Research

Overview

While I find all traditional philosophical problems interesting and important, my research has focused on problems within the philosophy of mind. I argue for an emergentist theory of consciousness (where consciousness depends on the physical brain for existence and functioning but is not reducible to or constituted by features of the physical brain). I also argue that consciousness is the ground of all mental phenomena (feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and so forth): there can be no mental representation at all without consciousness. These projects take introspection, a priori philosophy, and the empirical sciences equally seriously.

My research in the philosophy of mind is part of a broader fascination with human nature. Being human is a marvelous thing, ever familiar but ever mysterious. Its wonder-worthy features include subjectivity, sentience, attention, inference, imagination, pain and pleasure, understanding, language, deliberation, volition, love, and joy. Some of these phenomena have been reverse-engineered by cognitive neuroscience or modelled by artificial systems. But some of them remain, as best as we can tell, beyond the reach of mechanistic explanation.

Human nature is not merely metaphysically mysterious but also morally compelling. Human beings, while akin to non-human animals in many ways, command a unique type of respect and are capable of a unique type of flourishing—or so a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy maintains (though it remains a matter dispute how these moral dimensions of human nature are to be understood). Though human dignity and well-being are usually thought of as the purview of ethicists, while consciousness and cognition are thought of as the purview of metaphysicians and cognitive scientists, I regard them all as a bundle of interrelated mysteries that make up the human person. Only when we study them together can we come to terms with what we are and ought to be. I am pursuing a synoptic study along these lines in my next major academic project, a co-authored monograph provisionally titled Human Persons. 

Below are links to many of my papers, organized in thematic clusters.

The Mind/Body Problem

  • The Selection Problem for Constitutive Panpsychism (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2021)
    Constitutive panpsychism is the doctrine that macro-level consciousness—that is, consciousness of the sort possessed by certain composite things such as humans—is built out of irreducibly mental (or proto-mental) features had by some or all of the basic physical constituents of reality. On constitutive panpsychism, changes in macro-level consciousness amount to changes in either the way that micro-conscious entities ‘bond’ or the way that micro-conscious qualities ‘blend’ (or both). I pose the ‘Selection Problem’ for constitutive panpsychism: the problem of explaining how high-level functional states of the brain ‘select’ micro-conscious qualities for bonding or blending. I argue that there are no empirically plausible solutions to this problem.
  • Explaining the Ontological Emergence of Consciousness (in Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, 2019) 
    According to ontological emergentism about consciousness (‘emergentism', for short), consciousness is dependent on the workings of the brain for its existence and dynamics but is not reducible to, constituted by, or realized in the brain. In response to the criticism that emergentism is a purely negative doctrine, I develop a positive proposal by responding to four explanatory challenges: (1) The Collaboration Problem (How do consciousness-generating entities jointly manifest their collective consciousness-generating power?), (2) The Threshold Problem (Under what circumstances do such powers jointly manifest?), (3) The Subject Problem (Which object is the bearer of emergent phenomenal states?), and (4) The Specificity Problem (What determines which specific phenomenal state is generated?). On the picture that emerges, collections of fundamental entities share a subject-forming power. When such entities that are parts of a system sufficiently complexto exhibit conflict among distinct motivational systems come to bear a unifying relation to one another (analogous to quantum entanglement), they jointly manifest their subject-forming power. Emergent subjects, thereby formed, exhibit a novel causal power, the power to generate phenomenal states, which they themselves instantiate: states that “interpret” what is going on in the brain.
  • A Posteriori Physicalism and the Discrimination of Properties (Acta Analytica, 2018) 
    According to a posteriori physicalism, phenomenal properties are physical properties, despite the unbridgeable cognitive gap that holds between phenomenal concepts and physical concepts. Current debates about a posteriori physicalism turn on what I call ‘the perspicuity principle’: it is impossible for a suitably astute cognizer to possess concepts of a certain sort—viz., narrow concepts—without being able to tell whether the referents of those concepts are the same or different. The perspicuity principle tends to strike a posteriori physicalists as implausibly rationalistic; further, a posteriori physicalists maintain that even if the principle is applicable to many narrow concepts, phenomenal concepts have unique features that render them inferentially isolated from other narrow concepts (a dialectical move known as ‘the phenomenal concept strategy’ (PCS)). I argue, on the contrary, that the case for the perspicuity principle is quite strong. Moreover, not only have versions of the PCS repeatedly failed, likely, all versions will, given the strange combination of lucidity and opacity that the PCS has to juggle (it requires that we come up with a lucid explanation of an irremediable cognitive blindspot). I conclude that a posteriori physicalists currently lack a principled objection to classic anti-physicalist arguments.

Consciousness, Intentionality, & Rationality

  • Consciousness and Rationality: The Lesson from A.I. (forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies)
    The project of ‘Strong AI’—building artificial systems that literally instantiate general-purpose rationality—has from its inception been subject to the criticism that only a conscious system could ‘really’ be intelligent. I argue that this criticism is closely linked to two famous objections (that don’t explicitly mention consciousness): The Problem of Global Relevance, pressed by Hubert Dreyfus and Jerry Fodor; the Problem of Semantic Irrelevance, pressed by John Searle. Both objections allege that artificial systems will suffer from crucial functional deficits. I propose that at least some of the deficits in question ground out in an inability to perform non-syntactic inferences. Consciousness is what makes it possible for humans to perform non-syntactic inferences. Thus, the old criticism that non-conscious systems wouldn’t ‘really’ be intelligent is a cogent one.
  • Primer, proposal, and paradigm: A review essay of Mendelovici’s The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality.” Philosophical Psychology (Philosophical Psychology, 2019) 
    Angela Mendelovici’s book The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality is a paradigm-establishing monograph within the phenomenal intentionality research program. Mendelovici argues that extant theories of intentionality that do not appeal to consciousness are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate, and a coherent, consciousness-based alternative can adequately explain (or explain away) all alleged cases of intentionality. While I count myself a fellow traveler, I discuss four choice-points where Mendelovici has taken, I believe, the wrong fork. (1) The explanatory relation that holds between intentional and phenomenal properties is not identity but realization. (2) The mechanism that generates derivatively representational states is not content self-ascription but neural re-wiring. (3) The source of semantic structure within phenomenal-intentional states is not external structure and/or second-order co-instantiation but primitive phenomenal ascription. (4) The mode of presence of contents within phenomenal-intentional states is not being part of a superficial characterization, but being monadically present as an intentional object.
  • Phenomenal Intentionality: Reductionism vs. Primitivism (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2019 
    This paper explores the relationship between phenomenal properties and intentional properties. In recent years a number of philosophers have argued that intentional properties are sometimes necessitated by phenomenal properties, but have not explained why or how. Exceptions can be found in the work of Katalin Farkas and Farid Masrour, who develop versions of reductionism regarding phenomenally-necessitated intentionality (or ‘phenomenal intentionality’). I raise two objections to reductive theories of the sort they develop. Then I propose a version of primitivism regarding phenomenal intentionality. I argue that primitivism avoids the pitfalls of reductionism while promising broad explanatory payoffs.
  • Conscious Intentionality in Perception, Imagination, and Cognition (Phenomenology & Mind , 2016)
    Participants in the cognitive phenomenology debate have proceeded by (a) proposing a bifurcation of theoretical options into inflationary and non-inflationary theories, and then (b) providing arguments for/against one of these theories. I suggest that this method has failed to illuminate the commonalities and differences among conscious intentional states of different types, in the absence of a theory of the structure of these states. I propose such a theory. In perception, phenomenal-intentional properties combine with somatosensory properties to form P-I property clusters that serve as phenomenal modes of presentations of particulars. In imagination, somatosensory properties are replaced with phenomenal intentional properties whose intentional objects are somatosensory properties, thus resulting in imaginative facsimiles of perceptual P-I property clusters. Such structures can then be used as phenomenal prototypes that pick out individuals and kinds. Sets of such prototypes constitute a subject’s conception of individuals and kinds. Combined with a few additional elements, these imaginative P-I property clusters serve as the building-blocks of conscious cognitive states. Different ways of carving up theoretical space classify my theory either as inflationary or as non-inflationary. I conclude that the theory is anti-inflationary in letter but inflationary in spirit.
  • The Acquaintance Argument for Intrinsic Intentionality (manuscript)
    Intentional properties are those properties of intentional states that individuate such states by their contents. Because we have the capacity to tell, from the first-person perspective, when two mental states in different psychological modes have the same content, some intentional properties are, essentially, intrinsic to the mental states in which they are instantiated. This is because the only adequate explanation of our cross-modal discriminatory capacities requires that we have acquaintance-knowledge of at least some of the contents of some of our mental states; no theory that appeals exclusively to propositional-knowledge or ability-knowledge is successful. Given that we can only be acquainted with intrinsic properties of our mental states, it follows that some intentional properties are intrinsic.
  • The Emergence of Mental Content: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Mind (doctoral dissertation, 2015
    According to a common paradigm in philosophy of mind, for mental states to have intentional content is for those states to be suitably functionally embedded in a cognitive system vis-à-vis its environment. Such views, I argue, are unable to account for our first-personal knowledge of the content of our mental states. I develop an alternative approach according to which all intentionality is, at bottom, a way of being conscious. I call the relevant ways of being conscious “phenomenal-intentional properties.” Along with the rest of the phenomenal realm, phenomenal-intentional properties emerge as ontologically novel properties of subjects. In perception, imagination and cognition, phenomenal-intentional properties combine with each other (and with other non-intentional features of consciousness) to form arbitrarily complex and diverse representational states.

Human Agency

  • The Role of Consciousness in Free Action (forthcoming in The Wiley Companion to Free Will 
    It is intuitive that free action depends on consciousness in some way, since behavior that is unconsciously generated is widely regarded as un-free. But there is no clear consensus as to what such dependence comes to, in part because there is no clear consensus about either the cognitive role of consciousness or about the essential components of free action. I divide the space of possible views into four: the Constitution View (on which free actions metaphysically consist, at least in part, in phenomenally conscious episodes of a special sort), the Causal-Dependence View (on which free actions are necessarily caused by conscious episodes), the Counterfactaul-Dependence View (on which free actions necessarily counterfactually dependent on conscious episodes of certain types), and the Independence View (on which there are no necessary dependence-relations that hold between free action and conscious episodes). After surveying recent empirical literature that purports to show that consciousness plays a smaller role in generating action than is usually supposed, I conclude that it is plausible that free action depends on consciousness in two ways. First, free action causally depends on consciousness control. Second, free action counterfactually depends on the agent's being responsive to certain reasons.

Technology, Human Nature, and Well-Being

  • Devotion and Well-Being: A Personalist Platonist Perfectionist Account (forthcoming in Journal of Value Inquiry)
  • Technological Innovation and Natural Law (Philosophia Reformatta, 2020)
    I discuss three tiers of technological innovation: mild innovation, or the acceleration by technology of a human activity aimed at a good; moderate innovation, or the obviation by technology of an activity aimed at a good; and radical innovation, or the altering by technology of the human condition so as to change what counts as a good. I argue that it is impossible to morally assess proposed innovations within any of these three tiers unless we rehabilitate a natural-law ethical framework. And I offer some moral starting points within such a framework, in connection with innovations of each of the three types.

Philosophy of Religion

  • Incarnation and the Multiverse (with Tim O’Connor, in God and the Multiverse: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives, 2014)
    Traditional Christians affirm the doctrine of the Incarnation—the doctrine that God the Son, second person of the divine trinity, became fully human as the man Jesus of Nazareth while remaining fully divine, and that this event plays an important role in the redemption of human beings. One recent objection to this doctrine is that implies a unique place for humans in the divine economy. But we now know, given the size of our universe, that humans occupy a tiny fraction of spatiotemporal reality, and if contemporary scientific and theological ‘multiverse’ hypotheses are correct, a truly infinitesimal fraction. We argue, however, that God the Son’s Incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth need not be unique. We provide an emergentist gloss on the so-called ‘compositional theory’ of the Incarnation. On our picture of the metaphysics of the Incarnation, God the Son is able to take on the natures of whichever divine-image-bearing species there are, in our universe or any other.