Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Colloquium Series: Dr. Jonathan Simon
November 8, 2024 at 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM
| Location: | RB 3220 |
| Cost: | Free |
We are pleased to invite you to our fourth colloquium of the Academic Year!
Throughout the fall and winter terms, the Department of Philosophy hosts a series of lectures delivered by guest speakers/visiting and current professors. This colloquium lecture will take place in RB 3220 .
Dr. Jonathan Simon (Université de Montréal)
Talk title: The Moral Case for the Determinacy of Consciousness
Friday, November 8th, 2024
1:30pm EST
Abstract: Which comatose patients are sentient? Do fish feel pain? Will robots suffer? These are hard cases of consciousness: cases that we can’t decisively settle. But hard cases of consciousness are everywhere, and they give rise to pressing decision problems. For example, if we can’t settle whether fish feel pain, we can’t settle whether we do harm by eating them. How to decide? One popular answer appeals to indeterminacy. On this approach, the hard cases are neither determinately conscious nor determinately not conscious, and this is the key to resolving the decision problems they give rise to. Here I argue that the indeterminacy approach cannot be the key to resolving the decision problems that the hard cases give rise to, because no matter how we implement the indeterminacy approach, we get one of two undesirable results: either the wrong verdicts, or the right verdicts for the wrong reasons (reasons that entail significant differences in how individuals should be treated, without suitable descriptive differences between those individuals). In contrast, treating these cases as cases of theoretical uncertainty delivers the right results and the right justifications for them. In other words, I argue from a cluster of moral intuitions to the conclusion that there are determinate facts of the matter about consciousness, even in hard cases.