Swampman is a (imaginary) physical duplicate of Donald Davidson created by a freak accident by a lighning bolt hitting a swamp. Questions: do swampman’s parts (e.g., the parts shaped like a heart, liver, brain, etc.) have functions? Does swampman have intentional states? Does he have qualia? These questions have been …
Bernhard Nickel, “Against Intentionalism,” forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.Today, at the NEH seminar in Mind and Metaphysics, we discussed Nickel’s forthcoming paper. Nickel proposes a counterexample to representationalism, i.e., the view that the phenomenal aspects of experience are represented features of what is represented by the experience.The counterexample is a tic-tac-toe …
This week, Bill Lycan is visiting the NEH Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. The main purpose of his visit is to discuss representationalism about qualia.(According to representationalism, as Lycan formulates it, qualia are represented features of what is represented by a phenomenal experience (e.g., the redness of a tomato quale …
Robert Kirk, Zombies and Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2005.Kirk is famous for inventing phenomenal zombies–creatures physically indistinguishable from us but lacking consciousness–and for using their possibility to refute physicalism. (The undelying idea goes back to Descartes.) Kirk published his original papers on zombies in 1974. In recent years, David Chalmers …
Coma is a phenomenon that philosophers of mind should probably spend more time thinking about. As Reuters Health reports, a recent article in Neurology has found that most popular movies misrepresent coma, and most people don’t notice.
I’m in Tucson, AZ, at the conference Towards a Science of Consciousness 2006.There are a lot more people than I expected. It’s about as large as an APA meeting, I would say.I gave my talk yesterday, arguing that conceivability arguments like the zombie conceivability argument are unsound. The zombie conceivabity …
D. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination: On the Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press (due out in May 2006).Why is it so hard to explain phenomenal consciousness in physical (i.e., naturalistic, scientific) terms? Why do many find it easy to imagine zombies and other putative …
