fragments of consciousness

Ignorance and Imagination

I just received my copy of Daniel Stoljar's long-awaited new book, Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness.  (The introduction to the book is online.)  This book gives a highly sophisticated development of the view that the epistemic gaps between the physical and the phenomenal are grounded in our ignorance, and in particular in our ignorance of the physical.  One version of this view is Russellian (type-F) monism, as developed in well-known earlier papers by Stoljar, such as "Two Conceptions of the Physical".  But the book also develops other versions of the view without these Russellian commitments, including the most well-developed version to date of what I call "type-C materialism" in "Consciousness and its Place in Nature" (inter alia, Stoljar gives a detailed and interesting response to the "structure and dynamics just yields more structure and dynamics" argument that I give in that paper and elsewhere).  There's a lot of other good material, e.g. on the general form of the problem of consciousness, and on problems for other versions of materialism about consciousness.  It's well worth checking out. 

Epistemic Modality

The Epistemic Modality conference last week was pretty enjoyable.  Two talks (by Frank Jackson and me) on the space of epistemic possibilities -- worlds vs scenarios, 2D contents, epistemic rigidity, etc -- bookending four talks (by Andy Egan, Jonathan Schaffer, Matt Weiner, and Seth Yalcin) on the semantics of epistemic modals -- relativism vs contextualism vs no truth-conditions, etc.  No photos for this one -- I'm saving those for the AAP next week.  For reports and commentary, see the postings on the conference by Richard Chappell and Kenny Easwaran.