Well, the semester at LaGuardia is finally coming to a close (our schedule is out of step with the rest of CUNY). A lot has been going on and I have barely had time to do anything but since today is our reading day and I have a brief break before final exams come in, I thought I would quickly talk about what has been going on.

My new course, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Computation was a huge success and the students really seemed to enjoy the chance to take these kinds of questions seriously. The basic idea behind the course is to explore issues related to physicalism but after a grounding in the actual physics. My experiment to use the Stanford Encyclopedia as a primary text seemed to work ok as well. Some of the readings are fairly technical but I gave students the choice of which to read and which to write a one page summary/reaction to. They also seemed to like the Terminator book, which was nice. This is the first time I have used it in a class. I am toying with the idea of maybe recording the lectures for this course over the summer as I prepare to teach it again next semester (but I am also teaching philosophy of religion and ethics over the summer and I am tempted to record my philosophy of religion as well…they do overlap a bit so maybe I’ll do both!). For those interested, here is the syllabus. As with any new class I expect to update a lot of it in light of what happened this semester and any feedback would be appreciated.

All of that will have to wait until later in July, though, since I am currently getting ready for my trip to San Diego for the 17th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). This year I have organized a symposium on the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience. The speakers are Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev, and myself. I am really looking forward to it, as well as to the rest of the program! I am hoping to post a video of my talk in the nearish future.

I have also been working on a new paper, which came out of discussion at the 5th Online Consciousness Conference. It is entitled Consciousness is (Probably) a Biological Phenomenon. Those who know me know that I am attracted to an identity theory when it comes to consciousness and that I harbor the suspicion that consciousness is a uniquely biological phenomenon. This paper is my first attempt to spell out an answer to Chalmers’ fading and dancing qualia arguments using empirical results (in particular the partial report results that have figured in the overflow debate (see here and here)). It is extremely drafty (I have been working on it an hour here and hour there for the last few weeks) and any feedback would be much appreciated.

In addition to all of this I have just returned from my trip to the Omaha Kripke Conference (during which I was also on my first dissertation committee at the Grad Center, which was very much fun but then I also had to read and think about a dissertation!), which was a really rewarding experience. Omaha is a wonderful town and the conference itself was excellent, if exhausting. Three days of excellent papers and excellent discussion, and it was very cool to see Saul so active and engaging with the material. Unfortunately, due to bad weather, he came late and so he missed my talk but there was none the less a lot of very helpful discussion. The main objection was Dan Shargel’s ‘hierarchy objection’ which he presented at Tucson last year (the basic idea is that we can move the argument up to the level of appearance and imagine that we have that appearance without the neural state, etc). I have got to get better at explaining what my answer to that objection is. After the discussion at the conference I have come to think that the main problem is that we are using ‘how pain appears to me’ as a way to pick out two different states, one a psychological state and the other a neural state. On the one hand we use it to pick out the pain sensations, that is the first-order sensing of bodily damage. But we can also use it to pick out the neural state that the appearance is identical to (note: not the neural state that the sensation is identical to, but the neural state that is identical to the awful painfulness appearance. We can use the appearance property as a way to pick out that state itself). It is in that second sense that we avoid the charge of regress. This takes some spelling out to make sense of it and I am hoping to write something more detailed on it in the nearish future (hopefully before I head out to the ASSC).

During and after one of the other sessions I had the chance to talk to Saul about his 1963 paper Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic, which I have discussed previously on the blog. When I suggested that it was a cost to one’s theory to give up logical constants in your quantified modal logic he insisted that it was not. This was because for any sentence with a logical constant in it we could translate it into a sentence without the constant without loss of meaning using Quine’s trick of inventing a predicate. This led me to wonder whether this made it the case that we could reformulate the bothersome proofs using translated sentences. At the time I wasn’t able to come with a way to do this but once I got home I thought about it a bit more and came up with the following.

In the original reductio we used this sentences ☐∃x(x=k), where this is read as ‘there exists an x such that x is identical to Saul Kripke’. How would we translate this sentence to get rid of the constant? We would replace the constant with a predicate, say ‘K’ (‘the Kripisizer’) and thus we would get ☐∃x(x=Ky) but this has a free variable in it so we would have to take it as asserting the ‘closed’ version, so we get ∀y☐∃x(x=Ky). We can then proceed to prove this in the same way as before using a reductio

1. ~∀y☐∃x(x=Ky) -assumption for reductio
2. ∃y~☐∃x(x=Ky) -1, quantifier exchange
3. ∃y◊~∃x(x=Ky) -2, definition of ☐
4. ∃y◊∀x~(x=Ky) -3, quantifier exchange
5. ∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -Universal instantiation on 4
6. ∀y☐(Ky=Ky) -instance of axiom of identity
7. ~∃y~☐(Ky=Ky) -6, quantifier exchange
8. ~∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -7, definition of ☐
9. ∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) & ~∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -4,8 -conjunction introduction
10. ∀y☐∃x(x=Ky) -1-9 reduction

I think the main issue with this reformulated proof is line 5 when I use ‘Ky’ as an instance of x in 4. It seems to me that this move should be allowed, though. This is because part of the whole point of the 1963 paper was that we could block these kinds of proofs and still keep our traditional quantification theory. So we should be able to use UI, but if we are not allowed the use of constants then we will have to use predicates, which is what I did. Also, the variable in 5 is not free and is bound by the existential quantifier. So all in all I think this reformulated proof works but I really haven’t had the time to think about it very carefully.

Well that is enough for now…time to head over to Brains to read some of the commentaries in the Symposium on Louise Richardson’s “Flavor, Taste and Smell”.