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Some Recent Papers

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1. The HOROR Theory of Phenomenal Consciousness Philosophical Studies (online first). Just in time for Halloween a truly terrifying take on phenomenal consciousness: It may simply consist in a suitable higher-order representation of a representation.

2. (Coauthored with Pete Mandik) On Whether the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness Entails Cognitive Phenomenology, Or: What is it like to think that one thinks that P? Philosophical Topics 40(2):1-12. We argue that it does.

3. Consciousness Doesn’t Overflow Cognition. In this short piece I argue that the higher-order thought theory of consciousness is not threatened by Block’s recent arguments for phenomenological overflow.

If Consciousness is an M-Property then it is Physical

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Let us consider a possible world WM where consciousness is an M-property. At this world consciousness acts to collapse the wave function. Supposing that we live at WM can you or I have a zombie twin? A zombie twin is one that is physically identical to me in the relevant ways and which lacks consciousness. Suppose that I am actually suffering from a headache while eating Jelly Belly jelly beans. Then my zombie twin is in exactly the same physical states but without the consciousness. This means that the zombie must have a brain and that this brain must be in the same physical states that my brain is in. But my brain is in a collapsed state of definitely being in the relevant neural correlates (due to the presence of conscious experience). In the world where there is no consciousness, and which is physically just like WM (call this world WM-C), there would be no collapsed state. This is because the M property is missing. Since I am not in a superposition of states and my ‘zombie’ twin is we are not in the same physical states.

So it seems that if consciousness is an M-property then zombies are inconceivable and this in turns shows that if consciousness is an M-property then consciousness is a physical property.

But one might object that the right world to think about is WP. At this world the neural correlate of consciousness, construed here as distinct from consciousness itself (for the sake of argument), collapses the wave function. It is this world, continues the objection, rather than WM-C, that is the zombie world relative to WM. At WP there is a creature that has a brain, and which has a definite collapsed state identical to the neural correlates of the experience that I am actually having. This is the quantum zombie, not the one that is in the superposition of states.

I think it is is plausible that the creature at WP is in the same physical state as I am in some sense, but is it the case that WP has the same physics as WM? I would argue that they have similar physics but they are not the same. In WM when you lack consciousness you have a giant superposition that evolves deterministically according to the Schrodinger equation. There may be quasi-classical branches due to decoherence but that is not the same thing as there being a collapsed world, which is what we have at WP.

You cannot just start with WM and subtract consciousness and end up with WP. Instead you end up with WM-C and you then need to add some new physical law (or change the previous one), stating that it is the neural correlate that is responsible for collapsing the wave function. These worlds have different laws of physics and so are not the same. This is different than the zombie argument as normally construed, which leaves all the strictly physical laws in tact and simply posits the removal of the super-physical laws connecting the neural correlates of consciousness to actual consciousness.

Of course, consciousness probably isn’t an M-property but even so, any thoughts on the argument?

Logic and Death

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Episode four of the SpaceTimeMind podcast is now available. This episode features special guest Eric Schwitzgebel. In this first part of our discussion we talk about death, immortality, and logic (and in the second part we talk about consciousness and its relation to biology).

During the first part of the discussion about logic I am pressing the kind of argument that Williamson makes in his new book Modal Logic as Metaphysics (even though none of us have read the book :)). My thought was that since Eric is open to the possibility of Crazyism then he should welcome Williamson’s view as one of the possible crazy options. Eric resists because of a commitment to logical pluralism while Pete resists because modal logic seems disconnected from science and the actual world. At the 87 minute mark I make the crucial move of distinguishing one’s metalogic from first-order logic that would help to answer a lot of Pete’s and Eric’s objections. And of course after we had this discussion I found this paper by Williamson where he makes exactly the same move but with more elegance and sophistication. I am not saying that I endorse Williamson’s view of higher-order modal logic as a science, or that I reject it, but I do think it is an interesting and important position that is worth exploring.

Kantian Compatibilism?

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Spring Break is winding down for me and so I must soon quit the life of discussing philosophy and playing Assassin’s Creed IV and get back to discussing philosophy and playing Grand Theft Auto V. Since I have recently been bashing compatibism I figured I would do some small penance and write down some thoughts that first occurred to me when I read Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen’s recent-ish paper For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing, and Everything and which occurred again after my discussion with Gregg Caruso and Pete Mandik for SpaceTimeMind. The idea is that if one is going to be a compatibilist one should be a Kantian Compatibilst if at all possible.

As any reader of Kant knows, Kant himself was no fan of compatibilism, at least not of the kind that was floating around in his day. He says,

This is a wretched subterfuge with which some persons still let themselves be put off, and so think they have solved, with a petty word-jugglery, that difficult problem, at the solution of which centuries have laboured in vain and which can therefore scarcely be found so completely on the surface. (Critique of Practical Reason p 189-190)

And indeed it seems that many philosophers think that any kind of compatibilism (or determinism) forces one to a consequentialist account of morality and moral responsibility. But why? I think it is mostly because Kantians have traditionally been Libertarians about free will, but there doesn’t seem to be any principled reason for that.

A Kantian Compatibilism, as I am imagining it, is a view that asserts that free will is compatible with determinism and that free will is still a real feature of the world, just one that we discovered something surprising about. Once this basic move is made one can then go and interpret Kant’s writing in this way, substituting the compatibilist notion of freedom for Kant’s libertarian notion. How would this work? Here is a typical passage from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “Autonomy of the will is that property of it by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition”. This lends itself nicely to a compatibilst interpretation: Autonomy is simply the will being determined by the Categorical Imperative rather than something ‘foreign’ to the C.I. “morally good actions are just the ones that are determined by the supreme moral law” has a very Kantian ring to it, and if one accepted it then one could say most, if not all, of the things that Kantians want to say. Some actions are free (determined in the appropriate manner), some are not (determined some other way), and we are morally responsible for the free ones, the ones that are determined or caused in the right way,and finally, morally good actions are the one that are determined via the Categorical Imperative.

I am not endorsing this view but if I were ever forced to be a compatibilist I would defend it, so what’s wrong with it?

Introduction to the Philosophical Study of the Mind

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I have finally competed a series of recordings for my hybrid/online philosophy of mind course that I will be running in the summer. There are a few flaws here and there but for the most part I am fairly happy with how they turned out. Next up Philosophy and Logic, and maybe philosophy of space and time. (links to all of my video lectures can be found here)

Philosophy of Mind (Lectures recorded March/April 2014)

SpaceTimeMind

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You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind!

The first episode is up now (and has been positively reviewed by Eric Schwitzgebel (and also one iTunes user who described Quiet Karate Reflex perfectly as ‘weird but intriguing music’!!)) and the second should be up soonish. Our goal is to have two episodes a month. In the future we hope to have guests and talk about various interesting things (suggestions on both welcome).

In addition to being available on iTunes, there is a blog with notes and links, and there is a spacetimemind youtube channel where you can watch the live unedited conversation between Pete and I (tune in Wednesday Mornings at 8:00 a.m. (e.s.t.) to catch us all the way live!).

The Design Argument for Simulation Hypothesis

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I have always felt that the Fine-Tuning argument was the most serious of the empirical arguments for God’s existence. It is not merely that there is tuning but there is exquisite fine-tuning. Of course anthropic concerns are relevant. It is obvious that we will only be around to observe universes that have the requisite fine-tuning so maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised. Still, it seems reasonable to ask how and why the universe is fine-tuned. If it is by chance then that is amazing! Of course if there is a multiverse then we have a pretty satisfying explanation for why there is a fine-tuned universe at all. But whether there is or isn’t a multiverse is highly controversial. Overall then it seems to me that fine-tuning presents some (small, defeasible) evidence for design in nature.

Philosophers have known for some time that all design arguments suffer from the same basic flaw and that is that one needs to do a lot more work to get from ‘there is evidence for design’ to ‘God as traditionally conceived is the designer’. It is quite fun to imagine the various other possibilities, and as Hume points out, the more seriously one takes the analogy between nature and man made machines the more one starts to think that the designer is not perfect.

For my money the most compelling argument that God as traditionally conceived could not be the designer is the argument from evil (the fact that we are not photosynthetic pretty much cinches the deal for me). Of course there are responses, the necessity of moral freedom and the possibility of transworld saints to the logical problem and unknown motivations/ends to the inductive problem). But just as in the fine-tuning case I think that overall it is reasonable to conclude that the problem of evil provides defeasible evidence that God as traditionally conceived could not be the designer of the universe.

One possibility that immediately comes to mind is that the universe is designed because it is simulated. Bostrom’s simulation argument is well known and interesting but I think there is an interesting argument for the simulation hypothesis that stems from the above considerations. One way that a less than perfect being could design a universe is through simulation. To the extent that we find design inferences plausible, and to the extent that we find the problem of evil problematic, we have reason take the simulation hypothesis seriously.

More Square

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As I mentioned in my last post we are discussing the traditional vs modern square of opposition in my logic course (which did not go over well btw, most students reacted viscerally to the claim that modern logicians reject the entailment of the I proposition by the A proposition…to the point that one student exclaimed that it was a betrayal of Aristotle!) but at any rate I was reading the entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia on the Traditional Square of Opposition which is written by Terrance Parsons. The article is very interesting and provides a valuable history of the development of the square.

Along the way Parsons develops the very interesting idea that the modern problem with empty terms is not a problem for Aristotle’s original formulation of the square and especially because of the way he formulated the O statement, which is not as the traditional ‘some A is not B’ but rather is ‘Not every A is B’. This, argues Parsons, solves the problem with existential import since ‘not every A is B’ does in fact seem to be true as is required. Parsons blames Boethius for the rewording of the O form,

Aristotle’s work was made available to the Latin west principally via Boethius’s translations and commentaries, written a bit after 500 CE. In his translation of De interpretatione, Boethius preserves Aristotle’s wording of the O form as “Not every man is white.” But when Boethius comments on this text he illustrates Aristotle’s doctrine with the now-famous diagram, and he uses the wording ‘Some man is not just’. So this must have seemed to him to be a natural equivalent in Latin. It looks odd to us in English, but he wasn’t bothered by it.

But isn’t it obvious that ‘not every unicorn is an animal’ is truth-functionally equivalent to the traditional ‘some unicorn is not an animal’? That is to say, it is clearly the case that ~(x) (Hx –> Mx) is equivalent to Ex (Hx & ~ Mx) [by quantifier exchange, the definition of ‘–>’ and DeMorgan’s law]. So…Boethius was right, wasn’t he? And not just because it is a natural translation in Latin, but because the two statements are logically equivalent….right?