fragments of consciousness

Australasian philosophy family tree

In an earlier post, I mentioned Josh Dever's philosophy family tree project.  To help out with this project, I've now compiled an Australasian philosophy family tree.  Thanks to many Australian and New Zealand philosophers for their help with this.  Of course it is still incomplete, but I think it is probably well over halfway by now.  It's very interesting to see the various lineages, even though they are highly imperfect mirrors of influence.  If you have any additions or corrections, please let me know here or by e-mail.

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.

Representationalism showdown

I see that Alex Byrne and Michael Tye have just posted their reply, "Qualia Ain't in the Head", to Adam Pautz's paper "Sensory Awareness is not a Wide Physical Relation".  Both papers are forthcoming in Nous.  Pautz argues against externalist representationalism about sensory experience, and Byrne and Tye defend it.  The centerpiece of Pautz's case is the scenario of Twin Maxwell.  Maxwell is an ordinary perceiver of orange who represents it as a mixed hue, via activation of dual opponent-processing channels.  Twin Maxwell is a counterfactual perceiver in a different environment, who normally responds to (what we call) orange things with activation of a single channel, the sort of activation that normally goes along with representing a color as a unique hue.  Pautz argues that (1) Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have different experiences when looking at an orange in typical circumstances: Maxwell has a "mixed hue" experience, Twin Maxwell has a "unique hue" experience.  He also argues that (2) wide representationalism (at least of the Dretske/Tye variety, where states represent those properties that they causally covary with under normal conditions) is committed to saying that Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have the same sort of experience: both are in an internal state that is caused by the same external physical property P in optimal conditions, so both states will represent P, so both states will have the same phenomenal character. So externalist representationalism is false.

Byrne and Tye say various things in reply, questioning (1) in some cases, and also noting that externalist representationalism is not committed to Dretske/Tye representationalism.  But the core of their reply, toward the end of their paper, is to deny (2), holding that even Dretske/Tye representationalism is consistent with Maxwell and Twin Maxwell having different experiences.  (Or at least, that it is consistent with there being different experiences in all the cases where (1) is plausible.)  Their key point is that when Twin Maxwell looks at an orange thing, and assuming he has an experience as of unique red or some other unique hue here, then he is not perceiving under optimal conditions, precisely because he is perceiving the orange object as red (or as having some other unique hue), and such an experience will be nonveridical.  If so, the state does not causally covary with P under optimal conditions, so it does not represent P, so it need not have the same phenomenal character as Maxwell's experience.

I think the state of play favors Pautz here.  It seems illegitimate to appeal to nonveridicality in explaining why conditions are not optimal.  For an experience to be nonveridical is for it to have a false content; and on the Dretske/Tye account, the content of an experience is to be explained partly in terms of the notion of optimality.  If optimality is then explained partly in terms of veridicality, this account will be circular.  So a noncircular account requires that optimality be explained without invoking notions such as veridicality and content, perhaps instead using notions such as normality, fitness, and so on.  So to make their case, Byrne and Tye need to show that Twin Maxwell's conditions are suboptimal in some such independent sense.  But they have not done this, and it is not easy to see how this could be done, since Maxwell and Twin Maxwell's circumstances seem to be symmetrical with respect to the natural candidates for the relevant independent features.  (A version of this point is made by Pautz in his reply to the second objection [pp. 27-30] in the long version of his paper on the web, and, I gather, in a footnote in the abridged version that will appear in Nous.)  Perhaps there is some independent grounding for suboptimality that could be found, but this is far from obvious. 

Of course there are other replies available.  If the externalist abandons the Dretske/Tye account of content, other options will be available.  But it looks like the symmetry considerations generalize to many other accounts, so it would at least be interesting to see some other options spelled out.  Personally I think the best reply for the externalist representationalist is Pautz's "third objection" [pp. 30-31 of the web version]: the appeal to compositional representation of distinct but necessarily coextensive complex properties.  Maxwell might represent the property <R to degree 0.5 and Y to degree .5>, while Twin Maxwell might represent the coextensive property <R' to degree 1 and Y' to degree 0>, where R' and Y' are the properties tracked by Twin Maxwell's opponent-process channels corresponding to our R and Y channels. Pautz suggests in response that even the states of the single channels in Twin Maxwell (activation 1 on the first channel, activation 0 on the second channel) will track <R to degree 0.5> and <Y to degree 0.5> respectively.   But the externalist can easily handle this by holding that the different states of a single channel are constrained to represent different degrees of a single quantifiable property R', which must differ from R, and that <R' to degree 1> and <R to degree 0.5> are distinct properties.  As Pautz notes, this reply doesn't generalize to other inversion cases involving noncompositional representation in cases involving pain and taste.  But the externalist might reply that the real power of Maxwell case comes from the compositionality, and that in these other cases it is easier for them to deny that the relevant subjects have different experiences.

Of course there's a lot more to be said.  It will be interesting to see where things go from here.  It's interesting in any case to see the recent groundswell of support for internalist versions of representationalism, in the work of people like Tim Crane, Terry Horgan and John Tienson, Joe Levine, Georges Rey, Sydney Shoemaker, Charles Siewert, and Brad Thompson, as well as Pautz and yours truly.  Clearly this is the wave of the future!