Abstract: In "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Thomas Nagel argues that we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat or presently understand how physicalism might be true. Both arguments have been seriously misunderstood. I defend them against various objections, point out a problem with the argument against physicalism, and show how the problem can be solved

Abstract: My purpose in this paper is to discuss and defend an objection to physicalist or materialist accounts of the mind—one that I believe to be essentially conclusive. [1] The argument in question is not new. A version of it seems to be lurking, alon g with much else, in Thomas Nagel's famous paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" [2]; and a somewhat more explicit version is to be found in a well-known paper by Frank Jackson.[3] Despite the efforts of Nagel and Jackson (and some others), however, I believe that the most compelling version of the argument has not emerged clearly, with the result that responses that in fact fail to speak to its central point are widely taken to be adequate. Thus one purpose of the present paper is to offer what I regard as a more perspicuous restatement of the Nagel-Jackson argument, one which shows clearly why the responses in question do not work. A second purpose is to suggest that the application of the argument is in fact very much wider than the case of phenomenal properties or qualia upon which both Nagel and Jackson focus, that it in fact applies just as well to the content of intentional mental states like thoughts and indeed to the general phenomenon of consciousness itself

Abstract: The concept of consciousness has been the source of much philosophical, cognitive scientific and neuroscientific discussion for the past two decades. Many scientists, as well as philosophers, argue that at the moment we are almost completely in the dark about the nature of consciousness. Stuart Sutherland, in a much quoted remark, wrote that ‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved.’1 Cognitive scientists, such as Phillip Johnson-Laird, aver that ‘no one knows what consciousness is, or whether it serves any purpose’.2 Leading neuroscientists have gone so far as to suggest that ‘Perhaps the greatest unresolved problem ... in all of biology, resides in the analysis of consciousness.’3 And David Chalmers proclaims that our ignorance may be ‘the largest outstanding obstacle [to] a scientific understanding of the universe’.4 There are, no doubt, many problems concerning consciousness. Some are empirical problems amenable to scientific investigation. Others are conceptual problems, which can be tackled only by means of conceptual analysis. Distinguishing the two kinds of problem is important, for when a conceptual problem is confused or conflated with an empirical one, it is bound to appear singularly intractable — as indeed it is, for it is intractable to empirical methods of investigation. Equally, when an empirical problem is investigated without adequate conceptual clarity, misconceived questions are bound to be asked, and misguided research is likely to ensue. For to the extent that the concepts are unclear, to that extent the questions themselves will be unclear. Clarification of concepts, and disentangling the knots we tie in our grasp of problematic concepts is one of the tasks of philosophy. In the ordinary use of the term ‘consciousness’, we distinguish intransitive from transitive consciousness, and refer to diverse mental states as ‘states of consciousness’. Intransitive consciousness is a matter of being awake rather than asleep or otherwise unconscious..

Abstract: This paper is a response to Eric Lormand’s ‘The explanatory stopgap’. I discuss the meaning of ‘There’s something e is like’, arguing that Lormand is wrong to think it has a specially perceptual meaning. I locate four candidate meanings: (a) e is some way as regards its subject; (b) e is some way and e’s being that way is in the possession of its subject; (c) e is some way in the awareness of its subject; (d) e’s subject is the “experiencer” of e. I provide additional argumentation for the view in this paper that in the context, ‘like this’ functions as a predicate variable

Abstract: The central claim of this paper is that what it is like to see green or any other perceptible property is just the perceptual mode of presentation of that property. Perceptual modes of presentation are important because they help resolve a tension in current work on consciousness. Philosophers are pulled by three mutually inconsistent theses: representational externalism, representationalism, and phenomenal internalism. I throw my hat in with defenders of the first two: the externalist representationalists. We are faced with the problem of explaining away intuitions that favor phenomenal internalism. Perceptual modes of presentation account for what it is like to see properties in a way that accommodates those intuitions without vindicating phenomenal internalism itself. Perceptual MoPs therefore provide a new way of being an externalist representationalist

Abstract: Is there an explanatory gap between raw feels and raw material? Some philosophers argue, and many other people believe, that scientific explanations of conscious experience cannot be as satisfying as typical scientific explanations elsewhere, even in our wildest dreams. The underlying philosophical claims are

Abstract: Notably spurred into the philosophical forefront by Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' decades ago, and since maintained by a number of advocates of dualism since that critical publication, is the assertion that our inability to know 'what it's like' to be someone or something else is inexplicable given physicalism. Contrary to this well-known and central objection, I find that a consistent and exhaustive physicalism is readily conceivable. I develop one such theory and demonstrate that not only is it consistent with the private and varied nature of subjective experience, it, in fact, entails it

Abstract: In this paper I examine Thomas Nagel’s familiar challenge to physicalism. Nagel illustrates the difficulty of providing a purely physical characterisation of phenomenal experience with a vivid example about a bat’s sensory apparatus. While a number of objections have already been made to Nagel’s argument, I propose a novel way of undermining it. Adapting Thomas Aquinas’s principle regarding the nature of divine omnipotence, I argue that the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat does not threaten physicalism

Abstract: Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self- consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self- consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we (and other organisms) have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For example, recently Ned Block commented, “It is of course [phenomenal] consciousness rather than...self-consciousness that has seemed such a scientific mystery.” (Block, 1995, p. 230) And David Chalmers says that self-consciousness is one of those psychological states that “pose no deep metaphysical enigmas.” (Chalmers, 1996, p. 24) I think that this assumption that self-consciousness can be easily assimilated by science is too quick. For self-consciousness, as I shall try to show, rests on what I shall call ‘the first-person perspective.’ And it is not obvious how to treat the first-person perspective scientifically

Abstract: A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivist's case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does

Abstract: In Word and Object, Quine acknowledged the "practical indispensability" in daily life of the intentional idioms of belief and desire but disparaged such talk as an "essentially dramatic idiom" rather than something from which real science could be made in any straightforward way.Endnote 1 Many who agree on little else have agreed with Quine about this, and have gone on to suggest one or another indirect way for science to accommodate folk psychology: Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Stich, the Churchlands, Schiffer and myself, to name a few. This fainthearted consensus is all wrong, according to Fodor, whose new book is a vigorous--even frantic--defense of what he calls Intentional Realism: beliefs and desires are real, causally involved, determinately contentful states. "We have no reason to doubt," Fodor says, "that it is possible to have a scientific psychology that vindicates commonsense belief/desire explanation." (p.16)

Abstract: Many philosophical issues concern questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Of these questions, there are two kinds. The first considers whether something is objective or subjective; the second what it _means_ for something to be objective or subjective— questions that inquire as to the very essence of objectivity and subjectivity. I call questions of the first kind “questions of application” and questions of the second kind “questions of constitution”