Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0007
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Composite Subjectivity and Psychological Subjects","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123091142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0003
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Composite Subjectivity and Microsubjects","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114114153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0004
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"The Problems of Structural Discrepancy","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115926292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0001
L. Roelofs
This chapter 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 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. The chapter explains 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.
{"title":"A Universe of Composite Subjectivity","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter 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 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. The chapter explains 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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132658674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0008
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"What It Is Like for Two to Become One","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126717517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0009
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Concluding Remarks","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128134653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0006
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Composite Subjectivity in Organisms, Organs, and Organizations","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126470560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0002
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Conscious Subjects, Conscious Unity, and Five Arguments for Anti-Combination","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190859053.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"262 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120883216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-20DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0005
L. Roelofs
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.
{"title":"Composite Subjectivity and Intelligent Subjects","authors":"L. Roelofs","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190859053.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":188271,"journal":{"name":"Combining Minds","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121894419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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