University of Hertfordshire

Faculty Member, Philosophy

Senior Lecturer

About

I studied philosophy at Oriel College Oxford and Darwin College Cambridge, before writing my PhD - a defence of the Knowledge Argument – at the University of London. I finished the PhD in 2006 after overcoming the slight wrinkle of being run over in 2004. I’m not totally ungrateful for this event, as it happens, because my views evolved a fair bit between being bashed and the eventual completion of the thesis – in particular I became keen on panpsychism: the theory that all matter contains a degree of consciousness. That’s what a big bump on the head will do for you.

I no longer subscribe to panpsychism, but my ideas have softened really only a little bit. I now think the best approach to the mind/body problem is that of Russell and James: matter contains some of what we find in mental contexts—certainly more than scientists typically believe—though by no means everything. Specifically, I hold that matter is qualitative, in the sense of featuring intrinsically the kinds of quality we find in conscious experience, for example the redness of seeing (or hallucinating, or dreaming) an apple. If matter lacked these sorts of qualities, I believe, there would be no way of understanding how arranging matter as a brain causes us to experience them. In contrast to the popular deflationary approaches of (what pass for) scientifically-minded philosophies of the day, I take it that the qualities we experience are known to be real if anything is: There is simply no denying that a redness exists somewhere when one apparently sees an apple. The fact that one can hallucinate or dream the same redness makes me think the redness exists in the mind of the perceiver in the first place.

Matter is not conscious, I now believe. What enables consciousness is our awareness of qualities, thus the job of brains is primarily to provide for that awareness. The brain is some kind of self-scanning mechanism, I theorise (not a novel suggestion) geared to observing the quality that matter already has. This theory, I believe, provides a materialist, scientifically respectable solution to the mind/body problem, and it provides for natural explanations of things like the privacy of experience, as I hope to show over the next several years.

I have written papers on panpsychism, the combination problem, neutral monism and the extended mind theory. In the future I hope to write some political philosophy, but must first sort out my metaphysics, being as I am of the opinion that the former flows from the latter. I also hope to complete someday half-written pieces on the nature of creativity, dispositions and the theory of reference. One fine day I aim to put my worldview down in a big book. The theme is: how implicit dualism (even in, especially in, allegedly ‘scientific’ philosophy) is the basis of many of our problems: theoretical, moral, political, even psychological.

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