fragments of consciousness

Magazine madness

The Bulletin, the Australian counterpart of Newsweek, has a weekly feature where a reporter has lunch with some idiosyncratic figure.  I was lunch in last week's issue: here's the article, by Diana Bagnall.  As is common with this sort of thing, it has to be taken with a reasonably large grain of salt.  I'm credited with a bit too much, and various sentiments are attributed to me that I didn't express and don't quite endorse.  (E.g. "What matters is to be in there, among the action", "We'll know exactly what patients in a coma are thinking" -- the latter of which is run as a highlighted quote in the printed version, even though the words are Diana's and not mine!)  The "thinker" pose was the photographer's idea, but at least the bigger photos in the printed version make clearer that it's supposed to be ironic rather than pretentious!  On the plus side, there's a nice shout-out to the Desert Landscapes thread on philosophers' songs.  Overall, I'd say that Diana did an excellent job presenting some tricky issues very clearly.  Like the Festival of Ideas, this is another instance of a welcome degree of engagement with intellectual issues in Australian popular culture.

While on the theme of magazines, the magazine What is Enlightenment? recently ran a long feature article on the science of consciousness, with interviews with yours truly and many others, centering on last year's Tucson consciousness conference.  Overall, the article (by Craig Hamilton) is excellent.  There's also a web feature (including an audio interview with me), although much of that requires registration.  Finally, I'm told that the July 4 issue of the New Yorker has an article on death by Adam Gopnik that discusses ideas about consciousness at length and mangles my views in passing.  (Joe Levine, who was called as a fact-checker on the article, tells me that his fact-checking was to no avail.)  That article isn't available online and I haven't seen it, however.

Philosophy family tree

Josh Dever at Texas is putting together a philosophy family tree, consisting of (mostly) philosophers related by the Ph.D. advisor relation.  By now it has excellent coverage of some corners of the philosophical world, but there are also some big missing areas (e.g. most of Australian and British philosophy) and some key bits of missing information in the corners that are present.  Josh has started a blog to gather missing information, and welcomes information either on the blog or by e-mail.  It would be good if people could collectively supply as much information as possible.  E.g., if you have a Ph.D. in philosophy and this information isn't already there, let Josh know the identity of your advisor, your advisor's advisor, and so on, as well as any advisees, siblings (advisees of your advisor), and so on.

For my part, my main advisor (at Indiana) was Doug Hofstadter, whose advisor was a physicist at Oregon, so I don't go far back on that line.  But officially my co-advisor was Mike Dunn, whose advisor (at Pittsburgh) was Nuel Belnap, whose advisor (at Yale) was Frederic Fitch, whose advisor (at Yale) is not currently known (update: Fitch now goes back via F.C.S. Northrop and W.E. Hocking to Josiah Royce, and from there via a few intermediate steps to Kant and Leibniz!)  so that's at least a partial hook-up into the body of the tree.

Phenomenological disputes

I've just returned from a quick hop to Syracuse for the SPAWN conference on consciousness, organized by Bob van Gulick.  (Visuals: My photos are now online, and Murat Aydede has put together a photo-movie.  Uriah Kriegel has a conference report, including a summary of the papers.)  This is the first of a series of conferences aimed at highlighting new work by up-and-coming researchers in a given field of philosophy, with papers supplied in advance by relatively junior researchers, commentaries on these papers by relatively senior researchers, and a number of overview sessions to pull things together.  (Here's the program.)  It's a great model for a conference, and the conference was memorable in a number of respects.  Here I'll mention a few themes that came up along the way, especially in the overview sessions.

The first overview session mostly involved a look back at the last 15 years.  Most entertaining was Alex Byrne's division of researchers in the field into advocates of the "inner" perspective and the "outer" perspective on consciousness.  "Innies" and "outies", as they came to be known, were given different pithy one-line views on a number of the main issues in the field.  The conference attendees seemed fairly evenly divided between innies and outies: by my count, the nine senior commentators were divided 4-5 (in favor of outies) and the junior paper-givers were divided 6-3 (in favor of innies).  Also memorable in this session was a leading senior researcher's heartfelt declaration that there's a serious danger of the field becoming too driven by the latest empirical discoveries and losing touch with enduring philosophical issues.  Needless to say, this view wasn't shared by everyone.

For the second evening, I was commissioned to give an after-dinner talk on challenges for the philosophy and the science of consciousness in the next 15 years.  Fortunately I was helped in this by President Bush's announcement earlier that day of a major 15-year research project aimed at building a consciousness meter (motivated inter alia by the Terri Schiavo case and by the need to deal with uncooperative foreign prisoners).  After the president's proposed "Putin method" was rejected ("I looked into his eyes and saw his soul"), it was decreed that the project would need both neuroscientists and physicists to design a perfect brain scanner, and philosophers to interpret the results.  The latter part involved a number of key subprojects, each aided by a key advisor of the president.  The project on analyzing criteria for the ascription of consciousness was to be headed by Bill Frist; the project on verbal reports by Karl Rove; the project on the epistemology of consciousness by Donald Rumsfeld (well-known advocate of the KK thesis); the project on the relation between phenomenal states and intentional states by Condoleeza Rice (the Secretary of States); and, of course, the project on central executive function was headed by Dick Cheney. (This last project led to a familiar-sounding debate about whether George Bush is epiphenomenal, or plays an as yet unknown causal role, or is just wheeled out occasionally for press conferences, as on Dan Dennett's old theory.  Some advocated eliminativism about the concept of the presidency, some advocated analytic functionalism, but most seemed to favor adopting Ned Block's distinction between the phenomenal president, who is mostly for show, and the access president, who does all the work.)  There was also discussion of the CIA's proposal for a zombie army, of inattentional blindness (explaining nuclear weapons in North Korea?) and change blindness (explaining why no WMDs have yet been found in Iraq -- they're moved every time we saccade), of the development of new language (cf. "misunderestimate" and "strategery") for formalizing conscious states, and of many other crucial topics.