-
Does 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
-
Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers SurveyPhilosophers' Imprint 23 (11). 2023.
-
Verbal DisputesPhilosophical Review 120 (4): 515-566. 2011.The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something ab…Read more
-
Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave FunctionIn Shan Gao (ed.), Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press. 2022.Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versi…Read more
-
The extended mindAnalysis 58 (1): 7-19. 1998.Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an _active e…Read more
-
The content and epistemology of phenomenal beliefIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 220--72. 2002.
-
Facing up to the problem of consciousnessToward a Science of Consciousness 5-28. 1996.
-
Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of PhilosophyW. W. Norton. 2022.A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that's the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of "technophilosophy," David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already. Along…Read more
-
The matrix as metaphysicsIn Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix, Oxford University Press. pp. 132. 2005.The Matrix presents a version of an old philosophical fable: the brain in a vat. A disembodied brain is floating in a vat, inside a scientist’s laboratory. The scientist has arranged that the brain will be stimulated with the same sort of inputs that a normal embodied brain receives. To do this, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back into the simulation. The i…Read more
-
Materialism and the metaphysics of modalityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 473-96. 1999.This appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59:473-93, as a response to four papers in a symposium on my book The Conscious Mind . Most of it should be comprehensible without having read the papers in question. This paper is for an audience of philosophers and so is relatively technical. It will probably also help to have read some of the book. The papers I’m responding to are: Chris Hill & Brian McLaughlin, There are fewer things in reality than are dreamt of in Chalmers’ philosop…Read more
-
Panpsychism and PanprotopsychismAmherst Lecture in Philosophy 8. 2013.I present an argument for panpsychism: the thesis that everything is conscious, or at least that fundamental physical entities are conscious. The argument takes a Hegelian dialectical form. Panpsychism emerges as a synthesis of the thesis of materalism and the antithesis of dualism. In particular, the key premises of the causal argument for materialism and the conceivability argument for dualism are all accommodated by a certain version of panpsychism. This synthesis has its own antithesis in tu…Read more
-
The Two-Dimensional Argument Against MaterialismIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Sven Walter (eds.), Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.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
-
What is the unity of consciousness?In Axel Cleeremans (ed.), The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation, Oxford University Press. 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
-
-
Minds, Machines, And Mathematics A Review of Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose (review)PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 2 11-20. 1995.
-
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2002.What is the mind? Is consciousness a process in the brain? How do our minds represent the world? Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of…Read more
-
Strong and weak emergenceIn Philip Clayton & Paul Davies (eds.), The re-emergence of emergence: the emergentist hypothesis from science to religion, Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gapIn Torin Andrew Alter & Sven Walter (eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
The 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
-
The nature of epistemic spaceIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2011.A natural way to think about epistemic possibility is as follows. When it is epistemically possible (for a subject) that p, there is an epistemically possible scenario (for that subject) in which p. The epistemic scenarios together constitute epistemic space. It is surprisingly difficult to make the intuitive picture precise. What sort of possibilities are we dealing with here? In particular, what is a scenario? And what is the relationship between scenarios and items of knowledge and belief? Th…Read more
-
Intuitions in philosophy: a minimal defensePhilosophical Studies 171 (3): 535-544. 2014.In Philosophy Without Intuitions, Herman Cappelen focuses on the metaphilosophical thesis he calls Centrality: contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories. Using linguistic and textual analysis, he argues that Centrality is false. He also suggests that because most philosophers accept Centrality, they have mistaken beliefs about their own methods.To put my own views on the table: I do not have a large theoretical stake in the status of intuitions,…Read more
-
Intensions and Indeterminacy: Reply to Soames, Turner, and WilsonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 249-269. 2014.
-
Why Isn't There More Progress in Philosophy?Philosophy 90 (1): 3-31. 2015.
-
Structuralism as a Response to SkepticismJournal of Philosophy 115 (12): 625-660. 2018.Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been mo…Read more
-
What follows are compressed versions of three lectures on the subject of "Mind and Modality", given at Princeton University the week of October 12-16, 1998. The first two form a series; the third stands alone to some extent. All are philosophically technical, and probably of interest mainly to philosophers. I hope that they make sense, at least to those familiar with my book _The Conscious Mind_ . Lecture 1 recapitulates some of the material in the book in a somewhat different form, and adds som…Read more
-
Carnap's Second Aufbau and David Lewis's AufbauIn Denis Fisette, Guillaume Fréchette & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy: Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook Volume 24, . 2020.
-
It's very interesting to see neurophysiological evidence brought to bear on the puzzling question of conscious experience. Many have observed that information-processing models of cognition seem to leave consciousness untouched; it is natural to hope that turning to neurophysiology might lead us to the Holy Grail. Still, I think there are reasons to be skeptical. There are good reasons to suppose that neurophysiological investigation contributes to cognitive explanation at best in virtue of cons…Read more
-
-
What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63. 2020.
-
Finding Space in a Nonspatial WorldIn Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan & Nick Huggett (eds.), Philosophy Beyond Spacetime, Oxford University Press. 2021.
-
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