New in Draft: When Counting Conscious Subjects, the Result Needn't Always Be a Determinate Whole Number

(with Sophie R. Nelson)

One philosophical inclination I shared with the late Dan Dennett is a love of weird perspectives on consciousness, which sharply violate ordinary, everyday common sense. When I was invited to contribute to a special issue of Philosophical Psychology in his memory, I thought of his intriguing remark in Consciousness Explained against "the myth of selves as brain-pearls, particular, concrete, countable things", lamenting people's stubborn refusal "to countenance the possibility of quasi-selves, semi-selves, transitional selves" (1991, p. 424-425). As I discussed in a blog post in June, Dennett's "fame in the brain" view of consciousness naturally suggests that consciousness won't always come in discrete, countable packages, since fame is a gradable, multidimensional phenomenon, with lots of gray area and partial overlap.

So I contacted Sophie R. Nelson, with whom I'd published a paper last year on borderline cases of group minds, and we decided to generalize the idea. On a broad range of naturalistic, scientific approaches to consciousness, we ought to expect that conscious subjects needn't always come in determinate, whole number packages. Sometimes, the number of conscious subjects in an environment should be either indeterminate, or a determinate non-whole number, or best modeled by some more complicated mathematical representation. If some of us have commonsense intuitions to the contrary, such intuitions aren't probative.

Our submission is due November 30, and comments are (as always) very welcome -- either before or after the Nov 30 deadline (since we expect at least one round of revisions).

Abstract:

Could there be 7/8 of a conscious subject, or 1.34 conscious subjects, or an entity indeterminate between being one conscious subject and seventeen? Such possibilities might seem absurd or inconceivable, but our ordinary assumptions on this matter might be radically mistaken. Taking inspiration from Dennett, we argue that, on a wide range of naturalistic views of consciousness, the processes underlying consciousness are sufficiently complex to render it implausible that conscious subjects must always arise in determinate whole numbers. Whole-number-countability might be an accident of typical vertebrate biology. We explore several versions of the inconceivability objection, suggesting that the fact that we cannot imagine what it’s like to be 7/8 or 1.34 or an indeterminate number of conscious subjects is no evidence against the possibility of such subjects. Either the imaginative demand is implicitly self-contradictory (imagine the one, determinate thing it’s like to be an entity there isn’t one, determinate thing it’s like to be) or imaginability in the relevant sense isn’t an appropriate test of possibility (in the same way that the unimaginability, for humans, of bat echolocation experiences does not establish that bat echolocation experiences are impossible).

Full draft here.

[Figure 2 from Schwitzgebel and Nelson, in draft: An entity intermediate or indeterminate between one and three conscious subjects. Solid circles represent determinately conscious mental states. Dotted lines represent indeterminate or intermediate unity among those states.]