fragments of consciousness

Lectures and symposia

Two interesting sets of lectures that appear to be tied to forthcoming books are online: Robert Brandom's Locke Lectures on "Between Saying and Doing: Toward an Analytic Pragmatism" and Tim Williamson's Hempel Lectures on "The Philosophy of Philosophy".  The latter are accompanied by a full book manuscript.

In addition, there are two new PSYCHE symposia on consciousness-related topics.  There's a symposium on Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place For Consciousness (previously discussed here), with seven papers, and a symposium on Consciousness and Self-Representation, with four papers, four commentaries, and an introduction.

Discussions elsewhere

Elsewhere on the web, there have been a number of recent discussions that may be of interest to readers of this weblog, some of which I've been involved with.  Berit Brogaard  has made a number of interesting posts about two-dimensionalism: e.g. Chalmers on De Re Epistemic Ascriptions, 2Dism and Epistemic Extension, Modal Adverbials, and Another 2D Puzzle.  The last two of these have had lively discussions that have clarified a number of issues.  Eric Schwitzgebel posted on Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism", again with a lively and useful discussion thread.  Pete Mandik's work-in-progress blog has hosted a discussion of Brendan Ritchie's paper "Dualism and the Limits of Conceivability", as well as a lively thread on Hyperbolic Mary.  Wo has a post on Conceivably Possible Zombies.  Esa Diaz Leon has a post on Stoljar on actors and zombies and two on my paper "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap".  Robert Howell at Brain Pains has two posts on Daniel Stoljar's "Categorical Phenomenalism", with a reply by Stoljar.   As always, Conscious Entities has a lot of interesting material on consciousness.  And Mixing Memory has a fine zombie music video.

Update: See also a very interesting exchange between John Bengson, Adam Pautz, and others at Close Range on Being Aware of Uninstantiated Universals.  Also, Berit has a new post on 2D and Context-Sensitive Predicates.

New blogs

Things have been pretty quiet here the last few months, but I hope to post a bit more frequently in the months ahead.  In the meantime, a number of relevant blogs have been starting up elsewhere.  A full list is on my page of philosophical weblogs, but I'll highlight a few relevant things here.

There are now at least four other blogs by philosophers of mind on topics closely related to consciousness: Eric Schwitzgebel has a series of extremely interesting posts on phenomenology, introspection, and related topics; Gualtiero Piccinini has a lot of good material on representationalism and computation; Sean Kelly has a blog (lately inactive) devoted to his ongoing translation of Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception; and Pete Mandik has a lot on consciousness, perception, and neuroscience (not to mention a rock band with an intriguing name).  In addition, Conscious Entities has kept up a steady stream of interesting posts on all sorts of topics related to consciousness.

In other areas of philosophy, there are new blogs by M&E power couple Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, and another new M&E blog by Robbie Williams, as well as newish blogs by Luciano Floridi on the philosophy of information and David Corfield on the philosophy of real mathematics.  I should mention three student blogs, by Andreas Stokke, Brian Rabern, and ANU's own Richard Chappell, which have a lot of material on two-dimensionalism and modality.  There has also been an explosion of blogs on topics related to cognitive science, adding to old faithfuls such as Cognitive Daily, Language Log, and Mixing Memory, so I've now set up a cognitive science category on my weblogs page.  Finally, there's always 2hot4philosophy.

Zizek and me

John Holbo points to a discussion of my work by Slavoj Zizek, of all people.  The resulting discussion thread is long and animated.  I can't follow it all, but still: cool.

Update: John posts a lot more on the topic here.

Wikipedia on consciousness

The entry on consciousness at Wikipedia is coming along.  The section of the entry on philosophical approaches is a bit odd, though, and has provoked some argument on the entry's discussion page.   I don't think it's appropriate for me to get too involved, as I'm discussed in the entry.  (I had a Marshall McLuhan moment, but it seems that not everyone has seen Annie Hall.)  But I do think it would be a good thing for more philosophers to get involved with Wikipedia, as these entries are certain to be used more and more as reference works as time goes on.  If philosophers who know something about the philosophy of consciousness were to help flesh out this article, and related articles, that would certainly be a good thing.

Google perplexity

A few people have noticed that this weblog is not showing up in Google.  In a search on "fragments of consciousness" chalmers, there are numerous references to this site, but no links to the site itself.  I have no idea why this is.  There has been some talk of Google recently demoting weblogs in its rankings, but this should just affect relative position rather than inclusion.  If anyone knows of a way to fix this sort of thing, please let me know.

My main website is still showing up now that it has moved, but oddly, whereas the old site used to show up around third in a search for david, the new site doesn't show up at all in such a search (although my page of online papers pops up a few pages in).  It still shows up on searches for chalmers and "david chalmers", though.  Very strange.