fragments of consciousness

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.

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.

Bits and pieces

• An initial announcement and call for papers has been issued for next year's "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson, April 8-12.  Confirmed plenary speakers at this point include: Andy Clark, Stan Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Stuart  Hameroff, Christof Koch, Adrian Owen, Eric Schwitzgebel, Rupert Sheldrake, Susanna Siegel, Wolf Singer, Frank Tong, Michael Tye, and numerous others, with more still to come.


• Congratulations to the five current ANU graduate students -- Ben Blumson, Jacek Brzozowski, Yuri Cath, Ole Koksvik, and Dan Marshall -- who have had articles accepted at leading philosophy journals in the last month or two.  Berit has details.


• RIP Alex, the African Grey parrot trained by my Arizona ex-colleague Irene Pepperberg.  I'm now even sorrier that I didn't take up Irene's invitation to "meet the A-man" before she left for MIT.


• My philosophical humor page has been updated.  Additions include Rachael Briggs' modal logic version of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend".

Susan Hurley

Susan Hurley died yesterday.  Susan was a creative philosopher and a force of nature.  She was a major contributor to the philosophy of mind, the foundations of cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.  Her 1998 book Consciousness in Action is full of ideas and insights that can't be found elsewhere.

I first met Susan at the Tucson and Brussels consciousness conferences in 2000, and got to know her better on visits to Oxford and at the Santa Cruz summer institute in 2002 (here's a photo).  We agreed on very little, but she was terrific company, and her ideas always repaid close attention.  My paper with Tim Bayne, "What is the Unity of Consciousness?", started life in part as a commentary on Susan's work in a symposium at the Brussels ASSC conference in 2000.   She was a frequent visitor to the ANU, and last year was offered a professorship here, although to our disappointment she ended up moving to Bristol instead. At the time of her death Susan had a contract for a book on the boundaries of the mind, co-authored with Alva Noe, in the book series I edit at Oxford University Press.  I suppose that this book will now never see the light of day.

Susan was passionate about everything that she did, and had an unquenchable appetite for living and thinking.  She treated her repeated battles with cancer as inconveniences that should not get in the way of doing philosophy.  A month before she died, Susan organized a big conference on perception, action, and consciousness at Bristol, which by all accounts was a big success.  She was due to visit ANU in early September and give a talk.  Characteristically, she kept up this plan until near the end.  It was only last Sunday that she e-mailed me to cancel, saying "I still hope that maybe I can make it there someday, but that may not be probable given my illness".  She will be missed.

Canberra update

I've been back in Canberra for a while now.  The month away was a lot of fun, with the highlight being a memorable week in the Caribbean (including a marvelous match between the West Indies and England in Barbados in front of a full house of local fans), and the lowlight being the loss of my laptop in Atlanta airport.  As a result, I've lost my photos from the (excellent) Boise conference on metametaphysics and from the Caribbean, but I've posted some photos from the subsequent conference on formal epistemology in Oklahoma.

Here at ANU, conference season is warming up.  Last Friday saw an enjoyable workshop on "The Epistemology of Experience" with talks by Carrie Jenkins, Jim Pryor, Declan Smithies, and Nico Silins.  Carrie has posted a summary and Ole Koksvik has posted some photos.  Coming up June 15 is a workshop on "Phenomenology and Intentionality" featuring Bill Lycan, Adam Pautz, and Susanna Siegel.  The conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" will be July 18-20, preceded by an undergraduate workshop July 17.  Interested undergraduates from Australasian universities should e-mail me.  In addition, there are a small number of open 20-minute slots for submitted papers at the main conference.  People with suitable papers on experimental philosophy should get in touch with me.  There are also a number of other conferences coming up in other bits of Australasia.  The AAP website has a fairly extensive list.  Note that the AAP conference in Armidale July 1-6 (at which I'm supposed to give the presidential address, tentatively entitled "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan") has extended its deadline for submissions to May 31.

Elsewhere on the web: I recently did a video interview with John Horgan (author of The End of Science and various other books and articles), which has just been posted on the Bloggingheads website.  My webcam skills are revealed to be fairly shaky, but otherwise the interview seems to have come out OK.  It's also worth checking out Jerry Fodor's entertaining review of the "Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?" collection by Galen Strawson et al, in which Fodor comes surprisingly close to endorsing a form of property dualism with fundamental laws connecting physical processes and consciousness.

A month in the north

I'm about to head off for a month in the northern hemisphere.  The itinerary includes Boise (for the Metametaphysics conference), San Francisco (for the APA), UC Riverside, UC Davis, Harvard/MIT, Yale, NYU, the Caribbean, Georgia State, and Oklahoma (for the "Why Formal Epistemology?" conference).  Apart from the two new states at the end, the highlight will be a week in the West Indies for the World Cup, taking in matches in Grenada (Australia vs New Zealand), Barbados (England vs West Indies), and St. Lucia (semi-final).  Fingers crossed for no more murders!

Consciousness in the news

The mind-body problem has been in the news lately.  A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine had a special issue on mind and brain, with a lead story by Steven Pinker on the mystery of consciousness, along with brief sidebar articles on consciousness by Bernard Baars, Dan Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Colin McGinn.  Now the New Yorker has just published a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Pat and Paul Churchland (not online, unfortunately), with a lot of nice biographical and sociological background and some philosophical discussion along the way.  I talked to Larissa for this article a year or two ago, when it was a general article on the problem of consciousness, and a fair amount of philosophical background on consciousness has survived into the final version.

Job ads

As mentioned earlier, 2-3 permanent research positions in the Philosophy Program in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences are being advertised.  The ad is now available.  Inquiries and applications are welcome.  The deadline is March 1.

Another job ad: PSYCHE, the e-journal on consciousness, has been taken under the wing of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.  It is now looking for two executive editors, one for broadly philosophical and/or theoretical work, the other for empirical work.  The deadline is February 15.

Jobs at ANU

A number of positions are being advertised at ANU.  We are about to advertise 2-3 permanent positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program. These positions will be advertised as open rank, and while permanent RSSS positions typically go to senior candidates, a more junior appointment is not out of the question.  Of course these research-only positions are almost unique within philosophy, and the academic environment in the Philosophy Program is unmatched.  Inquiries from distinguished philosophers are welcome -- feel free to send an e-mail to me or to other members of the Program.

At the same time, we are also advertising 2-3 postdoctoral positions in the Centre for Consciousness.  Two of these positions will be attached to my Federation Fellowship project on "The Contents of Consciousness", and one will be attached to a newly-funded ARC project on "The High-Level Structure of Consciousness", directed by me, Ned Block, and Susanna Siegel.  More details about these positions can be found here.  (Note in particular that these positions aren't limited to people working directly on consciousness or even to philosophers of mind.  Note also the misprinted reference number in the JFP ad.)  Again, inquiries are welcome.

All this terrific news for ANU philosophy comes in combination with the good news that Frank Jackson is stepping down as director of the Research School of Social Sciences to once again become a regular member of the Philosophy Program, where he will be full-time apart from a period each year in Princeton (as Brian Leiter reports).  Frank has done an extraordinary job as director, but it will be great to have him around more.  After a recent review of the whole RSSS, it is good to see that things are moving in such a positive direction.

Fifty years of the identity theory

U.T. Place's pioneering article on the mind-brain identity theory, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", was published fifty years ago this year.  As part of a special focus on 1956, the ABC Radio show "All in the Mind" has just done an episode devoted to the identity theory: "The Mind-Body Problem Down Under".    Natasha Mitchell, who has done a great job with the show the last few years, interviews Jack Smart, David Armstrong, Gerard O'Brien, and me.  The ABC website has the audio and a transcript.  The University of Adelaide website has Place's brain.