate perception, as when an object in the periphery of one’s visual field looks red without looking to have any determinate shade of red. As sense data are supposed to have precisely the properties that sensibly appear to us, sense data theory evidently has the implausible consequence that a sense datum can have a determinable property without having any of its determinates. In this article, I show th…Read more
  •  164
    What is the consequence argument an argument for?
    Analysis 77 (2): 278-287. 2017.
    The consequence argument is widely regarded as the most important argument for incompatibilism. In this paper, I argue that, although the consequence argument may be sound in its standard formulations, it does not support any thesis that could reasonably be called ‘incompatibilism’.
  •  195
    Paradise Regained: A Non-Reductive Realist Account of the Sensible Qualities
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1): 38-52. 2018.
    This paper defends a non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities—roughly, the view that the sensible qualities are really instantiated by the external objects of perception, and not reducible to response-independent physical properties or response-dependent relational properties. I begin by clarifying and motivating the non-reductive realist view. I then consider some familiar difficulties for the view. Addressing these difficulties leads to the development and defence of a general theo…Read more
  •  102
    Spatial Experience and Special Relativity
    Philosophical Studies 174 (9): 2297-2313. 2017.
    In recent work, David Chalmers argues that “Edenic shapes”—roughly, the shape properties phenomenally presented in spatial experience—are not instantiated in our world. His reasons come largely from the theory of Special Relativity. Although Edenic shapes might have been instantiated in a classical Newtonian world, he maintains that they could not be instantiated in a relativistic world like our own. In this essay, I defend realism about Edenic shape, the thesis that Edenic shapes are instantiat…Read more
  •  109
    Color and Shape: A Plea for Equal Treatment
    Philosophers' Imprint 16. 2016.
    Many philosophers, especially in the wake of the 17th century, have favored an inegalitarian view of shape and color, according to which shape is mind-independent while color is mind-dependent. In this essay, I advance a novel argument against inegalitarianism. The argument begins with an intuition about the modal dependence of color on shape, namely: it is impossible for something to have a color without having a shape. I then argue that, given reasonable assumptions, inegalitarianism contradic…Read more
  •  183
    Pains and reasons: Why it is rational to kill the Messenger
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256): 423-433. 2014.
    In this paper, we defend the representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness against a recent objection due to Hilla Jacobson, who charges representationalism with a failure to explain the role of pain in rationalizing certain forms of behavior. In rough outline, her objection is that the representationalist is unable to account for the rationality of certain acts, such as the act of taking pain killers, which are aimed at getting rid of the experience of pain rather than its intentional …Read more