Luke Roelofs | University of Texas at Arlington (original) (raw)

Miscellaneous Papers by Luke Roelofs

This is a short paper on why two views defended by Chalmers, which critics have held to be incomp... more This is a short paper on why two views defended by Chalmers, which critics have held to be incompatible, are actually compatible after all when properly tweaked.

I offer a strategy for defining gender (as contrasted with sex), which begins with an account of ... more I offer a strategy for defining gender (as contrasted with sex), which begins with an account of what it is to perceive someone's body as gendered, and then analyses ascriptions of gender as expressing and recommending such perceptions, rather than as reporting an objective fact about a person.

This paper offers a way of making sense of beliefs and desires that are held by many people joint... more This paper offers a way of making sense of beliefs and desires that are held by many people jointly, understanding these in terms of their relationship to joint intentional action.
An abstract and video are now available here: https://www.academia.edu/28253578/Joint_Mentality_Abstract_and_Video_

This paper defends a hybrid position on the 'problem of other minds' (i.e. how do we know others ... more This paper defends a hybrid position on the 'problem of other minds' (i.e. how do we know others have mental lives like ours?), on which the incorporation of imagination into perception makes knowledge of other minds both perceptual and inferential. It's now been published in Erkenntnis: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-017-9886-2

It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'I') to... more It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'I') to function properly as rational agents. I argue that this is not strictly true: agents in certain relations could dispense with singular self-knowledge and instead rely on plural self-knowledge (knowledge involving the concept 'we'). In defending the possibility of this kind of 'selfless agent', I thereby defend the possibility of a certain kind of 'seamless' collective agency; agency in a group of agents who have no singular self-knowledge, who do not know which member of the group they are. I discuss four specific functions for which singular self-knowledge has been thought indispensable: distinguishing intentional from unintentional actions, connecting nonindexical knowledge with action, reflecting on our own reasoning, and identifying which ultimate practical reasons we have. I argue in each case that by establishing certain relations between agentsrelations I label 'motor vulnerability', 'cognitive vulnerability', 'evidential unity' and 'moral unity'we would allow those agents to do everything a rational agent needs to do while relying only on plural, rather than singular, self-knowledge. Finally, I consider the objection that any agents who met the conditions I lay out for selfless agency would thereby cease to qualify as distinct agents, merging into a single agent without agential parts. Against this objection, I argue that we should recognise the possibility of simultaneous agency in whole and parts, and not regard either as disqualifying the other.

I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual'... more I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways to extend and generalize the attentional construal of 'field-talk' to provide a genuine multiplicity of dimensions, through the notions of attentional proximity and causal proximity: the degree to which two experiential elements are disposed to bring one another into attention when attended, or to interact in other distinctively mental ways. I conclude that if consciousness is a field, it is one organized by attentional and/or causal proximity.

This paper was published in the Journal of Environmental Philosophy to critique something like th... more This paper was published in the Journal of Environmental Philosophy to critique something like the following idea: the natural world is in some sense a community, and recognising this fact should affect our ethical attitude to it. I argue that the natural world is not in any ethically significant sense a community.

Papers on Panpsychism and the Combination Problem by Luke Roelofs

This paper, co-authored with Jed Buchanan, examines the tension between everyday intuitions about... more This paper, co-authored with Jed Buchanan, examines the tension between everyday intuitions about consciousness and some philosophical theories, like panpsychism, which imply consciousness in surprising places. We argue against entirely rejecting either intuition or theory, and defend some ways of reconciling the two.

Doctor of Philosophy, 2015, Graduate This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousn... more Doctor of Philosophy, 2015, Graduate This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a longstanding intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference?

Panpsychists and their critics have by now distinguished a multitude of problems falling under th... more Panpsychists and their critics have by now distinguished a multitude of problems falling under the heading of 'the combination problem'. But we can distinguish 'hard problems of combination' from 'easy problems of combination', in a way that parallels the distinction between the 'hard' and 'easy' problems of consciousness. Just as the hard problem of consciousness is not even approachable by the usual methods of cognitive science, which seem able at least in principle to address the various easy problems of consciousness, the 'hard problems of combination' are those which are not even approachable by the methods of phenomenological analysis, which seem able at least in principle to address the various easy problems of combination.

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many expe... more The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such 'between-subjects unity'. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of 'experience-sharing', in which the same token experience belongs to more than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like.

I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the rel... more I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the 'grain problem'), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of 'the palette problem'). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small 'palette' of basic qualities could give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of 'phenomenal blending', and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive 'phenomenologically simple character'. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost.

Combining Minds by Luke Roelofs

[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the first c... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press]

This is a preprint of the first chapter of my book 'Combining Minds'. It introduces the topic of the book—composite subjectivity—and explains why it matters. This involves clarifying how the key term “combination” is used and how the key ideas like “composition” and “consciousness” are understood, as well as reviewing the various reasons why philosophers have tended to deny or neglect the possibility of composite subjectivity, and the implications they have drawn from doing so. I explain the significance of mental combination for panpsychism’s combination problem, for collective consciousness, and for a variety of other issues in the philosophy of mind, and sketches out the book’s plan of attack.

[Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the second chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter looks at five arguments that have been advanced to show that minds cannot combine (under the heading of the "combination problem for panpsychism") and considers the options for addressing them. They are the subject-summing argument, the unity argument, the privacy argument, the boundary argument, and the incompatible contexts argument. All of these arguments, under scrutiny, turn out to rest on assumptions either about the metaphysics of subjects of experience or about the unity of consciousness, so this chapter contains some in-depth examination of these two topics. For both topics, there is room for a range of plausible but conflicting views, and so the chapter outlines a plan to sketch three different theories of mental combination, starting from different assumptions about subjects and unity.

[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the third cha... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the third chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter is about how to combine the very simple subjects of experience posited by panpsychism, the theory that matter itself is inherently conscious. The combination problem has been most thoroughly discussed in relation to the combination of these 'microsubjects', and this chapter addresses head-on the two central strands of the combination problem: the subject-summing problem and the problem of the unity, and boundaries, of consciousness. Alternative solutions, including cosmopsychism (the world as a whole is conscious) and panprotopsychism (matter is not conscious, but contains some sort of germ of consciousness) are also discussed. The metaphysics of nature that results from addressing these challenges is both highly counterintuitive and theoretically elegant.

[Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the fourth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter considers a particular set of combination problems facing panpsychism, based on the apparent structural discrepancy between human consciousness and the microphysical structure of the brain. These problems have been termed the revelation problem, the palette problem, and the mismatch problem, and this chapter seeks to resolve them by developing a series of connected hypotheses about how phenomenal qualities combine and blend based on informational relations among them: the radical confusion hypothesis, the small palette hypothesis, and the informational structure hypothesis. These hypotheses are also shown to be compatible with moderate versions of the revelation thesis, the idea that by undergoing experience we are acquainted with the nature of experience.

[Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstra... more [Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the fifth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience understood in functionalist terms, as systems whose consciousness comes from having a functional structure which supports intelligent behavior. This requires examining how composition relates to the key features of such subjects, including not just their functional structure but the structure of their consciousness, and the systematic coherence between these two structures. The chapter argues that information-integrating interactions are key to connecting the conscious structure and functional structure of the parts, so that they form a whole with even richer structure. This integration can take many forms, even including the social interactions of cooperating subjects in a social group.

[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the first c... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press]

[Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: the text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract for the sixth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter looks at four potential cases of mental combination, to examine what the theory sketched in the previous chapter might say about them. It starts with the “Nation-Brain” thought experiment, originally offered as a reductio ad absurdum of functionalism, where a few billion people agree to collectively simulate a single human mind. It then considers actual human social groups, the ways that they differ from this thought experiment, and the significance of these differences for questions of collective mentality. It next considers the split-brain phenomenon, where patients with a severed corpus callosum seem at times to exhibit two distinct consciousnesses in one head, and then finally comes back to the ordinary human brain, where two cerebral hemispheres, each capable of supporting consciousness without the other, are able to establish richly unified consciousness through their intact corpus callosum.

[Preprint: Final chapter available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the sevent... more [Preprint: Final chapter available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the seventh chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience as they are understood by the psychological theory of personal identity. On this theory subjects are not the systems which generate mental states, but are instead constructs defined by the patterns of continuity among mental states. This requires considering how component and composite subjects can be individuated from one another, how they can develop self-consciousness, and how they can display agency. This results in a combinationist account of what is going on in everyday experiences of inner conflict and in dissociative identity disorder—an account which can recognize the conflicting or dissociated parts as subjects in their own right, but also as forming a composite subject with a greater or lesser degree of unity.

[Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstrac... more [Abstract: The text of this chapter is available from Oxford University Press] This is an abstract of the eighth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter considers in depth a particularly perplexing thought experiment that has puzzled theorists of personal identity, namely person-fusion. Philosophers have wondered: if two people were to go through a process of brain-interfacing that gradually changed them into a single, integrated, person combining the traits of both, should that be regarded as the destruction or the survival of the original subjects of experience? The chapter discusses this question, and tries to think through what this process might be like for the people involved: how they might experience a gradual shift from recognizably interpersonal ways of relating to the other person, to relations more like those that hold within a single person’s consciousness.

[Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the ninth cha... more [Preprint: Final text available from Oxford University Press] This is a preprint of the ninth chapter of 'Combining Minds'. This chapter draws together the previous chapters’ ideas and considers one remaining question: If mental combination is possible, why have so many people thought it impossible? Why does combining minds seem so strange and perplexing? The chapter argues that the idea is hard for us partly because of contingent facts about human (and more broadly vertebrate) anatomy, and partly because of the way that common conceptual confusions and uncertainties about consciousness and composition interact with each other. Because of these uncertainties, any answer to the major objections against mental combination will seem to miss something important, and only by developing more than one combinationist theory can combinationism be defended at all.

This is the list of sources I cite in my book 'Combining Minds'.

Philosophical studies, May 29, 2024

It may soon be possible for neurotechnology to connect two subjects' brains such that they share ... more It may soon be possible for neurotechnology to connect two subjects' brains such that they share a single token mental state, such as a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. How will our moral frameworks have to adapt to accommodate this prospect? And if this sort of mental-state-sharing might already obtain in some cases, how should this possibility impact our moral thinking? This question turns out to be extremely challenging, because different examples generate different intuitions: If two subjects share very few mental states, then it seems that we should count the value of those states twice, but if they share very many mental states, then it seems that we should count the value of those statesonce. We suggest that these conflicting intuitions can be reconciled if the mental states that matter for welfare have a holistic character, in a way that is independently plausible. We close by drawing tentative conclusions about how we ought to think about the moral significance of shared mental states.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Dialectica

Critics have charged constitutive panpsychism with inconsistency.Panpsychists reject physicalism ... more Critics have charged constitutive panpsychism with inconsistency.Panpsychists reject physicalism for its seeming inability to explainconsciousness. In making this argument, they commit themselves tothe idea of "revelation": that we know, in some especially direct way,the nature of consciousness. Yet they then attribute properties to ourconsciousness---like being constituted out of trillions of simplerexperiential parts---that conflict with how it seems introspectively.This seems to pose a dilemma: either revelation is false, andphysicalism remains intact, or revelation is true, and constitutivepanpsychists are hoist by their own petard. But this is too simplistic.Constitutive panpsychists can say that our minds contain innumerablephenomenal states that are "confused" with one another: immediatelypresent to introspection only en masse, not individually. Acceptingrevelation does not require ignoring the attentional, conceptual, andinterpretive limitations of intros...

The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, 2019

Philosophical Studies, 2018

Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuiti... more Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuitively think are conscious-most notably, panpsychism implies that consciousness is pervasive, even outside complex brains. Is this a reductio ab absurdum for such theories, or does it show that we should reject our original intuitions? To understand the stakes of this question as clearly as possible, we analyse the structured pattern of intuitions that panpsychism conflicts with (what we call the 'Great Chain of Being' intuition). We consider a variety of ways that the tension between this intuition and panpsychism (or other counter-intuitive theories) could be resolved, ranging from complete rejection of the theory to complete dismissal of the intuition, but argue in favour of more nuanced approaches which try to reconcile the two. Keywords Panpsychism Á Intuitions Á Consciousness Á Other minds Á Animal ethics Philosophers often find themselves led by theoretical reasoning into views that are sharply-some might say wildly-counter-intuitive. What is the most sensible response to such situations? We discuss a particular instance of this general issue, involving the distribution of consciousness in nature: which beings are, and which are not, phenomenally conscious? How should we react to theories which imply that & Luke Roelofs

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2017

Chalmers argues against physicalism using the premise that no truth about consciousness is deduci... more Chalmers argues against physicalism using the premise that no truth about consciousness is deducible a priori from purely structural truths, and later defines what it is for a truth to be structural, which turns out to include spatiotemporal truths. But Chalmers then defines spatiotemporal terms by reference to their role in causing spatiotemporal experiences. Stoljar and Ebbers argue that these definitions allow for the trivial falsification of Chalmers premise about structure and consciousness. I show that this result can be avoided by tweaking the relevant premise, and that this tweak is not ad hoc. Daniel Stoljar and Melissa Ebbers have recently argued that two key parts of the metaphysical framework developed by David Chalmers are incompatible. On the one hand, this framework is committed to a principled conceptual separation between consciousness, understood as 'non-structural', and physics, understood as 'structural'. We can formulate this as follows: Non-Entailment (NE): No truth about consciousness follows a priori from any set of purely structural truths. This principle, together with the claim that physics can teach us only structural truths, serves both as an argument against physicalism (Chalmers,

Erkenntnis, 2017

The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by d... more The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through 'perceptual co-presentation', in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of physical objects as unperceived. I discuss existing versions of this idea, particularly Joel Smith's, on which it is taken to imply that our knowledge of other minds is, in these cases, perceptual and not inferential. Against this, I argue that perceptual co-presentation in general, and mind-perception in particular, yields knowledge that is simultaneously both perceptual and inferential.

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2021

Galileo's Error is a superlative work of public philosophy, particularly as a way of introduc... more Galileo's Error is a superlative work of public philosophy, particularly as a way of introducing modern academic panpsychism to a broader audience. In this commentary, I reflect on an issue that is prominent, though often with different background concerns, in both academic and popular discourse: what it means to be 'scientific' or 'unscientific'. Panpsychism is not itself a scientific hypothesis, but neither is it (as critics sometimes claim) in conflict with science. Indeed, Goff argues, and I agree, that panpsychism is an eminently scientific worldview, in the sense of a way of viewing reality that accords with and embraces what science reveals. But what exactly it means to 'accord with and embrace' science is disputed; this paper tries to untangle some of the threads.

Philosophical Studies, 2016

Erkenntnis

This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, ... more This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pre- tence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are indeterminate, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires.

Combining Minds, 2019

This chapter looks at four potential cases of mental combination, to examine what the theory sket... more This chapter looks at four potential cases of mental combination, to examine what the theory sketched in the previous chapter might say about them. It starts with the “Nation-Brain” thought experiment, originally offered as a reductio ad absurdum of functionalism, where a few billion people agree to collectively simulate a single human mind. It then considers actual human social groups, the ways that they differ from this thought experiment, and the significance of these differences for questions of collective mentality. It next considers the split-brain phenomenon, where patients with a severed corpus callosum seem at times to exhibit two distinct consciousnesses in one head, and then finally comes back to the ordinary human brain, where two cerebral hemispheres, each capable of supporting consciousness without the other, are able to establish richly unified consciousness through their intact corpus callosum.

Combining Minds, 2019

This chapter is about how to combine the very simple subjects of experience posited by panpsychis... more This chapter is about how to combine the very simple subjects of experience posited by panpsychism, the theory that matter itself is inherently conscious. The combination problem has been most thoroughly discussed in relation to the combination of these microsubjects, and this chapter addresses head-on the two central strands of the combination problem: the subject-summing problem and the problem of the unity, and boundaries, of consciousness. Alternative solutions, including cosmopsychism (the world as a whole is conscious) and panprotopsychism (matter is not conscious, but contains some sort of germ of consciousness) are also discussed. The metaphysics of nature that results from addressing these challenges is both highly counterintuitive and theoretically elegant.

Combining Minds, 2019

This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience understood in functionalist terms, as... more This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience understood in functionalist terms, as systems whose consciousness comes from having a functional structure which supports intelligent behavior. This requires examining how composition relates to the key features of such subjects, including not just their functional structure but the structure of their consciousness, and the systematic coherence between these two structures. The chapter argues that information-integrating interactions are key to connecting the conscious structure and functional structure of the parts, so that they form a whole with even richer structure. This integration can take many forms, even including the social interactions of cooperating subjects in a social group.

Combining Minds, 2019

This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience as they are understood by the psychol... more This chapter is about how to combine subjects of experience as they are understood by the psychological theory of personal identity (Neo-Lockeanism). On this theory subjects are not the systems which generate mental states, but are instead constructs defined by the patterns of continuity among mental states. This requires considering how component and composite subjects can be individuated from one another, how they can develop self-consciousness, and how they can display agency. This results in a combinationist account of what is going on in everyday experiences of inner conflict and in dissociative identity disorder—an account which can recognize the conflicting or dissociated parts as subjects in their own right, but also as forming a composite subject with a greater or lesser degree of unity.

This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate ... more This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds? Could several of us, by organizing ourselves the right way, constitute a single conscious mind that contains our minds as parts? And could each of us have been, all along, a group of mental parts in close cooperation? Scientific progress seems to be slowly revealing that all the different physical objects around us are, at root, just a matter of the right parts put together in the right ways: How far could the same be true of minds? This book argues that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity and that understanding our place in nature requires being willing to see minds as composite systems, simultaneously one conscious whole and many conscious parts. In thinking through the implications of such a shift of perspective, the book relates the question of mental combination to a range of different theories of the mind (in particular panpsychism, functio...