• The Inconceivability Argument
    Brian Cutter
    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
  • Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Reflections
    Matthew J. Gaudet, Paul Scherz, Noreen Herzfeld, Jordan Joseph Wales, Nathan Colaner, Jeremiah Coogan, Mariele Courtois, Brian Cutter, 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
  • 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
  • Against the Middle Ground: Why Russellian Monism is Unstable
    Analytic Philosophy 60 (2): 109-129. 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