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25The project that Dan Lloyd has undertaken is admirable and audacious. He has tried to boil down the substrate of information-processing that underlies conscious experience to some very simple elements, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Some people will suspect that by considering a model as simple as a connectionist network, Dan has thrown away everything that is interesting about consciousness. Perhaps there is something to that complaint, but I will take a different ta…Read more
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41. I think that by emphasizing theoretical spaces of representations, Andy has put his finger on an issue that is key to connectionism's success, and whose investigation will be a key determinant of the field's further progress. I also think that if we look at representational spaces in the right way, we can see that they are deeply related to classical phenomenon of systematicity in representation. I want to argue that the key to understanding representational spaces, and in particular their ab…Read more
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4At the April 2006 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, in an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book _Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism_ , I presented a comment on Soames' book, "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism" . The other critic was Robert Stalnaker. Soames presented his response to critics . Below is a reply to Soames' response to me, for those who were at the session and interested others. Note that this response …Read more
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6Scott Soames’ Reference and Description contains arguments against a number of different versions of two-dimensional semantics. After early chapters on descriptivism and on Kripke’s anti-descriptivist arguments, a chapter each is devoted to the roots of twodimensionalism in “slips, errors, or misleading suggestions” by Kripke and Kaplan, and to the two-dimensional approaches developed by Stalnaker (1978) and by Davies and Humberstone (1981). The bulk of the book (about 200 pages) is devoted to “…Read more
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23Absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualiaIn Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience, Ferdinand Schoningh. 1995.In this paper I use thought-experiments to argue that functional organization fully determines conscious experience. These thought-experiments involve the gradual replacement of neurons by silicon chips, and similar scenarios. I argue that if "absent qualia" or "inverted qualia", are possible, then phenomena I call "fading qualia" and "dancing qualia" will be possible; but I argue that it is very implausible that fading or dancing qualia are possible. The resulting position is a sort of nonreduc…Read more
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82Absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualiaIn Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience, Ferdinand Schoningh. pp. 309--328. 1995.It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing "over and above" the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of g…Read more
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9*[[I wrote this paper in January of 1990, but did not publish it because I was never entirely happy with it. My ideas on consciousness were in a state of flux, ultimately evolving into those represented in my book _The Conscious Mind_ (Oxford University Press, 1996). I now think that some parts of this paper are unsatisfactory, especially the positive theory outlined at the end, although a successor to that theory is laid out in the book. Nevertheless, I think the paper raises issues that need t…Read more
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Phenomenal concepts and the knowledge argumentIn Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument, Mit Press. 2004.*[[This paper is largely based on material in other papers. The first three sections and the appendix are drawn with minor modifications from Chalmers 2002c (which explores issues about phenomenal concepts and beliefs in much more depth, mostly independently of questions about materialism). The main ideas of the last three sections are drawn from Chalmers 1996, 1999, and 2002a, although with considerable revision and elaboration. ]]
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69Phenomenal concepts and the knowledge argumentIn Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument, Mit Press. pp. 269. 2004.*[[This paper is largely based on material in other papers. The first three sections and the appendix are drawn with minor modifications from Chalmers 2002c . The main ideas of the last three sections are drawn from Chalmers 1996, 1999, and 2002a, although with considerable revision and elaboration. ]]
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98Response to SearleNew York Review of Books 44 (8). 1997.In my book _The Conscious Mind_ , I deny a number of claims that John Searle finds "obvious", and I make some claims that he finds "absurd". But if the mind/body problem has taught us anything, it is that nothing about consciousness is obvious, and that one person's obvious truth is another person's absurdity. So instead of throwing around this sort of language, it is best to examine the claims themselves and the arguments that I give for them, to see whether Searle says anything of substance th…Read more
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Availability: The cognitive basis of experience?In Ned Block, Owen Flanagan & Guven Guzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, Mit Press. pp. 148-149. 1997.[[This was written as a commentary on Ned Block 's paper "On A Confusion about a Function of Consciousness" . It appeared in _Behavioral_ _and Brain Sciences_ 20:148-9, 1997, and also in the collection _The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates_ (MIT Press, 1997) edited by Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere. ]]
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The content and epistemology of phenomenal beliefIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.Experiences and beliefs are different sorts of mental states, and are often taken to belong to very different domains. Experiences are paradigmatically phenomenal, characterized by what it is like to have them. Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional, characterized by their propositional content. But there are a number of crucial points where these domains intersect. One central locus of intersection arises from the existence of phenomenal beliefs: beliefs that are about experiences
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What is the unity of consciousnessIn Axel Cleeremans (ed.), The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation, Oxford University Press. pp. 497-539. 2003.At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing…Read more
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4Perception and the fall from EdenIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 49--125. 2006.In the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were simply presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory
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Toward a science of consciousness: the first Tucson discussions and debatesIn Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates, Mit Press. 1996.
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38'TT Ontology, the Hard Problem of Experience,-*'-*'Free Will, and Agency'In Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates, Mit Press. pp. 2--79. 1998.
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35Naturalistic dualismIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 359--368. 1996.
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35647Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers SurveyPhilosophers' Imprint 23 (11). 2023.What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.
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39Uploading: A Philosophical AnalysisIn Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Intelligence Unbound, Wiley. 2014-08-11.This chapter describes three relatively specific forms such as destructive uploading, gradual uploading, and nondestructive uploading. Neuroscience is gradually discovering various neural correlates of consciousness, but this research program largely takes the existence of consciousness for granted. It presents an argument for the pessimistic view and an argument for the optimistic view, both of which run parallel to related arguments that can be given concerning teletransportation. Cryonic tech…Read more
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102Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates (edited book)MIT Press. 1999.The first two conferences and books have become touchstones for the field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the third conference.
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Perception and the fall from EdenIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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Medical research : future directions in the genome eraIn Yann Joly & Bartha Maria Knoppers (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Medical Law and Ethics, Routledge. 2014.
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78The hard problem of consciousnessIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell. 2007.The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, th…Read more
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51Consciousness and its Place in NatureIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction1 The Problem Arguments Against Materialism Type‐A Materialism Type‐B Materialism15 The Two‐Dimensional Argument Against Type‐B Materialism Type‐C Materialism Interlude Type‐D Dualism Type‐E Dualism Type‐F Monism Conclusions.
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25The Matrix as MetaphysicsIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.In this chapter, the author says that the standard view of brain‐in‐a‐vat scenario is endorsed by the people who created The Matrix. The author argues that the hypothesis that he is envatted is not a skeptical hypothesis, but a metaphysical hypothesis. That is, it is a hypothesis about the underlying nature of reality. According to the author, the Matrix Hypothesis is equivalent to a version of the following three‐part Metaphysical Hypothesis. First, physical processes are fundamentally computat…Read more
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24The SingularityIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.This chapter provides a rich philosophical discussion of superintelligence, a widely discussed piece that has encouraged philosophers of mind to take transhumanism, mind uploading, and the singularity more seriously. It starts with the argument for a singularity: is there good reason to believe that there will be an intelligence explosion? Next, the chapter considers how to negotiate the singularity: if it is possible that there will be a singularity, how can we maximize the chances of a good ou…Read more
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89Two-dimensional semanticsIn E. Lepore & B. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.Two-dimensional approaches to semantics, broadly understood, recognize two "dimensions" of the meaning or content of linguistic items. On these approaches, expressions and their utterances are associated with two different sorts of semantic values, which play different explanatory roles. Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world. The second s…Read more
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Philosophy, Misc |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy, Misc |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |