Stop Caring about Consciousness

The best empirically grounded theory of first-personal phenomenal consciousness is global workspace theory. This, combined with the success of the phenomenal-concept strategy, means that consciousness can be fully reductively explained in terms of globally broadcast representational content. So there are no qualia (and there is no mental paint). As a result, the question of which other creatures besides ourselves are phenomenally conscious is of no importance, and doesn’t admit of a factual answer in most cases. What is real, and what does matter, is a multidimensional similarity space of functionally organized minds.

Mary Does Not Learn Anything New

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment.

Mary Does Not Learn Anything New

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment.

Counter-Conceivability Again

This chapter is concerned with the epistemology of metaphysical possibility implicit in the famous argument against physicalism about the mental outlined in the third lecture of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. Kripke’s argument presupposes that conceivability remains the best possible indicator of possibility, even where it is metaphysical possibilities, rather than conceptual possibilities, that are concerned. The chapter argues that this principle is good only when the concepts which frame the relevant imaginative exercise are adequate to the essential nature of the items for which a putative possibility is being entertained. The result is that metaphysical impossibilities may, in certain circumstances, be perfectly lucidly conceivable; and hence that the conceivability of pain’s coming apart from any particular supposed physical identification of it is no indication of a genuine possibility for pain unless the phenomenal concept of pain is adequate to the nature of pain—which physicalism denies.

Demonstrative Thought

In this paper I develop a model of what it is to entertain a demonstrative thought, whether about an individual or a property. The primary question I investigate is the mechanism responsible for securing the referent of the demonstrative component of the thought. I characterize mechanisms of demonstrative reference for both token-demonstratives and type-demonstratives, drawing a distinction between genuine type-demonstratives and “quasi” type-demonstratives in the process. I then use the results of this discussion to criticize various philosophical uses of the notion of a demonstrative concept, including the “phenomenal concept strategy” for responding to challenges to materialism and the attempt to explain concept acquisition by appeal to demonstrative concepts.

Phenomenal Concepts and the Materialist Constraint

Here I address the “phenomenal concept strategy” for addressing anti-materialist intuitions, such as the explanatory gap, by appealing to the special nature of phenomenal concepts. I look in depth at several proposals, including John Perry’s influential presentation in Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness, and argue that they all fail in meeting what I call the “materialist constraint”, which is the principle that no property or relation that is not realizable in physical properties or relations be appealed to in the account. I conclude that some relation such as acquaintance must be invoked to explain our first-person access to conscience experience, and that currently no materialist model for such a relation exists.

Quality and Content

The papers presented in this volume cover topics, such as the “phenomenal concept strategy,” to defend materialism from anti-materialist intuitions, the doctrine of representationalism about phenomenal character, the modal argument against materialism, the nature of demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology. On the one hand, I argue that the phenomenal concept strategy cannot work and that representationalism has certain fatal flaws, at least if it’s to be joined to a materialist metaphysics. On the other, I defend materialism from the modal argument, arguing that it relies on a questionable conflation of semantic and metaphysical issues. I also provide a naturalistic theory of demonstrative thought, criticizing certain philosophical arguments involving that notion in the process. I argue as well that the peculiarly subjective nature of secondary qualities provides a window into the nature of the relation between phenomenal character and intentional content, and conclude that relation involves a robust notion of acquaintance.