The Mental Lives of Zombies

This week, I’m blogging about my new book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, September 2019). Thanks to John Schwenkler for hosting me. Today, I’ll start by situating the project of the book within a broader landscape in the philosophy of mind. What is the role of phenomenal …

3. The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: Indeterminism as an Emergent Phenomenon

How could we have alternative possibilities if the world was physically deterministic? I argue that physical determinism does not rule out indeterminism at the level of agency. The distinction between determinism and indeterminism is level-specific.

5. Diachronic Constitution and Extended Consciousness

Based on our third-wave framing of predictive processing, we argued in our previous post (4) that generative models cannot be unplugged from the world, given that action couples the agent to the environment. It is only via action in the world that the agent is able to tune and maintain …

4. Is Perceptual Experience Controlled Hallucination?

Predictive processing is standardly combined with views of perceptual experience as the outcome of psychological processes of unconscious inference. Perceptual experience is taken to be the product of guesswork about what is out there in the external world. The brain forms its guess by a process that approximates probabilistic reasoning, …

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