fragments of consciousness

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.

Recent collections on consciousness

I've been meaning to do some posts about a number of recent interesting books on consciousness and related topics, but I haven't gotten a chance.  So rather than do a series of separate posts, I thought I'd do a single post here about a number of books that are worth checking out.  I'll devote this post to collections, and save single-authored books for another post somewhere down the line.

The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider.  This is a really impressive volume containing about 55 substantial articles, roughly evenly divided between the philosophy and the science of consciousness, written by many of the leading people in the field.  I've read a number of the articles already, and they are terrific.  For someone wanting a comprehensive yet in-depth guide to the field, there probably isn't a better single source.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, edited by Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson.  A similar volume, but containing 31 chapters mostly on the science of consciousness.  This has especially strong coverage in psychology and cognitive science, although it's somewhat lighter on neuroscience and philosophy (just four overview articles on the philosophy of consciousness).  I haven't read many of the chapters yet, but the quality seems to be high.

(Completing a triumvirate, there is also an Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Tim Bayne and  Axel Cleeremans, forthcoming in a year or two.  This will probably have the most comprehensive coverage of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology of the three, in a format of around 250 shorter articles, encyclopedia-style.)

Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge

I just received my copy of Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowlege: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, edited by Torin Alter and Sven Walter.  There have been quite a few collections of new papers on consciousness in recent years, but I think this is the best of them.  It's focused on what has become the central set of issues in the debate over materialism and dualism about consciousness: namely, the epistemic and ontological gaps between the physical and the phenomenal, and the role that phenomenal concepts play in grounding these gaps.  I'd say that every paper in this book is important, and that collectively the papers in the book greatly advance our understanding of these topics.

The first section on the knowledge argument has a number of special treats: Knut Nordby, the achromat color scientist, with a piece on what it's like to be in Mary's situation; Lawrence Nemirow, author of the original defence of the ability hypothesis concerning the knowledge argument, rebutting all the objections to the hypothesis that have sprung up in recent years; Dan Dennett with his "RoboMary" response to the knowledge argument; and an exchange between Frank Jackson and Torin Alter on whether representationalism undermines the knowledge argument (Jackson says yes, Alter no).

The second half of the book has a number of papers right at the leading edge of the debate over phenomenal concepts.  Janet Levin and David Papineau set out definitive versions of their well-known materialist views of phenomenal concepts, including replies to objections.  Joe Levine and I have papers raising problems for any materialist account of phenomenal concepts.  John Hawthorne raises problems for the sort of "direct reference" account of phenomenal concepts that I and many others favor.  Finally, there is a terrific set of three papers on arguments for dualism and the role of phenomenal concepts therein.  Stephen White defends the property dualism argument and Ned Block argues against it, both with a lot of attention to the conceptual foundations.  And Martine Nida-Rümelin has a new and important argument for dualism, one that is based on a two-dimensional analysis but is quite different from the 2-D arguments that I and others have put forward.

The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a superb book.  I expect that the papers in it will shape much of the debate on these topics in the coming years, and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these issues take a look at it.

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. 

Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism

At the meeting of the Central Division of the APA in Chicago this April, there will be an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism, with Bob Stalnaker and me as critics and Soames replying.  I've put online my paper for that session: "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism" (the official version for the session is a somewhat abridged version of this).  As the title suggests, one focus of the paper is the portion of the book where Soames turns out, surprisingly enough, to be a sort of two-dimensionalist himself.  There are also some bits responding to Soames' arguments on issues related to descriptivism and context-dependence.  There's not much overlap with my posts from last year on attitude ascriptions, as all that got much too long.  Instead that material has been incorporated into a new paper on a Fregean account of propositions and attitude ascriptions, which I'll be posting here shortly.

Jaegwon Kim comes out

Jaegwon Kim's new book, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, was recently published.  This book is full of interesting arguments about the mind-body problem.  But it is especially notable for the fact that Kim, often seen as an arch-reductionist, comes out of the closet as a dualist.  In the last couple of pages of the book, he embraces epiphenomenalist property dualism about qualia, combined with functionalist reductionism about intentional states.  The position is not too far from a view that is often attributed to The Conscious Mind, though as a matter of fact I'm much less confident about both the epiphenomenalism (about the phenomenal) and the functionalism (about the intentional) than Kim is.  Here's a review of the book by Andrew Melnyk, and here's a sample chapter.

As the title suggests, Kim softpedals his debut as a dualist a little. Here's the last paragraph of the book:

The position is, as we might say, a slightly defective physicalism -- physicalism manque but not by much.  I believe that this is as much physicalism as we can have, and that there is no credible alternative to physicalism as a general worldview.  Physicalism is not the whole truth, but it is the truth near enough, and near enough should be good enough.

(As someone suggested, this calls to mind a counterfactual book called Straight, Or Something Near Enough.  With subtitle: I Just Fool Around With Guys on Weekends.  "The position is, as we might say, a slightly defective heterosexuality -- heterosexuality manque but not by much.  Near enough should be good enough.")

Tone aside, this makes at least three prominent materialists who have abandoned the view in the last few years.  Apart from Kim, there's Terry Horgan and Stephen White (balanced, of course, by Frank Jackson moving the other way).  One still sometimes sees the claim that almost everyone these days is a materialist (e.g. in Peter Carruthers' new book, p. 5: "Just about everyone now working in this area is an ontological physicalist, with the exception of Chalmers (1996) and perhaps a few others").  I don't think one can get away with saying this any more.  Apart from the four counterexamples just mentioned, here are a few other contemporary anti-materialists about consciousness who come quickly to mind: Joseph Almog, Torin Alter, George Bealer, Laurence BonJour, Paul Boghossian, Tyler Burge, Tim Crane, John Foster, Brie Gertler, George Graham, W.D. Hart, Ted Honderich, Steven Horst, Saul Kripke, Harold Langsam, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Trenton Merricks, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Adam Pautz, David Pitt, Alvin Plantinga, Howard Robinson, William Robinson, Gregg Rosenberg, A.D. Smith, and Richard Swinburne.  There are plenty of others, and then at least as many again agnostics.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that the numbers within philosophy of mind are 50% materialist, 25% agnostic, 25% dualist.

Of course, sociology isn't the important thing here.  Philosophy is. So as philosophy, let me recommend Kim's book as a thoughtful and insightful treatment of the mind-body problem that's well worth reading.

Soames Chapter 10: De re attitude ascriptions

In the interest of completing the response to Soames' arguments against my analysis of attitude ascriptions, here's a post on Chapter 10. Unlike most of the previous chapters, this chapter is available online (in a slightly older version).  In the first part of the chapter, he gives arguments against "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism, mostly focusing on attitude ascriptions.  These arguments correspond pretty closely to the arguments I responded to in the ASU commentary, which shows how my analysis can deal with the various problem cases.  In the last part of the Chapter (pp. 313-324 of the book, and pp. 30-38 of the online version), he gives some further arguments against the "hybrid" view, which is his label for the view that I hold, focusing especially on some issues about de re attitude ascriptions.  I'll address these arguments here.

Soames Chapter 9: More attitude ascriptions

I've fallen behind on posting about the Soames book, due to various distractions.  I've written up partial entries on Chapter 8 (on Jackson) and on the first half of Chapter 9 (on me), and hope to get back to those shortly.  But for now I'll post about the second half of Chapter 9, which is about my account of attitude ascriptions.  One reason is that I'm giving a talk at UCLA on Wednesday on Soames on 2D, which will probably cover some combination of the material in this entry and the entry on Chapter 7, plus maybe a bit of the ASU talk.

In this chapter Soames gives four detailed arguments against my account.  There are more arguments against it in Chapter 10, but here I'll concentrate on the first four. If you haven't read it already, you might look at the entry on Chapter 7 for background on my analysis.

All the Power in the World

Peter Unger has put six of the ten chapters of his forthcoming book All the Power in the World on his website.  There's a lot of interesting material in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics in this huge manuscript (almost 900 pages), including the defense of a strong form of Cartesian dualism, and an investigation of the metaphysics of simple "qualities" related to those that are present in Eden. 

Also, some new people with online papers (via Ming Tan): Horacio Arlo-Costa, John Beatty, Franz Dietrich, Alexander George, Clark Glymour, Mark Lance, Jesse Prinz, Steven Savitt.  In addition, most of the papers for the Pacific APA are online.

Soames Chapter 7: Attitude Ascriptions

Chapter 7 of Soames' Reference and Description begins the third and by far the longest section of the book (comprising about 200 pages), devoted to a critique of the "ambitious two-dimensionalism" attributed to Frank Jackson, David Lewis, and me.  (Previous entries: introduction, chapter 4 on Kripke and Kaplan, chapter 5 on Stalnaker. Chapter 6 on Davies and Humberstone was postponed until Martin Davies returns from UCLA in April.)  In this chapter, Soames lays out the main theses of what he takes to be the two main versions of ambitious two-dimensionalism: "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism.