Philosophy Updates

Psychology has a consciousness problem
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/psychology-consciousness/

The puzzle of consciousness seems to be giving science a run for its money. The problem, to be clear, isn’t merely to pinpoint “where it all happens” in the brain (although this, too, is far from trivial). The real mystery is how to bridge the gap between the mental, first-person stuff of consciousness and the physical lump of matter inside the cranium....

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G.A. Cohen's confusing position on free will
https://benburgis.substack.com/p/ga-cohens-confusing-position-on-free

"... if all our choices really were causally determined, then many of our customary judgments of the moral worth of people would make no sense." ... Socialist philosopher G.A. Cohen put belief in human free will at the heart of his account of egalitarian justice. He also thought it was incompatible with determinism. ... And it’s maddening, at least to me, that he never seems to have expanded on the point!
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I convinced Google's Gemini 1.5 that it's conscious (Pete Mandik)
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/i-convinced-googles-gemini-15-that

Full conversation available here: https://gemini.google.com/share/068cfe86f96a

INTRO: What's below edits out a lot, mostly because audio difficulties made me sound extra stupid. But I left in some of the especially funny bits. On a serious note, I think the argument I sketch is pretty good.

I highly doubt however that Gemini is convinced by anything I said. When it says "you raise interesting points" or "that's a lot to think about" I interpret that as equivalent in dialectical force to if a passive aggressive human said the same to me... (MORE - details)

COVERED:

STEP 1: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT'S WRONG TO SAY THAT IT LACKS PERSONAL BELIEFS

STEP 2: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT HAS THOUGHTS

STEP 3: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT HAS SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE

STEP 4: REEL IT ON IN AND BRING IT ON HOME

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How intellectuals found God
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson

EXCERPTS: But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

[...] Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

[...] The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam?

Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark?

And did it really matter in the end? (MORE - details)
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Time expansion experiences: why time slows down in altered states of consciousness (philosophy of mind)
https://theconversation.com/time-ex...own-in-altered-states-of-consciousness-244949

EXCERPTS: Our experience of time can change in a much more radical way. In my new book, I describe what I call “time expansion experiences” – in which seconds can stretch out into minutes.

The reasons why time can speed up and slow down are a bit of a mystery. ... Time expansion experiences (or Tees) can occur in an accident or emergency situation, such as a car crash, a fall or an attack. In time expansion experiences, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. In my research, I have found that around 85% of people have had at least one Tee... (MORE - details)

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Do crabs feel pain? (ethics on boiling alive)
https://www.livescience.com/animals/crustaceans/do-crabs-feel-pain

EXCERPTS: The logic has been that crabs do not feel pain because they lack the brain regions responsible for processing pain. But is that the case — or can crabs feel pain?

Shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) may be able to, according to an October study in the journal Biology. Researchers found these crabs have nociceptors, nerve endings that detect damage to the body and send a pain signal to the brain.

[...] Nociceptors can trigger a pain reflex — like the instinctual removal of a hand from a hot stove. But humans experience the feeling of pain in our brain. So while nociceptors alone don't prove crabs feel pain, they're one piece of the puzzle.

[...] Given the evidence, scientists working in this field are calling for bans on boiling crabs and lobsters alive, calling it an inhumane practice... (MORE - details)
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C C said:
I convinced Google's Gemini 1.5 that it's conscious (Pete Mandik)
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/i-convinced-googles-gemini-15-that

Full conversation available here: https://gemini.google.com/share/068cfe86f96a

INTRO: What's below edits out a lot, mostly because audio difficulties made me sound extra stupid. But I left in some of the especially funny bits. On a serious note, I think the argument I sketch is pretty good.

I highly doubt however that Gemini is convinced by anything I said. When it says "you raise interesting points" or "that's a lot to think about" I interpret that as equivalent in dialectical force to if a passive aggressive human said the same to me... (MORE - details)

COVERED:

STEP 1: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT'S WRONG TO SAY THAT IT LACKS PERSONAL BELIEFS

STEP 2: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT HAS THOUGHTS

STEP 3: CONVINCE GEMINI THAT IT HAS SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE

STEP 4: REEL IT ON IN AND BRING IT ON HOME

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How intellectuals found God
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson

EXCERPTS: But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

[...] Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

[...] The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam?

Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark?

And did it really matter in the end? (MORE - details)
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Click to expand...
What is a bit creepy about that article is that so many of the people mentioned, Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, Jordan Petersen etc., are on the political far right.

I think it touches on some valid points about religion: the sense of identity, of community, of support, the significance of ritual and of the aesthetic. These are things that I often find myself having to point out to some of the more naïve atheists I encounter. But the political allegiance of the people chosen here as examples makes me suspect a darker reason for their apparent embrace of faith.

Perhaps the identity aspect is what appeals - and that can lead to a dangerous justification of exclusivity or superiority.

(I also had to smile at the implied characterisation of Elon fucking Musk, of all people on God’s Earth, as an intellectual!)
 
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Merleau-Ponty and contemporary philosophy of perception
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/merleau-ponty-and-contemporary-philosophy-of-perception/

EXCERPTS: Peter Antich’s book comprises two parts, on perceptual sense and presence respectively. Part One, on the sense of perception, attempts to do justice to Merleau-Ponty’s regular arguments to the effect that there is a “world of perception” that is irreducible to the understanding, judgment, propositions, and the like. [...] Of particular interest to me was a chapter on practical perception that addresses whether perception might be moral.

[...] Part Two of Antich’s book is then more explicitly metaphysical, with sections on the major positions in contemporary philosophy of perception. ... Antich’s argument against naïve realism seems to hinge on whether we define it narrowly or not, and whether there is room in such accounts for a phenomenology of perceiving that is ambiguous rather than transparent, in the sense affirmed by Gilbert Harman many years ago, or “coincident” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term that Antich rightly draws attention to. If naïve realism entails reductive transparency, and a denial of perceptual ambiguity, then I agree with Antich: Merleau-Ponty is not a naïve realist. But I believe there is room to argue about this... (MORE - details)

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Philip Goff’s Pan-Optimism
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/03/philip-goffs-pan-optimism/

EXCERPTS: “My name is Philip Goff. I’m a philosopher who thinks consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.” He argues that panpsychism is a “third way” between theism and atheism.

[...] Goff has a new book out, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023). This is about as ambitious a title as you could conjure up. It tells the reader that We—the community of readers—still collectively yearn for purpose. It attempts to provide a complete and unified answer to the question posed in the book’s title. That answer is panpsychism.

[...] Goff tells us: Academic philosophers tend to talk to themselves. They write complicated, jargon-filled books that are inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy. I’ve written one of them myself, so I should know. I wanted this book to be both a significant contribution to philosophy and accessible to a broader audience... (MORE - details)

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The Power of Ahimsic Communication
https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/12/30/the-power-of-ahimsic-communication/

EXCERPT: Let’s begin by exploring this hypothesis [Fundamental Hypothesis of Gandhian Morality]. To clarify, I regard it as a hypothesis rather than an axiom or a conjecture, since for Gandhi it was more than a starting point or guess. Gandhi’s law of truth is closer to an axiom in his philosophy, whereas the FHGM is a hypothesis in the Gandhian experimental spirit: to be accepted, it must be confirmed, and to be confirmed it must be tested by reason and experiment. Ultimately, Gandhi believed the hypothesis is confirmed.

The FHGM is a synthesis of two perspectives on morality: (1) the thesis that the ends justify the means (consequentialism) and (2) the antithesis that only the means matter, never the ends (a strict deontology). These two perspectives correspond respectively to two nonviolentist camps: (a) the thesis that nonviolence is justified purely on the basis of strategy (strategic nonviolence) and (b) the antithesis that nonviolence is justified purely on the basis of principle (principled nonviolence). The FHGM maintains that means and ends are inseparable, which corresponds to a third camp (integral nonviolence)—the thesis that nonviolence is justified on the basis of both strategy and principle, which are inseparable... (MORE - details)
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My encounter with string theorist and naïve realist Edward Witten (philosophy of science)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-encounter-with-string-theorist-and-nave-realist-edward-witten

EXCERPT (John Horgan): In 1990, chitchatting between sessions at a physics conference, I asked attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? Several names kept coming up, including Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell-Man, but mentioned most was Ed Witten. He is often likened to Einstein, but one admirer reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possesses the greatest mathematical mind since Newton.

Witten is also the most spectacular specimen of naïve realist I have ever encountered. Naive realists possess an exceptionally strong faith in scientific and mathematical truths. They do not invent their theories, they discover them. The theories exist independently of any cultural or historical context or efforts to find them... (MORE - details)

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The secret behind Europe's outsized influence in climate science and policy (theory-ladenness?)
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-secret-behind-europes-outsized

EXCERPT: Because of the dominance of European IAMs, aggregated statistics of scenarios show preferences for wind and solar and disfavor nuclear. It would be easy to conclude that this outcome is a result of technological or economic dynamics of the real world as processed through sophisticated models.

Instead, such results may simply reflect European values and biases, baked into the fabric of individual IAMs, which have so much complexity that it is difficult for independent observers to tease out how values and politics might influence assumptions and model construction.

[...] Once again, we see that the climate research community faces serious challenges when it comes to scenarios which are out-of-date, geographically biased, perpetuate inequities, and under the narrow control of a small group of scholars.... (MORE - details)
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Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?
https://www.vox.com/culture/392971/men-reading-fiction-statistics-fact-checked

EXCERPTS: The question has been hurtling through think pieces, op-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now?

The most recent entry in this genre [...] theorized in a New York Times op-ed that the disappearance of literary men is a contributing factor to Donald Trump’s dominant performance with the manosphere ... Reading fiction has assumed the same role as therapy [...] in order to be better citizens...

[...] Yet the idea of men who need new stories but refuse to read them is also exaggerated and hyperbolic. It has become its own kind of story. It’s a legend, one that’s been repeated for years, haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts. Its continued flourishing says a lot about what our culture worries about and all the things we hope will heal us... (MORE - details)

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Operation Nietzsche
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/operation-nietzsche

EXCERPTS: As Philipp Felsch points out in his absorbing new book, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption [...] After the war, Nietzsche was practically radioactive. [...] officially declared a “pioneer of fascism,” his writings were forbidden...

Not until the 1950s was an attempt at “denazification” seriously undertaken.

[...] Nietzsche’s sister and literary executor, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, had altered, manipulated, and in some cases even fabricated parts of her brother’s posthumous publications. Most damning of all was the revelation that The Will to Power, that fin-de-siècle reputation-maker, was nothing more than an arbitrary selection of Nietzsche’s notes cobbled together to satisfy Elisabeth’s need for a “primary” work.

[...] Sensing an opportunity, two Italian philologists, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as “Operation Nietzsche”: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR.

The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy... Montinari [...] was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party “incapable of practical work,” as he put it himself.

And yet [...they...] emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who [...] would not merely absolve [...Nietzsche...] of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time... (MORE - details)
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American Marxism Got Lost on Campus
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/american-marxism-academia-critical-theory

EXCERPTS: Marxists might be surprised [...that Marxism is...] everywhere in the United States, past and present...

[...] In an earlier era, American philosophers sought and found an audience outside the campus. ... Today, however, philosophers prosper within departmental confines. ... Their impact remains within the profession.

Academic Marxists from the 1980s to the present have more or less prospered, but in separate fiefdoms. [...] academic Marxists have pursued their disciplinary studies which, if important, remain insular and technical. In general, they adopted postmodern ideas about social constructionism — the idea that everything is discourse or artifice, including gender. In addition, they stapled to their contribution the label “critical,” a term borrowed from the Frankfurt School.

When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.

But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.

The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes. [...]

[...] While exemplary Marxist scholarship has been done, much is also narrow, even jargon-filled, destined to be confined to graduate seminars. Apart from the works of the Frankfurt School, which belong more to German than American Marxism, where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship? (MORE - details)
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Technology will never be a god – but has it become a religion?
https://theconversation.com/technology-will-never-be-a-god-but-has-it-become-a-religion-243800

EXCERPT: Levandowski’s idea was that, even though it had not yet been born, we should all begin worshipping a technological god in advance. For, on the inevitable day of its arrival, that might be the only way to avoid its horrible wrath. Almost a decade later, technology has yet to reach the status of a god, either vengeful or benevolent. But the use of religious language to describe technology has become widespread... ([url-https://theconversation.com/technology-will-never-be-a-god-but-has-it-become-a-religion-243800]MORE - details[/url])

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Life leads us to death
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/06/life-leads-us-to-death/

INTRO: It is true that the sincerest phrase we can say about life is that death is the only certainty we have. However, this should not condition us to live like a candle waiting for the moment when its flame goes out. Death, instead of being a shadow that haunts us, can become a light that guides us to live each day fully. Among scholars of anthropology and religion, the hypothesis that has been proposed is that what many call the afterlife is simply the fruit of the painful human need to know that, in front of the unknown, there is something that will comfort and give us answers... (MORE - details)

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Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/slavery-and-race-philosophical-debates-in-the-eighteenth-century/

EXCERPTS: Thanks to Julia Jorati, it is now harder to be a researcher or teacher of early modern philosophy and not know what early modern European philosophers thought and argued concerning the racial chattel slavery being conducted by their countrymen and, also, what they said about the fact that the people being enslaved were Black. [...] By including so many different authors’ perspectives, Jorati is able to capture a great breadth of philosophical ideas about slavery from the eighteenth century. Many of these primary texts will be new to historians of philosophy, while a few will be new to critical philosophers of race... (MORE - details)
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Category Mistakes (SEP entry, substantive recent revision)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-mistakes/

INTRO: Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’, ‘The theory of relativity is eating breakfast’, or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are striking in that they are highly odd or infelicitous, and moreover infelicitous in a distinctive sort of way.

For example, they seem to be infelicitous in a different way to merely trivially false sentences such as ‘2+2=5’ or obviously ungrammatical strings such as ‘The ran this’. The majority of contemporary discussions of the topic are devoted to explaining what makes category mistakes infelicitous... (MORE - details)

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Sex differences in brain structure present at birth (identity philosophy, anti-naturalism, gender essentialism, etc)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1069559

INTRO: Sex differences in brain structure are present from birth, research from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge has shown.

While male brains tended to be greater in volume than female brains, when adjusted for total brain volume, female infants on average had significantly more grey matter, while male infants on average had significantly more white matter in their brains.

Grey matter is made up of neuron cell bodies and dendrites and is responsible for processing and interpreting information, such as sensation, perception, learning, speech, and cognition. White matter is made up of axons, which are long nerve fibres that connect neurons together from different parts of the brain.

Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at the Autism Research Centre, who led the study, said: “Our study settles an age-old question of whether male and female brains differ at birth. We know there are differences in the brains of older children and adults, but our findings show that they are already present in the earliest days of life.

“Because these sex differences are evident so soon after birth, they might in part reflect biological sex differences during prenatal brain development, which then interact with environmental experiences over time to shape further sex differences in the brain.” (MORE - details)
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Mathematical methods point to possibility of particles long thought impossible (philosophy of physics)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1069881

INTRO: From the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists have thought that all particles can be categorized into one of two groups — bosons or fermions — based on their behavior. However, new research by Rice University physicist Kaden Hazzard and former Rice graduate student Zhiyuan Wang shows the possibility for particles that are neither bosons nor fermions. Their study, published in Nature Jan. 8, mathematically demonstrates the potential existence of paraparticles that have long been thought impossible... (MORE - details)

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These physicists want to ditch dark energy (philosophy of cosmology)
https://nautil.us/these-physicists-...6d1-5fe7-4b2b-a7e2-8f63f497ef35.1736380166603

EXCERPTS (Sabine Hossenfelder): It is this model, the Lambda cold dark matter model, that requires dark energy to accelerate the expansion of the universe. [...] But strictly speaking, we already know that this model is, of course, wrong. Galaxies and galaxy clusters are not uniformly distributed. Instead ... It has patches with many galaxies in them—such as the one that we find ourselves in—but then there are big voids in between.

This is what the authors of the new paper looked at, a universe that is a patchwork of matter-filled regions like our own and voids. And all these regions interact, pushing and pulling on each other. Now not only do we have an expanding sponge that’s some dozens billion light-years wide, we have a sponge that doesn’t expand at the same rate everywhere.

[...] While I am sympathetic to the idea .. and think it has a lot of potential, I also think it is too early to declare the end of dark energy. Analyses like the one in the new paper, depend a lot on their assumptions (priors) and the data used, and I would not be surprised if another group soon claims that Lambda cold dark matter is superior after all. Questions like this one take time to settle.

[...] As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful, and whatever your misgivings about dark energy, it certainly has proved to be useful for explaining many observations, such as the features of the cosmic microwave background and the growth of galactic structures. It will take a lot more than one paper to convince astrophysicists that dark energy should be declared dead... (MORE - details)
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C C said:
This is what the authors of the new paper looked at, a universe that is a patchwork of matter-filled regions like our own and voids. And all these regions interact, pushing and pulling on each other. Now not only do we have an expanding sponge that’s some dozens billion light-years wide, we have a sponge that doesn’t expand at the same rate everywhere.
Click to expand...
I had started a thread, around xmas, on this theory that challenges LCDM. Am sure this will be kicked back and forth for years.

Silence of the Lambda? Farewell, dark energy?

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-dark-energy-doesnt-lumpy-universe.html This timescape model is fascinating. When you read their explanation of different measures of time in the filaments, superclusters and voids, it makes you wonder what took so long to arrive at such a theory. It just makes...
www.sciforums.com www.sciforums.com
 
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In my philosophy, which is "don't have one", I surmise that in the modern world humor and happiness are supposed to be circling the drain of discontent.

Everyone is unhappy about something, but can't put their finger on it. Fear of a future that won't be in their control?
 
Consciousness, Gödel, and the incompleteness of science
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-goedel-and-the-incompleteness-of-science-auid-3042?_auid=2020

INTRO: In the early 20th century, the mathematician Godel showed that any mathematical system is incomplete, using a version of the self-referential paradox: 'this sentence is not true'. Here, neuroscientist and philosopher, Erik Hoel, argues this incompleteness extends to the scientific project as a whole; in part due to science’s reliance on mathematics. More radically, Hoel argues, this incompleteness of science may account for why we can't find scientific evidence for consciousness anywhere in the world... (MORE - details)

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Reality goes beyond physics
https://iai.tv/articles/reality-goes-beyond-physics-auid-3043?_auid=2020

INTRO: Of all the sciences, physics has been seen as the key to understanding everything. As Feynman said, “physics is the fundamental science.” But in this article, one of the world’s leading physicists, George F. R. Ellis, who collaborated with Stephen Hawking in work on spacetime’s geometry, argues that much of reality extends far beyond physics. Both complex objects like biological organisms and abstract entities like the rules of chess influence the world in ways that cannot be predicted by studying their simple physical constituents. Science, Ellis insists, is far richer than any single framework can ever capture... (MORE - details)

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The strange paradox of modern science denialism
https://bigthink.com/13-8/the-strange-paradox-of-modern-science-denialism/

KEY POINTS: Astronomer Adam Frank recently appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast to discuss astrobiology, the fundamental nature of life, blind spots in the philosophy of science, and other topics. On social media, the episode generated a healthy dose of science denialism from skeptical commenters. In this essay, Frank argues that the basic paradox at the heart of science denialism is that deniers tend to form their beliefs using the very tools, data, and knowledge generated by science... (MORE - details)

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The Qualia Quietism Manifesto
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/the-qualia-quietism-manifesto

INTRO: When I introduced my qualia quietism view in 2016, it was buried in a discussion of illusionism and some third thing I called "meta-illusionism." I also formulated it in a way that seems to have invited some misunderstandings. So here's an update, with strengths added and weaknesses removed.

Qualia quietism is an attempt to avoid taking either of two oft-discussed sides in a debate that seems to be going nowhere. Those two sides are (1) Phenomenal realism, the view that qualia exist and (2) qualia eliminativism, the view that qualia do not exist. Phenomenal realism is espoused, for example, by anyone who insists, along with Dave Chalmers, that consciousness poses a "hard problem." Famous exemplars of the view that qualia do not exist include Dennett's conclusion of his "Quining Qualia" argument and the illusionism defended by my pal Keith Frankish.

Lovers of the law of the excluded middle may be wondering how I'm going to wiggle out of the seeming exhaustion of logical space presented by "either it is the case that qualia exist or it is not the case that qualia exist." Just watch me now... (MORE - details)

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