fragments of consciousness

Photos and video

I've put up some photos from a few recent events: the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson in April, my visit to Oxford in May and June, the Carolina Metaphysics Workshop in June, and the just-finished Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting in Sydney.

I've also put video and lyrics online for the already legendary musical tribute to Jack Smart, composed by Kit Fine and performed by Kit and Geoff Brennan at the dinner after Kit's Jack Smart lecture at ANU last week.

Constructing the World

For the last couple of weeks I have been in Oxford giving the John Locke Lectures on Constructing the World.  The title is an homage to Rudolf Carnap's 1928 book Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt.   The lectures are based on a book I have been writing for the last couple of years, trying to execute a project that is reminiscent of Carnap's in certain respects.  I haven't put this material online until now in order not to pre-empt the lectures, but I will be putting chapters online as I give the corresponding lecture each Wednesday.  So far you can find the introduction and the first three chapters.  Also, the Oxford website has audio for lecture 1 and lecture 2, as well as slides and handouts.  More of this material will go online each week, and I'm told that there will eventually be video too.  It has been very good to be back in Oxford, and I'm grateful to everyone here for their hospitability to date.

The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis

I've put a new paper online: "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis".  This is a written version of the talk I gave at the Singularity Summit last October (Powerpoint,  video, blog post).  The main focus is the intelligence explosion that some think will happen when machines become more intelligent than humans.  First, I try to clarify and analyze the argument for an intelligence explosion.  Second, I discuss strategies for negotiating the singularity to maximize the chances of a good outcome.  Third, I discuss issues regarding uploading human minds into computers, focusing on issues about consciousness and personal identity (I think this is the first time I've written at any length about personal identity, a topic I've largely avoided in the past as it confuses me too much).  I'll be giving a talk based on this paper at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson the week after next, and also in upcoming events at NYU and Oxford.  I'm still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.

PhilPapers Survey results

Some preliminary results of the PhilPapers Survey and Metasurvey are now available.  There are all sorts of interesting data.  Among issues of interest to readers of this blog in the Survey results, for example: 56% of target faculty responding favor (i.e. accept or lean toward) physicalism, while 27% favor nonphysicalism (for respondents as a whole, the figure is 54:29).  A priori knowledge is favored by 71-18%, an analytic-synthetic distinction is favored by 65-27%, Millianism is favored over Fregeanism by 34-29%, while the view that zombies are conceivable but not metaphysically possible is favored over metaphysical possibility and conceivability respectively by 35-23-16% respectively.

The Metasurvey results are also very interesting.  For quite a few questions, mean estimates differ from the actual figures by around 20%.  For aesthetic value, the mean normalized estimate (setting "other" to zero) favor "subjective" over "objective" by 68:32, but the actual figures favor "objective" by 54:46.  For the analytic-synthetic distinction, estimates are 50:50, while the actual figures are 70:30.  Something  similar applies to laws of nature: estimates favor non-Humeanism by 52:48, actual figures by 70:30.  Nonphysicalism is mildly underestimated (28% compared to 32%) as is rationalism (33% compared to 44%).  Estimates predict consequentialism, invariantism, and nominalism to be the leading views on their questions, but actual results favor deontology, contextualism, and Platonism.  I got plenty wrong myself.

At this point, we have made available basic data the distribution of Survey and Metasurvey answers, broken down by basic population (faculty, graduate student, etc) and by area of specialization.  We will make more data available before long.  We have also released basic demographic data, and we have included some thoughts on the Survey's conception and design and on the results.  We are making survey respondents' own responses available to them, and before long we will allow these to be made public where appropriate.

We encourage you to look closely at these results, to play around with the various breakdowns, and to discuss the results in the PhilPapers Survey discussion forum.

ANU Postdocs

We are advertising for 2-4 post-doctoral/research fellows at the ANU.  One to three positions are in the Centre for Consciousness, and one is working with Alan Hajek in an ARC project on the Objects of Probability.  Applications are welcome.  The following ad will appear on the APA website shortly:

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint two or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with projects directed by Professors David Chalmers and Alan Hajek.  Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of probability, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and/or the philosophy of language. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women.  Full details, including details on how to apply, are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. Closing date: December 21, 2009.

The Philosophical Metasurvey

The Philosophical Survey has attracted a very strong response: more than 3000 responses so far, including 920 (47%) from the "target" group of 1972 philosophers from 99 selected departments, with the rest fairly evenly divided between philosophy faculty in other departments, graduate students, and others.  We have also launched a Philosophical Metasurvey in which respondents predict the results of the Philosophical Survey.  Here the idea is to assess the accuracy of philosophers' sociological beliefs about the distribution of views in the field.  So far we have had around 650 responses to the Metasurvey, including around 200 from the target group.

In order to maximize responses, we've extended the deadline for the Survey and Metasurvey to Tuesday December 3.  This will be the final deadline, and we'll start releasing preliminary results soon afterwards.    It is already clear that the results of both are going to be very interesting.

We  encourage anyone who hasn't taken the Survey or Metasurvey to go ahead and take them.  Consider: today's sociology of philosophy is tomorrow's history of philosophy, so by taking the surveys, you'll be part of history!  We especially encourage members of the original target group to take the surveys, in order to increase the maximize the reliability of our results regarding that group.  And if you have taken the Survey but not the Metasurvey, consider taking the Metasurvey too.  We'll send you the results, and will make your responses available to you, so you might consider this a test of the accuracy of your sociological beliefs!

The Philosophical Survey

David Bourget and I have recently launched a new PhilPapers project: the Philosophical Survey.  This is a survey of the philosophical views of members of the philosophy profession and others.  We encourage all professional philosophers, graduate students, and interested others to take part.

The survey contains thirty questions, each giving a choice between 2-4 views on a philosophical issue.  Respondents can indicate that they accept or lean toward one of the options or can give one of a variety of "other" answers.  We have kept the questions as simple as possible, as clarification would be a never-ending process.  The survey also asks for some optional background information.

We have already launched the survey by e-mail to philosophers in 99 leading departments and to users of PhilPapers, and so far we have had responses by around 1000 professional philosophers and 700 others.  We are now opening up the survey publicly so that anyone can take it. The questions focus on issues in analytic philosophy, and will make most sense to those with some experience in the area, but anyone is welcome to take it.  We will publish results for the population of professional philosophers, graduate students, and other groups.

You can take the survey here.  Note that to take the survey, you must either have a PhilPapers account or  create a guest survey account, which will require a valid email address.  If you have received a direct email invitation to take the survey, please use the unique link found in that email instead.  These measures allow us to minimize survey abuse and to maximize the reliability of responses.  For further information about privacy concerns and about the methodology of the survey, see the survey's information page.

Singularity Summit

Ive been in New York for the last two months, teaching at New York University (as I'll do in September-December for the next three years).  There's been too much going on to report on in full, but two conferences are worth mentioning.

In early October I attended the Singularity Summit.  The term "singularity" here means different things to different people, but the core idea is I.J. Good's idea of an "intelligence explosion": if we can create machines more intelligent than us, then they'll be able to create machines more intelligent than them, and there will be a rapid spiral to superintelligence.  There were lots of interesting talks shedding light on this topic from many different directions.

The topic is often dismissed as science fiction, and is not much discussed within the academic mainstream.  Still, I think there's good reason to take seriously the possibility that a singularity will occur one of these days.  So it's worth giving serious attention to the associated practical and philosophical questions.  In fact, it's a place where philosophical issues (concerning consciousness, personal identity, and ethics, for example) take on great practical concern.

In my talk I gave a brief philosophical analysis of the argument for an intelligence explosion, and explored various practical and philosophical questions about the consequences: How can we maximize the chances of a benign outcome?  How we might upload into a post-singularity environment?  Will the results of uploading be conscious?  Will we survive the process?   I see that a video of the talk is now available, and there are discussions of the talk on various blogs (see also more videos, more summit discussion, and my photos from the summit).  Of course there is much more to say about the topic, and I plan to write up the talk as a more in-depth paper one of these days.  The materials on the websites of the Singularity Institute and of Eliezer Yudkowsky are also worth checking out. 

More recently, there was a terrific workshop on Action, Perception, and Consciousness at NYU this past weekend.  My session involved a talk by Hakwan Lau on neurobiological and philosophical models of consciousness, with comments by Ned Block, David Rosenthal, and me.  The session was filmed and will eventually be online as part of the second Online Consciousness Conference, early next year.  In the meantime I've put a few photos from the workshop online.

The extended will

Joel Anderson gave a nice talk in CAPPE a few days ago on "Scaffolded Autonomy and the Extended Will".  The talk focuses on the role of environmental triggers in facilitating the control of action, and on the ensuing possibility of an extended view of the will.  The paper isn't online, but see his "Procrastination and the Extended Will" (co-authored with Joseph Heath) for the general idea.

Joel wasn't certain whether he wanted a real extended will thesis, or a weaker embedding thesis on which the environment plays a crucial explanatory role in the processes that support and sustain an (internally constituted) will.  I think the key issue in choosing between them is whether one can get an Otto/Inga case going for the extended will, and especially whether one can get a twin case going, as one needs for a strong extension thesis.  Something like the following three cases are my best stab at it:

(1) Ida is working on her book, which is important to her.  She regularly is distracted with thoughts of watching TV.  Every time the thought occurs she quashes it, and realizes that she should return to work.  So she returns to work.

(2) Ollie is working on his book, which is important to him.  He regularly is distracted with thoughts on watching TV.  Every time thought occurs, he looks toward the TV, sees a sign saying "Return to work!", and realizes that he should return to work.  So he returns to work.

Five papers

For the last couple of years I have mostly been working on books, so I have not posted many papers here.  But I've recently significantly revised three old drafts and written up two new ones (previously circulated as talks), as follows:

• Verbal Disputes and Philosophical Progress: This is a written-up version of the old Powerpoint on Terminological Disputes (I gave in and went with the more common "verbal dispute").  Still extremely drafty in places.
• Revisability and Conceptual Change: A written-up version of an earlier handout on Conceptual Analysis meets "Two Dogmas of Empiricism".  It's a critique of Quine's argument from revisability in "Two Dogmas", using a Bayesian version of a Carnapian criterion for conceptual change.
• Frege's Puzzle and the Objects of Credence.  A heavily revised version of  "Probability and Propositions".  It argues against referentialist views of the objects of credence and develops a nonreferential view.  It now includes some new material on updating beliefs with centered-world contents and on chance-credence principles.
• The Nature of Epistemic Space.  A revised version of a paper that has been kicking around since 2001, now forthcoming in the Epistemic Modality volume edited by Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson.  It contains a long new section on Kaplan's paradox concerning the cardinality of the space of possible worlds.
• Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions: A Fregean Account.  A revised version of my paper spelling out a detailed two-dimensional account of attitude ascriptions.  As a bonus includes material on the Fregean hierarchy and communication, as well as a treatment of many puzzle cases and some replies to Scott Soames' arguments against 2D accounts of attitude ascriptions.  Forthcoming in Nous.

Conference season wrap-up

OK, I haven't been very good about keeping this blog up-to-date.  I'll try to do better.  First, recent conferences (here "recent" means since April).

• St. Andrews conference on Philosophical Methodology: I've posted photos.  An audio file of my talk on verbal disputes (and also of Jonathan Schaffer's talk on modality and methodology) is online.
• Fullerton conference on Consciousness and Self: I've posted photos and Powerpoint for my wrap-up talk on "The Varieties of Self-Awareness".  Someone uploaded the entire talk to YouTube.
• Hong Kong conference on consciousness: I've posted photos.  Once again, my talk (on the extended mind revisited) found its way to YouTube.
• ANU conference on consciousness and attention.  Photos and Powerpoint for wrap-up: "Consciousness First?  Attention First?"
• AAP conference in Melbourne: Photos and handout for my talk on "Kaplan's Paradox and Epistemically Possible Worlds".
• Utah NEH Institute on Experimental Philosophy: Photos and Powerpoint for my talk on "What Can Experimental Philosophy Do?".

Attention and Consciousness

Here's the program for a workshop on Attention and Consciousness, put on by the ANU Centre for Consciousness.  It will be held in the Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre in the ANU College of Law later this week.  If you'd like to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.

Thursday June 25

9-10:30    Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophy, UC Riverside), Consciousness and Attention
11-12:30  Matthew Finkbeiner (Cognitive Science, Macquarie), Visual Attention and Reportability
2-3:30      Brian Scholl (Psychology, Yale), The Logic of Seeing (and not Seeing)
4-5:30      Ned Block (Philosophy, NYU), Attention and Veridicality
7pm         Conference Dinner

Friday June 26

9-10:30    Chris Mole (Philosophy, UBC), Attending and Referring
11-12:30  John Campbell (Philosophy, UC Berkeley), Where Does Consciousness Fit In?  On the Boolean Map Theory of Visual Attention
2-3:30      Declan Smithies (Philosophy, ANU/OSU),  What Is Attention?
4-5:30      David Chalmers (Philosophy, ANU), Wrap-Up/Discussion

Bob Meyer

Bob Meyer just has died, of a heart attack after a year-long battle with cancer.  Bob was a long-time member of the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences here at ANU, and even after he moved across the university and then retired, was a ubiquitous presence here.  He was a larger-than-life character who was enormous fun to be around.  

Bob was well-known for his work on nonclassical logic, especially relevance logic (or as Bob always insisted, relevant logic).  He was also famous as Maximum Leader of the Logicians Liberation League, whose manifesto (presented at Indiana University in 1969 complete with a cream pie attack) ends as follows:

Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons. Oh, you filterable viruses, we will shake you off and fly once more.

Bob was author of one of my all-time favorite philosophy articles (which I read in graduate school long before knowing him), "God Exists!", published in Nous in 1987.  This article demonstrates that the existence of God is equivalent to the axiom of choice.  One direction is easy (just let God do the choosing), while the other direction requires a bit more work, applying Zorn's lemma to infinite causal chains.

Bob's cancer was said to have a 97% fatality rate, but he had high hopes for being in the 3%.  He wrote to me a while back: "I do remain (stupidly?) cheerful--after all, I worried for years that all that smoking would lead to cancer. I don't have that worry any more."  I'll remember him coming to a party last year as Wonko the Sane (pictured here with his wife Bobi, daughter Dorothy, and me; here are some more photos of Bob), the character from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who took his house to be the only pocket of sanity and the rest of the world to be the Asylum.  That captures something of the Bob Meyer worldview.  His many quirks were grounded in an enormously warm humanity.  We'll miss him.

PhilPapers news

In the two months or so since it launched, PhilPapers has thrived.  There are now close to 3000 registered users, and twice as many again active unregistered users.  Many journals have asked to be added to the database, and we are developing methods whereby this can easily be done.  In the meantime, there are a couple of major items of news.

First, PhilPapers has been awarded a grant of 200,000 pounds by the Joint Informations Systems Committee in the UK.  This grant will be administered by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where David Bourget will be based for the next three years.  With support from London and ANU (which will now be the joint sponsors of PhilPapers), this grant will enable the development of many new features for PhilPapers.  Congratulations to David for doing all the work to make this grant possible.  Many thanks also to Barry Smith at the Institute, and to Tim Crane before him, for their support.

Second, we have introduced a system of editorships for PhilPapers categories, from the area level down to the leaf level.  Editors will have a set of powerful tools for populating and maintaining PhilPapers categories, as outlined in the editors' manual.  We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to apply.  If you're interested and have any questions, feel free to drop me an email.

We are hoping to develop the community around PhilPapers in a number of ways.  The editorships are one.  The discussion forums are another.  There has been some good discussion so far, but there is the potential for a lot more.  We would like to see these turn into a locus for all sorts of high-quality interaction between professional philosophers (of the sort that one sees on the best blogs, for example) whether concerning philosophical articles and books, philosophical issues, issues regarding the profession of philosophy, or discussion of ideas for Philpapers itself.  To that end, the forums are now moderated, and we have also introduced a PhilPapers blog based on the forums.   We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to take part in discussions in the forums, and to initiate discussions about matters of interest.

Consciousness and the Vegetative State

There will be a workshop on Consciousness and the Vegetative State this Thursday-Friday March 26-27 at the ANU (National Europe Centre at 1 Liversidge St), sponsored by the Centre for Consciousness.  The workshop will bring together scientists and philosophers (four of each) to discuss foundational issues raised by recent work on vegetative state, especially the use of brain imaging in an attempt to detect signs of consciousness.  If you plan to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.

Thursday March 26

10-11:20 David Reutens (Queensland Brain Institute), Clinical Differentiation of Vegetative State from its Mimics

11:40-1   Jakob Hohwy (Philosophy, Monash), Dimensions of Consciousness

2-3:20     Malcolm Horne (Florey Institute), Functional Neuroimaging and Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Treatment from Vegetative Patients

4-5:20     Neil Levy (Philosophy, Melbourne/Oxford), Consciousness in the Vegetative State: Some Residual Doubts.

7             Conference Dinner

Friday March 27

10-11:20 Levin Kuhlmann (Neuroengineering, Melbourne), The Functional and Anatomical Correlates of Awareness: MRI Investigations of Patients with Post-Coma Unresponsiveness.

11:40-1   Tim Bayne (Philosophy, Oxford), The Vegetative State and the Problem of Other Minds

2-3:20     Peter McCullagh (John Curtin School, ANU), Three Decades of Begging the Question: An Epistemological Slant on PVS

4-5:20     David Chalmers (Philosophy/Centre for Consciousness, ANU), Wrap-up /Discussion

Metametaphysics

I just received my copies of the book Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, which I co-edited with David Manley and Ryan Wasserman.  The book grew out of the ANU conference on Metametaphysics in 2005, followed by the Boise conference on the same topic in 2007.

There are 17 papers in the book, by a superb group of authors: Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund, Kit Fine, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, John Hawthorne, Eli Hirsch, Thomas Hofweber, Kris McDaniel, Huw Price, Jonathan Schaffer, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Amie Thomasson, Peter van Inwagen, Steve Yablo, and me.  The papers include definitive statements of many of these authors' view, and I think that a number of them are going to be very widely discussed.

The book looks fantastic -- thanks to OUP for doing a great job with it.  Special thanks also to David Manley who did the bulk of the editorial work that made the book possible.  Ryan and I did various things, but David wrote the superb introduction, co-ordinated the review process, prepared the index and proofs, and did much else besides.  A lot of work, but I think the result suggests that it was worth it.

Online consciousness conference

The Online Consciousness Conference has been up and running for a few days now.  The conference, organized by Richard Brown, has a keynote paper by David Rosenthal and nine contributed papers, each followed by one or two commentaries, usually with both a video and a written version.  There are lively and high-quality discussions in the comment threads after each paper.  I'm a bit late to the party, having been out of town for the first few days of the conference.  But as it happens, six of the ten papers take my work as a primary target (Derek Ball on mysterianism, Kati Balog on the phenomenal concept strategy, Dave Beisecker also on the phenomenal concept strategy, Richard Brown on arguments for dualism, Barbara Montero on Russellian physicalism, Gualtiero Piccinini on first-person data), so I've posted comments in those six threads.  Other philosophers are encouraged to join in.

Fodor on the extended mind

Jerry Fodor has a lively and thoughtful review of Andy Clark's new book Supersizing the Mind in the latest issue of the London Review of Books.  The paper is in effect a critique of the extended mind thesis, targeting Andy's and my joint paper "The Extended Mind", Andy's book, and my foreword to the book.  Fodor makes two or three interesting objections to the extended mind thesis.

Fodor's first objection is that we haven't given any clear content to the claim that extended objects (such as iPhones and notepads) can be parts of the mind.  Here it's worth noting that we never put things in exactly this way in the original paper: at a couple of points we talk of external objects being parts of cognitive processes, but not parts of minds.  I do talk about parts of the mind in the foreword, but this is mainly to quickly give a sense of the thesis for general readers. In any case, I think that talk about "parts" here (and of "minds", for that matter) is quite dispensable.

PhilPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  David Bourget and I have been working on this project for a year or two now, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and books in philosophy.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to the site and try it yourself (we've compiled a basic introduction to some of the features).  Even a casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on.  However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you'll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

Conferences

There have been a bunch of lively workshops at ANU and Sydney recently.  I've put a few Powerpoint presentations on my website: a wrap-up talk from the Introspection and Consciousness workshop, an introductory presentation from the Hyperintensionality and Impossible Worlds workshop, and a talk ("Conceivability Arguments for and against Contingentism") from the Contingentism in Metaphysics conference.

At least two more workshops will be happening at ANU in the coming months, both on issues tied to the philosophy and science of consciousness: one on Consciousness and the Vegetative State in late March (probably March 20-21), and another on Consciousness and Attention in late June (probably June 24-26).

There are many interesting upcoming conferences elsewhere, as well.  In the consciousness area alone, there's the first Consciousness Online conference February 20-27 (deadline for submissions is January 12), Consciousness and the Self at CSU Fullerton April 29-30, and then two major conferences in June: ASSC 13 in Berlin (June 5-8), and Toward a Science of Consciousness: Investigating Inner Experience in Hong Kong (June 11-14).  The Hong Kong conference will be the central point of an Asia Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong June 5-21, comprising all sorts of consciousness-related events.  Another interesting-looking conference that I'll be taking part in is the upcoming conference on Philosophical Methodology in St Andrews, April 25-27.

Update: Two other relevant events are the Minds, Brains, and Beyond conference in memory of Susan Hurley, at Bristol on March 20-22, and the NEH Summer Institute on Experimental Philosophy, at Utah from June 22 to July 17.

Postdocs at ANU

The following ad for a couple of postdocs at ANU has just gone up on the APA Jobs for Philosophers website (it won't appear in the printed version).  A full ad and an online application procedure are on the ANU website, and informal details are on my website.

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint two or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with projects directed by Professors David Chalmers and Jonathan Schaffer. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and/or the philosophy of language. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women.  Full details, including details on how to apply, are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. Closing date: December 15, 2008.

A taxonomy of philosophy

Now back to philosophy.  Or at least, to philosophical taxonomy. David Bourget and I are finalizing a new project for access to online work in philosophy.  To a very rough first approximation it will be like MindPapers generalized to all of philosophy, although there will be many significant differences (it will be less ambitious in some respects, more ambitious in others).  More on that when it goes public, hopefully within the next month or so.

One part of the project is a classification scheme, under which any paper in philosophy can be classified in up to three areas.  The idea is that at least eventually, the classification scheme should be about as fine-grained as the MindPapers scheme.  Philosophy is divided up into five clusters (Metaphysics and Epistemology, Value Theory, Science Logic and Mathematics, History of Western Philosophy, Other Philosophical Traditions).  Each cluster is divided into six or more fields (in M&E, for example, these are Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion).  Each field is divided into 5-10 areas (in Philosophy of Mind, for example, these are Consciousness, Intentionality, Perception, Metaphysics of Mind, Epistemology of Mind, Mental States and Processes, and Misc).  Then each area can be divided into up to ten topics, and up to ten subtopics of each in turn (in roughly the way that the main areas of philosophy of mind are divided into topics and subtopics in Mindpapers).

With help from a number of others, including consultants in a wide range of areas, we've made a very rough first attempt at a taxonomy.  Unsurprisingly, this taxonomy is better-developed in some areas than others.  And even in areas where it is reasonably well-developed, many tricky decisions have to be made.  Eventually, we will have ongoing projects for the refinement and development of these categories, with systematic consultation.  For now, however, we're trying to get things up to scratch for a first draft.

At the moment, the various areas of M&E (apart from philosophy of religion) are developed to a fair degree of detail, though there is still work to be done.  Value Theory and Science/Logic/Mathematics are more patchy.  Some fields in these clusters (such as Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy of Education, and Philosophy of Social Sciences) are hardly subdivided at all, while other areas (such as General Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, and many other areas in these clusters) are extremely patchy and incomplete.  As for History of Philosophy, we've decided not to subdivide this for now beyond a few obvious groupings, and then categories for a few individuals in each period (these were settled by mechanically choosing those with more than n entries with their name in the title in the database, followed by a small amount of tweaking), although we may well subdivide these further eventually.  And we haven't made any attempt to subdivide the Other Philosophical Traditions.

For now, I'm calling for feedback from the philosophical community, either via e-mail or via comments on this blog.  Especially valuable will be thoughts on categories that we've missed, on ways to structure categories that don't yet have much structure, and on better ways of structuring things in tricky cases.  The field structure is largely set (though perhaps not irrevocably), but the area structure is still a work in progress in many cases, and topics and subtopics are still very much in progress.  In many cases what we have has been compiled partly from our own sense of the fields, partly from Internet sources (the Stanford Encyclopedia has been valuable), and partly from feedback from others, but all three of these things have been more extensive and useful in some fields than in others.  So further feedback will be very useful at this stage.  For now, our aim is to fill in structure in the first three main clusters, though thoughts about the other two clusters are also welcome.  Of course we probably won't be able to follow every suggestion, but we'll at least give every reasonable suggestion some consideration.

Some methodology: we'd like to stick to 5-10 subcategories per category where possible, as this makes the system much more usable (and there are also relevant technological constraints).  Of course sometimes there will be fewer (especially at the topic/subtopic level), and some topics may not have subtopics at all, especially in smaller areas.  In a few cases it seems unavoidable to have more subcategories, but this shouldn't happen too often.  Typically, finest-grained categories will have around 15-100 papers in them.  More than this calls for further division, while less than this calls for less division.  For now, we don't want to go beyond five levels.  A given category can be crosslisted under multiple parent categories, marked withn asterisk in the taxonomy.  Each crosslisted category has a primary parent category under which it is listed without an asterisk, though in some cases this selection is fairly arbitrary.  For many purposes the choice of primary parent category won't matter much, as the relevant papers can show up in multiple places.

Of course there are many ways to produce a taxonomy like this, and this is just one way.  For a start, the system is produced by analytic philosophers and has a bias toward carving things as an analytic philosopher would.  Still, we'd like the system to be useful to continental philosophers and those in other traditions.  Continental philosophy is covered to a considerable extent under 19th and 20th century philosophy, and there's a separate field under "Other Philosophical Traditions" both to capture contemporary work that doesn't fit well elsewhere, and to provide a way to mark continental papers for those who are looking for them.  There's no reason why papers from continental and other traditions can't be included under the first three clusters too, though, and we're open to using categories that will help make that possible.  Even from within an analytic perspective, of course many taxonomies are possible, but as always some choices need to be made.  We're not suggesting that this is a definitive taxonomy (it's just something to make a website more useful), and we'd look forward to seeing other taxonomic attempts by others.  And again, keep in mind that what we have currently is extremely preliminary and is highly sketchy and inexpert in some fields.

With that in mind, all constructive feedback by e-mail or in the comments is welcome.  Feedback from those with expertise in relevant areas is especially welcome, and non-anonymous comments are especially appreciated.  Again, here's the draft taxonomy.  Thanks in advance,

The problem of consciousness meets "Intelligent Design"

It had to happen eventually.  The "hard problem" of consciousness is being invoked in favor of anti-Darwinist ideas such as "Intelligent Design".  Here's a key quote from an already infamous New Scientist article:

"According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

The reporter contacted me to ask for a comment when she was writing the article.  I told her that like many other scientists and philosophers (even people like Steven Pinker!), I have serious doubts about the possibility of a materialist explanation of consciousness, but that those doubts do little to support a religious agenda or intelligent design.  I declined to be quoted on the record, though, because of the danger of being taken out of context as supporting the movement.  Perhaps this was a mistake, as the article doesn't do a good job of separating the issues.  I'd hate to see the consciousness/materialism issue and the design/theism issue run together in the popular imagination.  As Peter Hankin says amusingly at Conscious Entities:

"Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn't need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!"

Anyway, let's get things straight.  The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism.  In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there.  But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world.  Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness.  But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness.  If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct.  Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

So I think there is very little support for anti-Darwinist ideas to be found here. I think there's also not much support for theist ideas: of course traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true.  As for intelligent design, I'm on the record as saying that I can't rule out the hypothesis that we're living in a computer simulation, so I suppose that it follows that I can't rule out the hypothesis that our world is designed.  But there's not much here to support traditional theism or to oppose Darwinism, and whatever support there is doesn't come from the problem of consciousness.  In any case, I hope that these issues remain firmly separated, as they should.

Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions

A nice recent development in philosophy publishing is the "5 Questions" series, in which philosophers in various fields offer personal and autobiographical ruminations.  Snippets from a few of these volumes are available online, including formal philosophy, foundations of physics, normative ethics, philosophy of mathematics, political philosophy, and a few others.

The latest in the series is Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, edited by Patrick Grim, with an impressive cast of contributors.  I've now written a draft of my contribution to this volume.  This is mainly autobiographical rambling and metaphilosophical pronouncement rather than philosophy per se, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.  But any thoughts are welcome.  I see that the contributions by David Rosenthal and Michael Tye are also available online.

Congrats to Jonathan Schaffer

Congratulations to my colleague Jonathan Schaffer, who has been awarded the APA's 2008 article prize for the best article published by someone under 40 in the last two years, for his article "Knowing the Answer".  In addition, Jonathan has been awarded the AAP's prize for the best article published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 2007, for "From Nihilism to Monism".  That's quite a double!

Jonathan is the second ANU philosopher to win the APA article prize in the last few years, following Alan Hajek in 2004.  Once one combines this with Kim Sterelny's Jean Nicod Prize, Bob Goodin's election to the British Academy, Daniel Stoljar's acclaimed book and forthcoming PPR book symposium, and Frank Jackson's election as a Companion of the Order of Australia, these are good times for ANU philosophers.  Our new junior philosophers are no slouches either, with Susanna Schellenberg having papers accepted to Journal of Philosophy and Mind, and Nic Southwood having papers accepted to Ethics and Nous and a book accepted by Oxford University Press, both within about a year of getting their Ph.D.

Travel wrap-up

I've recently returned from five weeks of philosophy travel: Seoul (for the World Congress of Philosophy), Beijing (a couple of lectures and some Olympics), Kirchberg (the Wittgenstein conference on Reduction on Elimination), Syracuse (the SPAWN conference on perception), Krakow (the European Congress of Analytic Philosophy), and Dubrovnik (a workshop on Consciousness and Thought).  I've put photos from the five conferences online: Seoul, Kirchberg, Syracuse, Krakow, Dubrovnik.  I've also put online photos from three July events in Australia: the AAP in Melbourne, a workshop on the representational and relational character of perceptual experience here at ANU, and the Jack Smart lecture by Brian Skyrms.

In addition, I've put online Powerpoint for the wrap-up talks I gave at the ANU and Dubrovnik conferences, R&R and The Critique of Pure Thought, and for the commentary I gave at Syracuse (on Jesse Prinz on attention): Is There Consciousness Outside Attention?  Some of these may turn into papers at some point, but for now the Powerpoint will do.

Back in the saddle

I'm back in Canberra after a month of traveling in the US and Canada: Pasadena, Buffalo, Toronto, Brown, New York, Rutgers, Texas, Arizona. The highlight was the consciousness conference in Tucson, which had superb sessions on consciousness vs attention, local vs global neural correlates of consciousness, brain imaging as mind reading, first-person methods and the richness of consciousness, and many others. Various blog posts on the conference have been posted by John Derbyshire, Anand Rangarajan, and Eric Schwitzgebel (and here). I've posted some photos here.

Having turned 42 since returning, I've also posted some photos from my Life, the Universe, and Everything party.

Supersizing the Mind

Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension is being published by Oxford University Press later this year. Among other things, this book fleshes out and defends the ideas put forward in our joint 1998 article "The Extended Mind". It includes a comprehensive (and I think largely compelling) set of replies to the various objections to the extended mind thesis that have been raised over the last decade, and also has a lot on applications of the extended mind idea within cognitive science.

I've written a foreword to the book, which I've just put online. The foreword will also form the basis for my talk in the Barwise Prize session at the Pacific APA meeting later this week. Of course this short piece doesn't go into remotely the depth of Andy's book, but it gives some elements of my current take on the extended mind thesis, ten years after publication of the original article.

Philosophy teams

Some frivolity for the new year. Some of you may know about the fish philosophers and the bird philosophers:

Fish philosophers: Adrian Haddock, Kelly Roe, Nathan Salmon, Scott Sturgeon, J.D. Trout, Jennifer Whiting. (Borderline case: Ellery Eells.) Captain: Bill Fish.

Bird philosophers: Tim Crane, Antony Eagle, Alicia Finch, Mike Martin, Chris Peacocke, Rob Sparrow. (Borderline cases: Gabe and Susanna Seagull.) Captain: Alexander Bird.

There are also:

Occupation philosophers: Lynne Baker, Alex Barber, Bill Brewer, John Gardner, Cliff Hooker, Jeff King, Ray Monk, Graham Priest, Sydney Shoemaker, Peter Singer, Ken Taylor. (Captain: Steve Jobs?)

Body-part philosophers: Justin D'Arms, Philippa Foot, Michael Hand, R.M. Hare, H.L.A. Hart, Cathy Legg, Louis Loeb.

Colour philosophers: Max Black, Jessica Brown, Ian Gold, T.H. Green, Thomas Pink, Wolfgang Schwarz, Anita Silvers, Ming Tan, Roger White. (Captain: Hue Price?)

Then there are the autological philosophers: Jack Smart, Kit Fine, Stephen White. And the heterological philosophers: Max Black, Steven Gross, Alva Noe. (I leave aside hard cases such as Crispin Wright and Joe Heterological.) And the philosophers whose name are sentences: Lynda Burns, Immanuel Kant, Benson Mates, Adam Pautz, John Shook, Jeff Speaks.

More philosophers for these categories, and more categories?

Jobs at ANU

Two advertisements for positions at ANU have just appeared in Jobs for Philosophers.    The first is for post-doctoral fellowships associated with the Centre for Consciousness:

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint one or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with Professor David Chalmers’ Federation Fellowship project on ‘The Contents of Consciousness’, and/or in association with other projects in the Program in related areas. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and/or epistemology. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women. Send applications (reference: CASS4400), preferably by e-mail (Word, rtf, or pdf format) to jobs@anu.edu.au, or by mail to: Applications Officer, Human Resources Division, Chancelry 10A, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Full details are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. [Formal information is available here and here.]  Closing date: November 30, 2007.

The second is for continuing positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program (abbreviated version here):

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to make continuing appointments, 1 or 2 depending on rank.  Appointment will be offered at Levels B through E2 (Assistant to Full Professor, salary package: $66,764-$131,929 plus 17% super), depending on qualifications and experience.  This is an opportunity for outstanding scholars to take up an ongoing research position in a program with a major international profile and a very strong graduate program.  Applications are invited in any area of philosophy consonant with work currently being done in the Philosophy Program, but preference for one of the positions may be given to Social & Political Theory. Applicants must, except in exceptional circumstances, be willing and able to make a major contribution to one or more of the overarching themes  around which the work of the School is organized.  The Research School of Social Sciences particularly welcomes applications from women. The beginning dates are negotiable. Further particulars are available here.

Re the continuing positions: these full-time permanent research positions (tenurable after a few years, in the case of a junior appointment) are of course very attractive, and applications/enquiries from distinguished philosophers are encouraged. The information regarding rank of the continuing positions in the ad and on the ANU website is confusing, but these should be treated as an open rank positions.   The JFP ad doesn't list a closing date, but the ANU ad lists a closing date of November 19 (9 days from now).  I don't know how serious this closing date is, but it would be a good idea to send applications as soon as possible.  Note that e-mail applications are accepted for both positions.