Elizabeth Cardona

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

This volume is a collection of new work on the significance of consciousness: in what ways does conscious experience matter, and why? Many have thought that consciousness is not merely a theoretically puzzling phenomenon, but that it is important morally, epistemically, or in other ways. For example, this is a key reason why people care how consciousness is distributed: do animals, insects or even near future AIs have it? But in what sense (if at all) is this true, and why? And how does this relate to our view of what consciousness is? Do different theories of consciousness have different implications for how it matters? Does the view that consciousness reduces to a physical state of the brain imply that it does not matter in the way we think it does? The Importance of Being Conscious brings together a variety of perspectives on these questions from leading theorists in ethics and philosophy of mind.