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2Supervenience and materialismIn Zoltan Torey (ed.), The conscious mind, The Mit Press. pp. 697-709. 2014.
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265Naturalistic dualismIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
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Ontological anti-realismIn Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford University Press. 2009.The basic question of ontology is “What exists?”. The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no.
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Introduction: The extended mind in focus / Richard Menary The extended mindIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. 2010.
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2In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perception and the Fall From Eden, Clarendon Press, Oxford. pp. 49-125. 2006.
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The representational character of experienceIn Brian Leiter (ed.), The future for philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 153--181. 2004.Consciousness and intentionality are perhaps the two central phenomena in the philosophy of mind. Human beings are conscious beings: there is something it is like to be us. Human beings are intentional beings: we represent what is going on in the world.Correspondingly, our specific mental states, such as perceptions and thoughts, very often have a phenomenal character: there is something it is like to be in them. And these mental states very often have intentional content: they serve to represen…Read more
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The foundations of two-dimensional semanticsIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Josep Macià (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 55--140. 2006.Why is two-dimensional semantics important? One can think of it as the most recent act in a drama involving three of the central concepts of philosophy: meaning, reason, and modality. First, Kant linked reason and modality, by suggesting that what is necessary is knowable a priori, and vice versa. Second, Frege linked reason and meaning, by proposing an aspect of meaning (sense) that is constitutively tied to cognitive signi?cance. Third, Carnap linked meaning and modality, by proposing an aspec…Read more
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1The two-dimensional argument against materialismIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Sven Walter (eds.), Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2006.A number of popular arguments for dualism start from a premise about an epistemic gap between physical truths about truths about consciousness, and infer an ontological gap between physical processes and consciousness. Arguments of this sort include the conceivability argument, the knowledge argument, the explanatory-gap argument, and the property dualism argument. Such arguments are often resisted on the grounds that epistemic premises do not entail ontological conclusion. My view is that one c…Read more
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1Consciousness and its place in natureIn Ted A. Warfield & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2003.
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7Subsymbolic computation and the chinese roomIn John Dinsmore (ed.), The Symbolic and Connectionist Paradigms: Closing the Gap, Lawrence Erlbaum. 1992.More than a decade ago, philosopher John Searle started a long-running controversy with his paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (Searle, 1980a), an attack on the ambitious claims of artificial intelligence (AI). With his now famous _Chinese Room_ argument, Searle claimed to show that despite the best efforts of AI researchers, a computer could never recreate such vital properties of human mentality as intentionality, subjectivity, and understanding. The AI research program is based on the underl…Read more
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1Can consciousness be reductively explained?In Zoltan Torey (ed.), The conscious mind, The Mit Press. 2014.
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10The Components of ContentIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. 2002.
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24Consciousness and its place in natureIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. 2002.*[[This paper is an overview of issues concerning the metaphysics of consciousness. Much of the discussion in this paper (especially the first part) recapitulates discussion in Chalmers (1995; 1996; 1997), although it often takes a different form, and sometimes goes beyond the
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Consciousness and its place in natureIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. 2002.Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature. In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is posed most ac…Read more
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FoundationsIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1--9. 2002.
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The nature of epistemic spaceIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2011.There are many ways the world might be, for all I know. For all I know, it might be that there is life on Jupiter, and it might be that there is not. It might be that Australia will win the next Ashes series, and it might be that they will not. It might be that my great-grandfather was my great-grandmother’s second cousin, and it might be that he was not. It might be that copper is a compound, and it might be that it is not
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200Syntactic transformations on distributed representationsConnection Science 2 53-62. 1990.There has been much interest in the possibility of connectionist models whose representations can be endowed with compositional structure, and a variety of such models have been proposed. These models typically use distributed representations that arise from the functional composition of constituent parts. Functional composition and decomposition alone, however, yield only an implementation of classical symbolic theories. This paper explores the possibility of moving beyond implementation by exp…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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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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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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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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Connectionist Models: Proceedings of the 1990 Summer School Workshop. (edited book)Morgan Kaufmann. 1992.
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35816Philosophers 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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47Uploading: 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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3686Does thought require sensory grounding? From pure thinkers to large language modelsProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 97 22-45. 2023.Does the capacity to think require the capacity to sense? A lively debate on this topic runs throughout the history of philosophy and now animates discussions of artificial intelligence. Many have argued that AI systems such as large language models cannot think and understand if they lack sensory grounding. I argue that thought does not require sensory grounding: there can be pure thinkers who can think without any sensory capacities. As a result, the absence of sensory grounding does not enta…Read more
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244Phenomenal StructuralismIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Constructing the World, Oxford University Press. pp. 412-422. 2012.
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New York UniversityDepartment of Philosophy
Center For Mind, Brain And ConsciousnessUniversity Professor
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
21 more