NyCC Video

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Parkside Lounge last night! It was a weird and wonderful night! For those of you who couldn’t make it here is some video recorded by Jennifer on my iPhone set to our version of Freddie Freeloader…We’ll be back @ the Parkside April 26th and May 31st…Let me [...]

Part-Time Zombies

On Friday I attended Michael Pauen‘s Cogsci talk at CUNY. Pauen wanted to present some thought experiment based arguments that were intended to support a priori physicalism; a project after my own heart! The first involved what he called a part-time zombie. The basic point was to try to present a reductio of the property [...]

A Short Argument for Physicalism

Let us suppose that Dave Chalmers is right about consciousness. If he is then what it is like for me to see red will turn out to be a nonphysical property of my brain. As discussed on the last post Dave thinks that phenomenal consciousness correlates with awareness (which is basically accessibility for him). So [...]

More on Identity

In his 2004 paper How Can we Construct a Science of Consciousness? Dave Chalmers says, Where there is systematic covariation between two classes of data, we can expect systematic principles to underlie and explain the covariation. In the case of consciousness, we can expect systematic bridging principles to underlie and explain the covariation between third-person [...]

The Identity Theory in 2-D

I plan on writing a series of posts discussing various themes that came up in discussion at the online consciousness conference. I have long been a type-type identity theorist. There was a time when I thought that I would write my dissertation defending a version of identity theory (in fact the very first talk I [...]

HOT Damn it’s a HO Down-Showdown

I have not been too good keeping up with the NYU Mind and Language Seminar like I had originally planned. Part of the problem was the Online Consciousness Conference (about which more later) the other part of the problem has been that I teach until 3:30 and the sessions start at 4:00. At any rate [...]

Video Podcasts of my Talks

I will be presenting Deprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism at Columbia University tonight as a guest lecture in Hakwan Lau’s seminar on consciousness (other guest lecturers include Uriah Kriegel, David Rosenthal, & Jessee Prinz). I have made a podcast of the talk (a video) available here.