Death.--The absurd.--Moral luck.--Sexual perversion.--War and massacre.--Ruthlessness in public life.--The policy of preference.--Equality.--The fragmentation of value.--Ethics without biology.--Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness.--What is it like to be a bat?--Panpsychism.--Subjective and objective.

In Thomas Metzinger, Conscious Experience, Schoningh Verlag. 1995. [ online ].

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is not conceivable.1 This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the first- person perspective -- must (...) be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take the form of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing the mental in terms of the physical. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the claim that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible connection between qualitative and physical concepts.

Chalmers’s anti-materialist argument runs as follows.

This paper discusses a number of recent criticisms of ‘theoretical’ accounts of mental state concepts—that is, accounts which take these concepts to derive their meanings from the roles played by mental states in the explanation of behavior: in particular, I evaluate the claim that (insofar as they are ‘third‐personal’ or ‘theoretical’) these concepts cannot individuate mental states that intuitively are distinct, and the claim that they cannot account for what goes on in the ascription of mental states to oneself. I (...) argue (with reference to what may be the originating text of this approach to mental state concepts, Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’) that, although these criticisms may have some plausibility when directed against theoretical accounts of experiential or qualitative states, they have little plausibility when directed against theoretical accounts of intentional states. In so arguing, moreover, I try to show the shortcomings of various recent ‘first‐person’ or ‘subjectivist’ views. (shrink)