ABSTRACT Some philosophers argue that near‐term artificial intelligence (AI) systems might soon be welfare subjects. We should take AI welfare seriously, they urge, because AI systems might soon have properties indicated by our best scientific theories of consciousness, and consciousness suffices for welfare subjectivity. I argue that this view faces constraints from the epistemology of...
In this paper, I argue that the thoroughly algorithmic nature of current AI systems (such as LLMs) is no obstacle to their being conscious, despite strong apparent reasons to the contrary. To this end, I present a picture on which algorithmic AI systems comprise dispositional properties that realize categorical phenomenal properties where the latter, in turn, provide the identity conditions for...
ABSTRACT It is generally assumed that an ordinary human brain is associated with a single mind. Indeed, this assumption is so deeply rooted that it is rarely articulated explicitly, let alone questioned. However, as philosophers of mind have increasingly noticed, it turns out to rest on alarmingly shaky ground. In this article, I argue for the multiplicity hypothesis : under normal conditions,...
ABSTRACT This article defends a provocative claim: Light itself is not seen. Proposed by Aristotle, Alhazen, and recently Hilbert and Kalderon, this view regards light as the medium of sight rather than its object. Unlike reflectance physicalism or color relationalism, this medium theory maintains that colors are entirely independent of light, which merely provides conditions for their...
ABSTRACT Are some creatures “more conscious” than others? A number of consciousness researchers have aimed to answer this question. Yet some have claimed that this question does not even make sense. They claim that “conscious” (in the phenomenal sense) never occurs as a gradable adjective , meaning an adjective that permits degree expressions (“more f than,” “slightly f ,” etc.) and that is...
ABSTRACT Empirical arguments in the philosophy of perception have become increasingly influential. In this paper, we evaluate the prospects for one such argument—the Argument from Structure —in light of the a priori constraint that we must give a unified account of visual experience. We argue that, correctly understood, the kinds of empirical findings marshalled in support of an internalist...
Abstract Does phenomenal force, the distinctive phenomenology attributed to perceptual experience, really form an integral part of the latter? If not, what implications does it have for perceptual justification? In this paper, I first argue for a metacognitive account, according to which phenomenal force constitutes a separate, metacognitive state. This account opens up a previously unexplored...
What is the role of consciousness in our mental lives? This book argues that consciousness plays an essential role in explaining how we can acquire knowledge and epistemically justified belief about ourselves and our surroundings. On this view, our mental lives cannot be preserved in unconscious creatures—zombies—who behave just as we do. Only conscious creatures have epistemic justification to...
This paper develops a form of transcendental naive realism. According to naive realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental naive realism, the naive realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis...
The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism—the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our...
Color qualia inversion scenarios have played a key role in various philosophical debates. Most notably perhaps, they have figured in skeptical arguments for the fundamental unknowability of other persons’ color experiences. For these arguments to succeed, it must be assumed that a person's having inverted color qualia may go forever unnoticed. This assumption is now generally deemed to be...
Block's well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental...
I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense‐data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively...
Jaegwon Kim is one of the most pre-eminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect...
David Papineau's book on naturalism is clear, level-headed, and illuminating. It is also very broad in its sweep. Papineau considers a variety of different challenges to the naturalist's position, and he tries to meet each of these challenges head-on. There is no waffling or obscurantism. My focus in this paper will be on some of the remarks Papineau makes with respect to consciousness. I am...
Introduction: is our task impossible or impolite? Part I. The Experimental Data: 1. Religious experience, 'East' and 'West' Some basic epistemological concepts Part II. The Challenge from Ineffability: 3. The outlines of ineffability ineffability relative to particular languages 5. Reasons in ineffability's favour Part III. The Social Science Challenge: 6. Nonepistemic explanation of belief 7....
A number of influences have combined to make reductionism an unpopular position in recent philosophy of mind and psychology. Davidson's Principle of the Anomalousness of the Mental, the multiple realizability arguments of Putnam, Fodor, and others, and attempts to characterize supervenience or dependency as the appropriate nonreductive relation to seek between psychological and physical kinds...
As one would expect, John Searle's latest book The Rediscovery of the Mind, is a daring and controversial work. It is a blunt and lively book, as is exhibited by the title that didn't make it: What's wrong with the Philosophy of Mind? Searle's long term goal is to bring consciousness back to center stage in the philosophy of mind from the rather marginal position it currently occupies in...
The central thesis of the book is that experiential awareness of God-the of God, as I call it-can provide epistemic justification for certain kinds of beliefs about God. I call such beliefs 'M-beliefs' ('M' for manifestation), beliefs to the effect that God is doing something vis-a-vis the subject-strengthening, guiding, communicating a message, etc-or to the effect that God has some...
Both Gale and Pappas argue that I fail to justify the claim that mystical experience is perceptual. Hence, in Gale's terms, my project derailed before it leaves the station. However, the two criticisms are rather different. Gale's is the more radical, since he seeks to show that mystical experience is not even a candidate for being a source of justification for beliefs about any objective...
Consciousness has always been a baffling phenomenon, and some have seen it to be fundamentally mysterious, irretrievably beyond human understanding. I argue, on the contrary, that its mysteries are beginning to dissolve, thanks largely to the onslaught of empirical and conceptual advances in cognitive science. So entrenched, however, are the traditional ways of addressing the philosophical...
One strategy for explaining consciousness is to locate it relative to its causes and effects. Common sense seems to tell us what the causes and effects of consciousness are; so perhaps we can identify consciousness as being whatever it is that occurs in between the two. Though superficially tempting, this idea heightens the air of mystery surrounding consciousness. As far as we can tell, the...
is so much that is brilliant, delightful, and right in Dennett's book that it is tempting try explain away, or sweep under the rug, the things that seem wrong. I was aware of one long standing disagreement between him and me, namely over the existence of But I had hoped that this was an isolated case. And, indeed, the book a whole presents a vision of mind and its place in nature (to steal C....
Like a leaky roof, the phenomena of consciousness continue to drip cold water on otherwise virtually watertight physicalist pretensions. There are no current prospects for any sort of scientific theory of consciousness and the various speculative attempts to point in the direction of such a theory of consciousness all appear to suffer from the rather basic problem of being, in the words of...
When Timothy Sprigge's The Vindication of Absolute Idealism appeared in 1983 it ran very much against the grain of the dominant linguistic and analytic traditions of philosophy in Britain. The very title of this work was a challenge to those who believed that Absolute Idealism fell with the critiques of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the 20th century. Sprigge, however, saw...