Symposium PrŽcis
Consciousness and the Self
by
JeeLoo Liu
Topic:
The focus of the 39th Philosophy Annual Symposium (2009) is a topic of the highest interest for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike: Consciousness and the Self. We all have conscious experiences during our waking moments, and we all seem to be conscious of ourselves as the host of all our experiences. The capacity with which one perceives what goes on in oneÕs own mind is called Òintrospection.Ó Through introspection, we come to know what we believe or how we feel, and we are seldom wrong in our self-knowledge. Philosophers have been confident in the apparent reliability of our self-knowledge. Some have argued that we have infallible knowledge of the content of our thought; some have called our introspection a Òprivileged accessÓ to our own minds in that it is an access only the individual herself may have. Some questions arise: who is the one with access to the mind? Is there a ÒselfÓ or an ÒIÓ that is the agent of this cognitive function, inspecting or introspecting on the internal mental states? Where is the I located?
Recent developments of neuroscience challenge this assumption of a unified self. Neuroscientists tell us that there is no single nexus in the brain that processes a unified consciousness, and there is no region of the brain that handles the representation of the self. The subjective experience of a single ÒselfÓ has no neural foundation in the brain. If that is the case, then how do we come to have a subjective sense of a unified ÒselfÓ? If there is no ÒmindÕs eyes,Ó how do we come to perceive what passes in our minds? If introspection is not an inner form of perception, then how do we know what we think and how we feel? If there is no neural correlate for the representation of a unified self, then how do we come to see ourselves as the same entity in different temporal/spatial locations? Whence originates this notion of the self? How is knowledge of oneÕs own mind possible?
This symposium includes some of the most prominent philosophers on the subject of consciousness and the self. Each one of them has produced voluminous work on various topics related to the nature of consciousness, the subjective experience or the phenomenal consciousness, the possibility of privileged access, the modes of introspection, the varieties of self-knowledge and its reliability, the usage of the self-referential term ÔIÕ, the meaning of the notion the self, as well as the nature of personal identity.
SpeakersÕ List:
Alex Byrne is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He has been working primarily on color perception and phenomenal consciousness, though he has also done extensive work on other areas such as philosophy of language, epistemology and metaethics. He co-edited a two-volume collection Readings on Color. He is also a co-editor for Disjunctivism (MIT Press: forthcoming); Content and Modality (Oxford U. Press: 2006); Fact and Value (MIT Press: 2001). He is currently working on a book on Transparency and Self-Knowledge. In addition, he has already published close to fifty philosophy articles on topics such as introspection, color perception, nonconceptual content of consciousness, self-knowledge, qualia, etc.
David Chalmers is a Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. His seminal work The Conscious Mind (1996) was a best seller at the time, and it paved the road to many new discussions on the nature of consciousness. He is widely regarded as a leader in the discourse of consciousness, and is credited with the introduction of the hard problem and the zombie problem in this discourse.
Fred Dretske is currently a Professor of Philosophy and a senior research scholar at Duke University, after retiring from Stanford University in 1999. He is widely respected as a leader in philosophy of mind and has produced an impressive body of work, which includes Seeing and Knowing (U. of Chicago: 1969); Knowledge and the Flow of Information (MIT Press: 1981); Explaining Behavior (MIT Press: 1988); Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press: 1995), and Perception, Knowledge and Belief (Cambridge U. Press: 2000). In addition, he has published close to one hundred philosophy articles.
Jesse Prinz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (as of January 2009, he is joining CUNY Graduate Center). He is undoubtedly a rising star in philosophy of mind, already with three books tucked under his belt: Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis (MIT: 2002), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford U. Press: 2004), and The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford U. Press: 2007). He also has two more books coming soon: Beyond Human Nature (London: Penguin; New York: Norton) and The Conscious Brain (Oxford). He has published numerous articles on concepts, emotions, morals, consciousness, and other topics.
John Perry is a Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has made significant contributions to many areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is widely revered as the expert on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, and he is well known for his work on situation semantics, reference and reflexivity, indexicality, and self-knowledge. Among his publications are: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Hackett: 1978); Situations and Attitudes (with Jon Barwise) (MIT Press: 1983); The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays (Oxford U. Press: 1993); Dialogue on Good, Evil and the Existence of God (Hackett: 1999); Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (Bradford-MIT: 2001); Reference and Reflexivity (Stanford: CSLI Publications: 2001); Identity, Personal Identity and the Self: Selected Essays (Hackett: 2002). He has also published more than one hundred philosophy articles.
Eric Schwitzgebel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UI Riverside. He has produced an impressive number of articles on topics such as self-knowledge on conscious experiences, belief, perception, and cognitive development, in addition to dabbing in Chinese philosophy. He co-authored (with Russell T. Hurlburt) Describing Inner Experience: Proponent Meets Skeptic (MIT Press: 2007). Currently he is working on a book manuscript entitled Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press).
Sydney Shoemaker is a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is widely respected as a leader in philosophy of mind as well as in metaphysics, and has produced many classic papers in both areas. He has made invaluable contributions to the discourse on self-knowledge and personal identity. His published books include Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963); Personal Identity: Great Debates in Philosophy (coauthored with Richard Swinburne) (Blackwell: 1984); Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays (Oxford U. Press: 1984); The First-Person Perspective, and other Essays (Cambridge U. Press: 1996); and Physical Realization (Oxford U. Press: 2007).