Research Interests:

 

I am actively engaged in research in the philosophy of mind.  My main focus is the problem of explaining consciousness—what are the main obstacles to a materialist theory of the conscious mind; why does the problem seem so intractable; what role do folk-psychological intuitions have in a theory of consciousness; and can we provide a satisfying materialist theory of our first-person access to consciousness.  These issues quickly venture into questions in metaphysics and epistemology—what are the best justified means of settling questions of ontology, particularly the ontology of the mind; do we have a priori access to our concepts, and what limits might this place on metaphysical speculation; is first-person access incorrigible; do the principles of a “naturalized” epistemology beg important questions against their rivals, and so on.  The study of consciousness also quickly contacts important areas of empirical research in cognitive science, including issues in implicit cognition and subliminal perception; error and confabulation in perception and introspection; the development of mental concepts in children; and the study of pathologies like “blindsight,” neglect, and aphasia.   I have already written and presented on a number of these issues, and I plan to expand my research in the near future.  My more long-term goal is to connect my research to issues in moral cognition and judgment:  what is the phenomenology of moral decision making; to what extent is moral cognition theory laden; and how do political rhetoric and indoctrination affect perception and judgment. 

Dissertation abstract:

 

The Problem of Consciousness:  Mental Appearance and Mental Reality

Adviser:  David M. Rosenthal 

Additional Readers:  Michael Devitt, Doug Lackey

 

Consciousness is widely viewed as a mystery, one marking the limits of mechanistic science and naturalistic explanation.  This claim ultimately rests on the way consciousness appears from the first-person perspective.  We seem to directly access intrinsic qualities of experience, qualities that evade the net of scientific explanation.  We seem to directly access the intrinsic redness of a red sensation or the intrinsic painfulness of a pain.  How can science, which arguably deals only in relational information, ever explain such qualities?

 

In this dissertation, I reject the idea that we directly access consciousness.   Instead, I propose that we access consciousness by way of a theory, one we apply automatically, outside of conscious awareness.  The automatic application of the theory explains why we seem to access intrinsic qualities of experience.  The theory picks out our conscious states by way of complex relational information; however, we are only aware of the theory's output--that we're in a red or green sensory state, for example.  And because we're unaware of the complex relational information the theory employs, we interpret the accessed qualities as "intrinsic," as lacking any constitutive connection to the rest of the mind.  But this is an illusion brought on by the phenomenology of automatic theory application.  Conscious mental states only appear to possess intrinsic inexplicable features; in reality, they are the sorts of relationally characterizable states amenable to scientific explanation.

 

Other processes offer suggestive support for my central claim.  When we see a person as beautiful, we are picking up a set of complex relational features--hips-to-waist ratio, spacing of the eyes, symmetry of the face, etc.  But we are unaware that this is what we're doing.  Instead, we simply see the person as beautiful, as possessing that special intrinsic quality so hard to put into words.  When we learn that we're only responding to hips-to-waist ratio, we may retort, "But that's not all there is to beauty!"  The situation is analogous, I claim, to what occurs when we access our conscious mental states.  We seem to access intrinsic qualities while behind the scenes, we pick up relational information.

 

This provides the heart of my thesis.  The dissertation begins by surveying the attempts of several theorists--David Chalmers, Joseph Levine, and Ned Block--to isolate the problem of consciousness.  I argue that all three fail to establish that anything requires explanation beyond the appearance of intrinsic qualities.  Next, I present and reject a popular model for explaining our first-person access to consciousness:  the "phenomenal concepts" approach of Brian Loar, David Papineau, John Perry, and others.  I argue that the view either lacks the resources to explain the richness of the qualities we experience, or it illicitly involves an undischarged intrinsic element.  I then develop my model of access and consider its implications for Frank Jackson's knowledge argument.  I defend a modified version of David Lewis's ability hypothesis.  I close by evaluating potential empirical evidence for my model, including expert perception in wine tasting, music appreciation, and chicken sexing, among others; evidence from developmental psychology on the child's "theory of mind"; and evidence from social psychology on confabulation in reports of mental states.