Miscellaneous Papers by Luke Roelofs
This is a short paper on why two views defended by Chalmers, which critics have held to be incomp... more This is a short paper on why two views defended by Chalmers, which critics have held to be incompatible, are actually compatible after all when properly tweaked.
I offer a strategy for defining gender (as contrasted with sex), which begins with an account of ... more I offer a strategy for defining gender (as contrasted with sex), which begins with an account of what it is to perceive someone's body as gendered, and then analyses ascriptions of gender as expressing and recommending such perceptions, rather than as reporting an objective fact about a person.
This paper offers a way of making sense of beliefs and desires that are held by many people joint... more This paper offers a way of making sense of beliefs and desires that are held by many people jointly, understanding these in terms of their relationship to joint intentional action.
An abstract and video are now available here: https://www.academia.edu/28253578/Joint_Mentality_Abstract_and_Video_
This paper defends a hybrid position on the 'problem of other minds' (i.e. how do we know others ... more This paper defends a hybrid position on the 'problem of other minds' (i.e. how do we know others have mental lives like ours?), on which the incorporation of imagination into perception makes knowledge of other minds both perceptual and inferential. It's now been published in Erkenntnis: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-017-9886-2
It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'I') to... more It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'I') to function properly as rational agents. I argue that this is not strictly true: agents in certain relations could dispense with singular self-knowledge and instead rely on plural self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'we'). In defending the possibility of this kind of 'selfless agent', I thereby defend the possibility of a certain kind of 'seamless' collective agency; agency in a group of agents who have no singular self-knowledge, who do not know which member of the group they are. I discuss four specific functions for which singular self-knowledge has been thought indispensable: distinguishing intentional from unintentional actions, connecting nonindexical knowledge with action, reflecting on our own reasoning, and identifying which ultimate practical reasons we have. I argue in each case that by establishing certain relations between agentsrelations I label 'motor vulnerability', 'cognitive vulnerability', 'evidential unity' and 'moral unity'we would allow those agents to do everything a rational agent needs to do while relying only on plural, rather than singular, self-knowledge. Finally, I consider the objection that any agents who met the conditions I lay out for selfless agency would thereby cease to qualify as distinct agents, merging into a single agent without agential parts. Against this objection, I argue that we should recognise the possibility of simultaneous agency in whole and parts, and not regard either as disqualifying the other.
I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual'... more I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways to extend and generalize the attentional construal of 'field-talk' to provide a genuine multiplicity of dimensions, through the notions of attentional proximity and causal proximity: the degree to which two experiential elements are disposed to bring one another into attention when attended, or to interact in other distinctively mental ways. I conclude that if consciousness is a field, it is one organized by attentional and/or causal proximity.
This paper was published in the Journal of Environmental Philosophy to critique something like th... more This paper was published in the Journal of Environmental Philosophy to critique something like the following idea: the natural world is in some sense a community, and recognising this fact should affect our ethical attitude to it. I argue that the natural world is not in any ethically significant sense a community.
Papers on Panpsychism and the Combination Problem by Luke Roelofs
This paper, co-authored with Jed Buchanan, examines the tension between everyday intuitions about... more This paper, co-authored with Jed Buchanan, examines the tension between everyday intuitions about consciousness and some philosophical theories, like panpsychism, which imply consciousness in surprising places. We argue against entirely rejecting either intuition or theory, and defend some ways of reconciling the two.
Doctor of Philosophy, 2015, Graduate This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousn... more Doctor of Philosophy, 2015, Graduate This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a longstanding intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference?
Panpsychists and their critics have by now distinguished a multitude of problems falling under th... more Panpsychists and their critics have by now distinguished a multitude of problems falling under the heading of 'the combination problem'. But we can distinguish 'hard problems of combination' from 'easy problems of combination', in a way that parallels the distinction between the 'hard' and 'easy' problems of consciousness. Just as the hard problem of consciousness is not even approachable by the usual methods of cognitive science, which seem able at least in principle to address the various easy problems of consciousness, the 'hard problems of combination' are those which are not even approachable by the methods of phenomenological analysis, which seem able at least in principle to address the various easy problems of combination.
The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many expe... more The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such 'between-subjects unity'. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of 'experience-sharing', in which the same token experience belongs to more than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like.
I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the rel... more I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the 'grain problem'), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of 'the palette problem'). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small 'palette' of basic qualities could give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of 'phenomenal blending', and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive 'phenomenologically simple character'. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost.
Combining Minds by Luke Roelofs
[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press]
This is a preprint of the first c... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press]
This is a preprint of the first chapter of my book 'Combining Minds'. It introduces the topic of the book—composite subjectivity—and explains why it matters. This involves clarifying how the key term “combination” is used and how the key ideas like “composition” and “consciousness” are understood, as well as reviewing the various reasons why philosophers have tended to deny or neglect the possibility of composite subjectivity, and the implications they have drawn from doing so. I explain the significance of mental combination for panpsychism’s combination problem, for collective consciousness, and for a variety of other issues in the philosophy of mind, and sketches out the book’s plan of attack.
[Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the second chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter looks at five arguments that have been advanced to show that minds cannot combine (under the heading of the "combination problem for panpsychism") and considers the options for addressing them. They are the subject-summing argument, the unity argument, the privacy argument, the boundary argument, and the incompatible contexts argument. All of these arguments, under scrutiny, turn out to rest on assumptions either about the metaphysics of subjects of experience or about the unity of consciousness, so this chapter contains some in-depth examination of these two topics. For both topics, there is room for a range of plausible but conflicting views, and so the chapter outlines a plan to sketch three different theories of mental combination, starting from different assumptions about subjects and unity.
[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the third cha... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the third chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter is about how to combine the very simple subjects of experience posited by panpsychism, the theory that matter itself is inherently conscious. The combination problem has been most thoroughly discussed in relation to the combination of these 'microsubjects', and this chapter addresses head-on the two central strands of the combination problem: the subject-summing problem and the problem of the unity, and boundaries, of consciousness. Alternative solutions, including cosmopsychism (the world as a whole is conscious) and panprotopsychism (matter is not conscious, but contains some sort of germ of consciousness) are also discussed. The metaphysics of nature that results from addressing these challenges is both highly counterintuitive and theoretically elegant.
[Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the fourth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter considers a particular set of combination problems facing panpsychism, based on the apparent structural discrepancy between human consciousness and the microphysical structure of the brain. These problems have been termed the revelation problem, the palette problem, and the mismatch problem, and this chapter seeks to resolve them by developing a series of connected hypotheses about how phenomenal qualities combine and blend based on informational relations among them: the radical confusion hypothesis, the small palette hypothesis, and the informational structure hypothesis. These hypotheses are also shown to be compatible with moderate versions of the revelation thesis, the idea that by undergoing experience we are acquainted with the nature of experience.
[Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstra... more [Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the fifth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience understood in functionalist terms, as systems whose consciousness comes from having a functional structure which supports intelligent behavior. This requires examining how composition relates to the key features of such subjects, including not just their functional structure but the structure of their consciousness, and the systematic coherence between these two structures. The chapter argues that information-integrating interactions are key to connecting the conscious structure and functional structure of the parts, so that they form a whole with even richer structure. This integration can take many forms, even including the social interactions of cooperating subjects in a social group.
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Miscellaneous Papers by Luke Roelofs
The full paper is here: https://www.academia.edu/24673186/Joint_Mental_States_and_Quasi_Agential_Groups
It's being presented on September 19th here: http://mindsonline.philosophyofbrains.com/minds-online-2016-program/
An abstract and video are now available here: https://www.academia.edu/28253578/Joint_Mentality_Abstract_and_Video_
Papers on Panpsychism and the Combination Problem by Luke Roelofs
The review was published in Dialogue, Volume 57 (3), September 2018 , pages 639-641.
Combining Minds by Luke Roelofs
This is a preprint of the first chapter of my book 'Combining Minds'. It introduces the topic of the book—composite subjectivity—and explains why it matters. This involves clarifying how the key term “combination” is used and how the key ideas like “composition” and “consciousness” are understood, as well as reviewing the various reasons why philosophers have tended to deny or neglect the possibility of composite subjectivity, and the implications they have drawn from doing so. I explain the significance of mental combination for panpsychism’s combination problem, for collective consciousness, and for a variety of other issues in the philosophy of mind, and sketches out the book’s plan of attack.
The full paper is here: https://www.academia.edu/24673186/Joint_Mental_States_and_Quasi_Agential_Groups
It's being presented on September 19th here: http://mindsonline.philosophyofbrains.com/minds-online-2016-program/
An abstract and video are now available here: https://www.academia.edu/28253578/Joint_Mentality_Abstract_and_Video_
The review was published in Dialogue, Volume 57 (3), September 2018 , pages 639-641.
This is a preprint of the first chapter of my book 'Combining Minds'. It introduces the topic of the book—composite subjectivity—and explains why it matters. This involves clarifying how the key term “combination” is used and how the key ideas like “composition” and “consciousness” are understood, as well as reviewing the various reasons why philosophers have tended to deny or neglect the possibility of composite subjectivity, and the implications they have drawn from doing so. I explain the significance of mental combination for panpsychism’s combination problem, for collective consciousness, and for a variety of other issues in the philosophy of mind, and sketches out the book’s plan of attack.