fragments of consciousness

Metametaphysics

I just received my copies of the book Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, which I co-edited with David Manley and Ryan Wasserman.  The book grew out of the ANU conference on Metametaphysics in 2005, followed by the Boise conference on the same topic in 2007.

There are 17 papers in the book, by a superb group of authors: Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund, Kit Fine, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, John Hawthorne, Eli Hirsch, Thomas Hofweber, Kris McDaniel, Huw Price, Jonathan Schaffer, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Amie Thomasson, Peter van Inwagen, Steve Yablo, and me.  The papers include definitive statements of many of these authors' view, and I think that a number of them are going to be very widely discussed.

The book looks fantastic -- thanks to OUP for doing a great job with it.  Special thanks also to David Manley who did the bulk of the editorial work that made the book possible.  Ryan and I did various things, but David wrote the superb introduction, co-ordinated the review process, prepared the index and proofs, and did much else besides.  A lot of work, but I think the result suggests that it was worth it.

Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions

A nice recent development in philosophy publishing is the "5 Questions" series, in which philosophers in various fields offer personal and autobiographical ruminations.  Snippets from a few of these volumes are available online, including formal philosophy, foundations of physics, normative ethics, philosophy of mathematics, political philosophy, and a few others.

The latest in the series is Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, edited by Patrick Grim, with an impressive cast of contributors.  I've now written a draft of my contribution to this volume.  This is mainly autobiographical rambling and metaphilosophical pronouncement rather than philosophy per se, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.  But any thoughts are welcome.  I see that the contributions by David Rosenthal and Michael Tye are also available online.

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.

Soames Chapter 5: Stalnaker's presuppositions

Chapter 5 of Soames' Reference and Description (previous entries: introduction and chapter 4) concerns Stalnaker's two-dimensional framework.  I'm by no means an expert on Stalnaker's system, but Bernard Nickel of MIT was there to help out. There are a few odd features of the chapter: Soames doesn't cite anything by Stalnaker after his 1978 paper 'Assertion', and expresses puzzlement at the relation between Stalnaker's and Kaplan's framework, even though this is something that's been clarified greatly in more recent literature.  Nevertheless, Soames raises an interesting problem for Stalnaker's framework that's worth addressing.

Stalnaker's use of the two-dimensional apparatus is intended in part to explain how utterances such as 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' can be informative.  On Stalnaker's general framework (simplifying slightly), an utterance is informative iff it reduces the "context set" -- the set of contexts compatible with the presuppositions of the speakers.  Here contexts are represented as possible worlds.  But the proposition expressed by 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is true in all possible worlds.  If an utterance of 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' simply imposes the constraint that this proposition be true in all contexts in the context set, it won't narrow down the context set at all.  So it won't be informative.

Soames Chapter 4: Kripke's error

The reading group on Scott Soames' Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (see this entry) has met twice so far. The first meeting covered chapters 1-3, which are mostly just background.  In chapter 3, Soames does consider one of Frank Jackson's arguments for descriptivism, remarking somewhat incredulously that if it works, it is a priori and irrefutable -- prompting Frank's response, "That's an objection?".  At the end of the chapter he also gives initial characterizations of "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism, both of which seemed fairly unrecognizable to the two-dimensionalists present. But all that is discussed in more detail later on in the book.

Things get going in chapter 4 on "Roots of Two-Dimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke".  The main theme here is that while Kaplan and Kripke are the main heroes of the anti-descriptivist revolution, their work contains "errors, slips, and misleading suggestions" that gave too much encouragement to later two-dimensionalists.  Soames points to various errors, but the main "error" for both of Kripke and Kaplan is the suggestion that when a name or a 'dthat'-expression is introduced using a reference-fixing description, this can give rise to contingent a priori knowledge.

Matrix philosophy

The Ultimate Matrix Collection was recently released on DVD.  It's a 10-DVD box set that includes the movies and all sorts of ancillary material.  Disk 8 is "The Roots of the Matrix", consisting of two hour-long documentaries: Return to Source: Philosophy and the Matrix and The Hard Problem: The Science Behind the Fiction.  These documentaries mostly involve interviews with philosophers and scientists intercut with clips from the movies.  The philosophers include Andy Clark, Dan Dennett, Julia Driver, Bert Dreyfus, Richard Hanley, Colin McGinn, John Searle, Cornel West, and a few others.  The first documentary focuses especially on issues about epistemology, free will, and religion (with quite a lot of history of philosophy), while the second focuses especially on issues about AI and consciousness.  My bits are slightly annoying, but I was pleased that they included my theory on why the real Christ figure in the movie is Agent Smith (go to the bonus "Easter egg" page that you can reach from the main menu and pick the rightmost Easter egg).  Overall, the documentaries are pretty well done.

Also, the articles from the philosophy section of the Matrix website are collected in a book to be published in a few months by Oxford University Press: Philosophers Explore the Matrix, edited by Chris Grau.  Papers by most of the people mentioned above are included, as well as a few classic readings from Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Putnam, and Nozick.  I'm guessing it will work well for the general public and should be of interest to professional philosophers too (my own piece is dead serious, despite the topic).  It might be especially useful for introductory courses in philosophy. In all these enterprises, most of the credit goes to Chris Grau (both philosopher and former producer at Redpill, the movies' production company) for bringing high-quality philosophy to a broad audience.

While on the topic of Matrix philosophy, I should note that Peter Lloyd has posted a detailed response to my paper "The Matrix as Metaphysics", mostly from a Berkeleyan perspective.  People interested in these things might check it out.  Lloyd is also in the documentaries mentioned above, and comes across as the star of them: although he's not a professional philosopher, his lucid explanations of philosophical ideas put the professionals to shame.  He has a fine career ahead of him as a philosophical talking head.

Then, of course, there's the Meatrix.

Books in the philosophy of mind

There have been recent discussions on other weblogs of the last century's five most important books in epistemology and ten most important books in the philosophy of biology (also here and here).  Being something of a listmaniac, I couldn't help starting to think about a similar list in the philosophy of mind.  What's surprising was how hard it was.  By my lights, three books select themselves: Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), and Armstrong's A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968).  But it's hard to think of others that stand alongside these.  Maybe Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1953) and Feigl's The "Mental" and the "Physical" (1958) count retrospectively, although neither was a book at the time.  One could make a case for Price's Perception (1932) and just maybe something by Russell (The Analysis of Mind?) or Wittgenstein (the Investigations?).  One should probably include something by Husserl (but which book?), and some would include Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and/or Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).  But no book from the last thirty years or so seems to quite stand alongside the first three, although of course there could be illusions of perspective.

So to make it easier, I then lowered the standards and considered the ten most important books in the philosophy of mind from the last thirty years.  It wasn't too hard to come up with a first pass at a list: Fodor's The Language of Thought (1975), Jackson's Perception (1977), Dennett's Brainstorms (1978), Churchland's Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), Searle's Intentionality (1983), Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1983), Fodor's Psychosemantics (1987), and Dennett's The Intentional Stance (1987).  I see there's nothing there from the last 15 years, because that's just too close.  But anyway, I'm sure that I've overlooked a number of books and that a better list is possible.

So I hereby throw open the listmaking to all-comers.  People are welcome to contribute to either question: most important of the last 100 years, and of the last 30 years.  Feel free to include books from the last 15 years if you like (but I stipulate that no book by an author of this weblog is eligible).

Anthology: Philosophy of Cognitive Science

I published the anthology Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings with Oxford University Press in 2002.  In preparing that anthology, it proved impossible to do justice to the philosophy of cognitive science, which has become a huge field in its own right.  So that volume concentrated on relatively traditional philosophy of mind, and in the introduction I promised an eventual companion anthology on the philosophy of cognitive science.  Those promises catch up with one, and the press thinks it's time for the new anthology.  So Tim Bayne and I have put together a proposal.

The proposed table of contents is below.  Note that this list is extremely tentative: it hasn't yet been through the review process for the press, and we haven't yet sought permission to reprint any of the articles.  So the final product may look significantly different.  We have aimed for good coverage of many different areas of the philosophy of cognitive science, including both traditional areas of the field and recently active areas.  We've also aimed for a fairly even mix of articles by philosophers and articles by scientists on foundational topics.  Note that one constraint was that the anthology shouldn't overlap with the other anthology, so it doesn't include any of those articles (contents here) and more generally doesn't aim for extensive coverage of traditional philosophy of mind.  Another constraint is that the anthology probably can't be any longer than this (11 sections with 6 articles per section).

At this point we are looking for feedback on the proposal.  It would be especially useful to get feedback from people who teach courses in the philosophy of cognitive science (or related topics such as the philosophy of psychology/AI/neuroscience) about what would be desirable for a collection to be used in those courses.  But all thoughts are welcome, including suggestions about other papers that might be included, about the balance of coverage, and so on.  Feel free to comment either here or by e-mail.

Soames on two-dimensionalism

Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism was recently published by Princeton University Press (Amazon has the table of contents).  The book discusses various sorts of two-dimensionalism, but the heart of it is a critique of the sort of "ambitious two-dimensionalism" held by Frank Jackson and by me.  The book has a 70-page chapter arguing against my version of the view, as well as a lot of other relevant material.  There will be a reading group on the book in the coming weeks at the ANU (with Jackson and others involved too), and I'm supposed to be writing a critical notice of the book for Mind.  While working through the book, I'll probably post some reactions to this weblog.

It looks like two chapters of the book are online: Chapter 1 and an old version of Chapter 10.  Those who are interested and haven't seen it already might also look at my piece "Soames on Two-Dimensionalism".  This is a detailed handout from a symposium at Arizona State University last year, where I responded to two talks by Soames, which turn out to correspond fairly closely to Chapters 7 and 10 of his book.  The review article I linked to recently may also give some useful background.

The upshot of my Arizona State piece was that the versions of two-dimensionalism that Soames attacks are versions that no-one accepts (as far as I know), and certainly are quite different from the versions that I favor.  In particular, most of Soames' arguments against two-dimensionalism in those talks were really arguments against certain two-dimensionalist accounts of propositional attitude ascriptions, accounts that I take to be obviously false and that no-one has endorsed in print, to my knowledge.  The good news is that in the book Soames discusses other accounts of attitude ascriptions, in particular giving a number of further arguments against the account that I endorse.  I don't think that two-dimensionalism stands or falls with this (or with any) account of attitude ascriptions, but nevertheless I don't think Soames' arguments against it work.  I'll post something about those arguments in coming weeks, as well as about other more general considerations.

A Place for Consciousness

Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World was published a few months ago by Oxford University Press.  Even before publication this book had a sort of cult following among people interested in "radical" approaches to the metaphysics of consciousness.  Broadly speaking, Rosenberg defends a Russell-style metaphysics on which consciousness is grounded in the intrinsic categorical properies of certain physical processes, and in particular is closely tied to the intrinsic nature of causation itself.  This is by far the most detailed development of a Russell-style metaphysics of consciousness that I know of.  He also has a chapter with a novel anti-physicalist argument, a chapter responding to philosophical critics of anti-physicalist arguments, chapters on the "boundaries" of consciousness and on panpsychism, and a lot of material on understanding causation in its own right.  I don't agree with everything here (and I'm still trying to understand all the details of the positive theory), but it's well worth reading.

There's already some discussion of the book on the web.  Apart from Rosenberg's own website and an Amazon page, Steve Esser's weblog "Guide to Reality" has a summary and an evaluation.  The Physics Forum website has threads discussing the book here and here.  Much of this discussion is by philosophically-interested nonphilosophers, who are often less conservative than professional philosophers where radical views of consciousness are concerned.  But there is a lot of meaty analytic philosophy in Rosenberg's book (like my own book on consciousness, Rosenberg's book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis from Indiana University), and I'd encourage interested philosophers to come to grips with it.