Here are my first papers on consciousness, two written in late 1987 at Oxford when I was a graduate student studying mathematics, the next two written in 1989 and 1990 when I had just started at Indiana as a graduate student in philosophy an cognitive science. Click on “+” for abstract and for download options.
Consciousness: The First-Person and Third-Person Views
Focuses on whether machines would talk about consciousness and would be puzzled about consciousness. Contains a (sort of) argument against the possibility of zombies! [pdf].
Mind, Pattern, and Information
A sketchy proto-theory of consciousness in terms of pattern and information. This eventually turned into the double-aspect theory of information presented (still sketchily) in The Conscious Mind.
[pdf].
The First-Person and Third-Person Views
An early high-level overview of "first-person" and "third-person"
issues about consciousness. This was Part I of a supposedly 3-part paper
– the two remaining parts got turned into my paper "Consciousness
and Cognition". This part doesn’t reach any firm conclusions,
but it captures something of the eternal internal struggle. [html]
Consciousness and Cognition
Written when I was a
graduate student at Indiana. The paper talks about the odd fact that even if
consciousness is not reductively explainable, our claims about
consciousness should be, and discusses various ways in which this
tension might be resolved, eventually proposing a proto-theory of
consciousness based on the notions of pattern and information. I no
longer agree with everything in this paper, and it gets a bit wild
toward the end, but it covers some interesting issues. I’ve never
tried to publish it, but it’s still among my
favorites and I’m hoping to return to these issues before long. [html][ps]
Old proto-papers
These are a few unfinished papers on a variety of subjects, mostly
written around when I was graduate student at Indiana. I set these
aside because I wasn’t quite happy with them, or because I didn’t
think they were very significant, or because they evolved into
something else, or because I am lazy, but looking at them now I quite
enjoy them. My later self may not endorse every youthful excess
here, but there are some interesting bits and pieces.
A Taxonomy of Cognitive Jokes
This was my inner taxonomist at work. (See my bibliography
for another example of this sad trait.) Following a workshop on humor at
CRCC, during which innumerable jokes were told and dissected, this was
my attempt to fit all of the jokes into a few basic templates. Unfortunately
the jokes themselves are given only one-line summaries, so I wish you luck with recognizing
them. [html]
On Spaghetti-Sorters and the Powers of
Analog Computation
This has a few jottings on the existence of "spaghetti-sorters"
and other remarkable devices that seem to be able to compute certain functions
faster than any standard computer (a spaghetti-sorter sorts a list of n
numbers in order n time, for example, by cutting n pieces of spaghetti
with the right lengths and banging them against a table). [html]
How Cartesian Dualism Might Have Been
True
On a not-too-far-fetched scenario, inspired by contemporary work in
artificial life, in which a Cartesian interactive dualism would have turned
out to be true. Indeed, many of the "simulated worlds" in artificial
life are Cartesian in just this way. [html]
Philosophical commentaries
These are a few commentaries I’ve given at philosophy conferences over
the years. Often I don’t write these up, but these may have enough in them
to be worthwhile.
Connectionist Representation and
Deep Systematicity
A 1991 commentary (for a St. Louis conference on “Perspectives on Mind”) on Andy Clark’s "Theoretical Spaces". I
think the idea of "deep systematicity" as the central virtue
of connectionism is quite important, although I haven’t got around to developing
it in a real paper. There are also some remarks on the relationship between
evolution and learning. [html]
Determining the Moment of
Consciousness?
This was a 1993 SPP commentary on Valerie
Hardcastle‘s paper "On Determining the Monent of Consciousness"
(published in Philosophical
Psychology), which argues the neural level can help determine some
"Orwell/Stalin" indeterminacies. Here I was in the unusual position
of defending Dan Dennett; at the end Dennett was in the unusual position
of agreeing with almost everything I said. [html]
What is it Like to be a Thermostat?
A 1994 APA commentary on Dan Lloyd’s "What is it Like to be a Net?"
Most people at the time thought I was joking. [html]
Old Usenet postings
In days gone by I posted to Usenet, and other mailing lists, quite
a bit. There was an occasional very good discussion – at least one of my
published papers resulted from this sort of thing, and I can see other
traces here and there. Other postings were just intellectual curiosity
or frivolity. The endless discussions of Chinese rooms and consciousness
were too open-ended to excerpt here, but here are a few more specific topics.
"Pick a number between zero
and infinity"
About the time I stood on a street corner and asked just that. [html]
Is the Continuum Hypothesis true, false,
or neither?
I asked this question in sci.math and got quite a few interesting responses.
This message (which is now part of the sci.math
FAQ) is a summary and discussion. Lots of information on the Continuum
Hypothesis can be found here. [html]
Thoughts on emergence
An attempt at explicating the notion of "emergence" that
is very popular in artificial life, complex systems theory, and other parts
of contemporary science. [html]
Does a rock implement every FSA?
A comp.ai.philosophy discussion of Putnam’s argument that every ordinary
open system implements every finite automaton. A number of people contributed
to this discussion, which has lots of interesting byways and raises plenty
of deep questions about computation. My paper
of the same title descended from this. [text]
Realms of cognitive science
Someone else posted about various "realms" such as those
of matter, representation, and consciousness; here I take the conceit and
run with it, multiplying the realms and discussing various possible relations
among them. [html]
