fragments of consciousness

We've just posted the following ad for postdoctoral fellowships in the ANU Centre for Consciousness.  The deadline is just two weeks away, so please apply soon if you're interested.  There will be 1-3 positions, and these are distinct from the other ANU philosophy postdocs recently advertised.  As the ad says, further details can be found here.

Australian National University
SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Postdoctoral Fellow/Research Fellow Fixed-Term Level A/B

The School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, seeks to appoint one or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B), subject to funding. The Fellows will be appointed in association with the ANU Centre for Consciousness directed by Professor David Chalmers and with the ARC Research Project on "The Basis of Conscious Thought". Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind or language, metaphysics, epistemology, or cognitive science. Appointment will be for up to three years. The School will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment from other institutions, and particularly welcomes applications from female candidates. Full details can be found at consc.net/fellows.html.  Deadline: February 24, 2012.

 

Toward a Science of Consciousness 2012 will be held at the Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson on April 9-14 next year.  It's shaping up to be a great conference.  The deadline for abstract submission is in a few days, on December 31.  Anyone doing work on consciousness is encouraged to submit an abstract.

Two other relevant conferences coming up later in the year are ASSC 16 in Sussex on July 2-6, and a summer school on The Evolution and Function of Consciousness in Montreal from June 30 to July 8.  And don't forget the AAP in Wollongong July 1-6.  It's a shame that all three of these clash with each other!

Yet another new project from the PhilPapers team: PhilEvents, a website devoted to upcoming events in philosophy.  PhilEvents has a database of hundreds of forthcoming events.  You can search it in many different ways: by subject, by location, and by various combinations of subject, location, and so on.  You can use this to set up RSS feeds for searches on subjects and locations of interest.

The database covers conferences as well as covering talks and calls for papers for books and conferences.  You can maintain a "My events" lists of the events of interest to you, and use special widgets to display information about events on other websites.  To start with, items have been entered manually, but we hope that in the longer term organizers will submit their events to PhilEvents as a matter of course.  The site can also be used to store associated information about events before and after the fact -- papers, audio or video, photos, and so on.  We hope that this site will be useful both for event organizers and for philosophers who want to find out about and take part in events.

The main credit for PhilEvents goes to David Bourget and his team at the Centre for Computing and Philosophy in the Institute for Philosophy at the University of London.  (I played only a minimal role.)  Thanks also for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee for a grant to fund the development of PhilEvents, and to Barry Smith at the Institute for Philosophy for support.

PhilJobs is also going strong.  The aim of serving as a comprehensive listing of jobs in philosophy seems to be working out: it contains listings for all the jobs in October and November editions of Jobs for Philosophers as well as many listings that cannot be found there.  It  currently has a database of 420 jobs, of which 292 are the subject of still-active ads.

The new PhilJobs website has been progressing in leaps and bounds.  It now has 250 active listings for 315 jobs in philosophy (some listings advertise multiple jobs).  The listings now include both full ads submitted directly by employers and "stubs" for jobs advertised in other venues (such as Jobs for Philosophers) containing the basic information about the positions (institution, position, AOS, AOC, deadline) and links to venues with full information.  As a result the site now has listings for all jobs advertised in the major venues for philosophy jobs.

PhilJobs has also introduced a "My Jobs" feature, where users can "save" some jobs to their personal "My Jobs" page.  Users can also "exclude" other jobs in which they are not interested, so they do not come up in future searches.  We hope that these features are useful for job candidates in keeping track of the jobs in which they are most interested.

See the PhilJobs FAQ (especially the last four items there) for more details on these new features.

The PhilPapers team is announcing a new service: PhilJobs, an online database of philosophy job advertisements.  The database is to include philosophy job ads of all sorts and from all over the world, and will be searchable in many different ways.  We hope that it provides a useful service both for people advertising philosophy jobs and especially for philosophy job candidates.

PhilJobs aims to provide an international year-round service for philosophy job advertisements.  It builds in features such as email alerts to let users know when relevant jobs are advertised.  It also provides integration with PhilPapers: for example, jobs will be advertised on PhilPapers where appropriate, and users can login under their PhilPapers account and to exploit saved searches and the like that way.

As we explain in the FAQ, PhilJobs is not intended to undercut the APA's Jobs for Philosophers or any other national association's job service.  We see this as an international project: the PhilJobs directors have appointments in the US, the UK, and Australia, and the project is run out of the Institute of Philosophy in London.  PhilJobs also offers a numbers of features that the APA does not, including notably an online searchable database.

We've been working on this service for a few months now (Brian Leiter foreshadowed it here).  A couple of weeks ago, another service with a fairly similar aim, Phylo Jobs, was announced.  This took us by surprise, but in the end we've decided to launch on our planned schedule.  The people at Phylo have done a very nice job.  PhilJobs offers a few different features, including saved searches, email alerts, and integration with PhilPapers.  It will also offer many new features in the future, including the possibility of online job submissions.  So we'll just see where things go from here.

The chief architect of the PhilJobs project has been David Bourget, working along with his team at the newly formed Centre for Computing and Philosophy, of which he is director.  (As with PhilPapers, David and I are co-directors of PhilJobs, but I've played a much smaller role on this project.)  We're all lucky to have someone with David's vision and his combined talents for software design and for philosophy doing this sort of work for the philosophy community.  The new Centre is part of the University of London's Institute of Philosophy, directed by Barry Smith.  We're grateful to the Institute and to Barry for infrastructure and support.

For now, we encourage anyone advertising a philosophy job to submit it to PhilJobs (submission is easy and free), and we encourage anyone looking for a job in philosophy to try out the search mechanisms on the site.  Any feedback (either via the site or via the PhilJobs discussion forum on PhilPapers) will be very welcome.

I'm hunkered down at the moment trying to finish my book.  In the meantime, here are a few video goodies I've been involved with that have recently gone online.  This week's episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman on the Science Channel has a lot on consciousness, including some clips of the zombie blues and the NYU philosophy staircase.  (My bit starts around the 7:30 mark; ignore the "sixth sense" framing at the start of the episode!  If your auditory system can handle the trauma, YouTube also has a clip of the full zombie blues from that occasion.)   There's also a video of my TEDxSydney talk on the extended mind.  And a video of a recent panel discussion (my bit starts around 14:20) at the National Portrait Gallery that goes into autobiographical and philosophical matters (for their Inner Worlds exhibition; see also this ABC news piece).

My unpublished 1993 paper "A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition" is to be the subject of a special issue in the Journal of Cognitive Science.  This is the best statement of my views on computation and cognition, and I still agree with most of it.  I'm not sure why I never published it.  It received an encouraging revise and resubmit from Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1994, but then I got caught up with finishing The Conscious Mind and then moving to Santa Cruz and never resubmitted it.  (The same thing happened with "The Components of Content" at Mind.)  Maybe I took the  view that web publication was nearly as good as journal publication.  That view turns out to be overoptimistic, but the paper has been cited quite a lot over the years and I'm still quite fond of it.  So I was pleased when Gualtiero Piccinini, who has himself done important work in this area, suggested this special issue.  A number of the leading people in this area have already agreed to comment (there's also a call for submissions), and I'll write a reply. 

Other publication news: In addition to this symposium and the Journal of Consciousness Studies symposium on the singularity, there will be symposia on The Character of Consciousness in Analysis Reviews and Philosophical Studies.  Also, "Verbal Disputes" is forthcoming in the Philosophical Review, "Revisability and Conceptual Change in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'" is forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy, "Frege's Puzzle and the Objects of Credence" is forthcoming in Mind (I think), and there are previously mentioned forthcoming papers in Nous and Analysis.  As someone who's often been bad about journal publication (see above), it's nice to have a few things coming out.  In addition, "The Nature of Epistemic Space" will finally appear in the Egan/Weatherson Epistemic Modality volume any day now, and Constructing the World is still on track for publication sometime next year.

We have just advertised a number of jobs in philosophy at ANU.  These jobs include two or more postdoctoral fellows: one or two in the Centre for Consciousness (directed by me) and one in an ARC project on Philosophical Progress directed by Daniel Stoljar and Frank Jackson.  An ad will appear in Jobs for Philosophers shortly, but in any case details on these jobs can be found here.  The official deadline is January 14, but we encourage candidates to submit applications as soon as they can.

Two other positions were advertised a while ago, with deadline December 15.  These are both permanent positions in the RSSS School of Philosophy (the RSSS Philosophy Program recently merged with the Philosophy Program in the School of Humanities to form a single larger RSSS School of Philosophy).  One position is a junior (level B) research position in social and political philosophy.  The second is a senior (level E) research/teaching position with a largely open area.  Whoever fills the second job will be a senior professor in the department and will also play an administrative role as the head of the teaching side of the philosophy program.  We are hoping to find a well-respected senior scholar for this position, and all inquiries are welcome.

We will also soon have another position: a 4-year research position associated with Daniel Stoljar's ARC Future Fellowship. The area and level are somewhat open but we're especially hoping to find someone (senior or junior) in a "core" area of philosophy such as the philosophy of mind.  Again, all inquiries are welcome.

My article "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis" was recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.  JCS will be running a special issue with papers responding to the article in January 2012.  Authors who have agreed to contribute so far include Ned Block, Paul Churchland, Dan Dennett, Bert Dreyfus, Susan Greenfield, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Gary Marcus, Jesse Prinz, Drew McDermott, and Robert Sawyer.  JCS will also be considering submissions.  Details can be found on the last page of the JCS version of the article.

In other publication news: a revised and somewhat expanded version of my paper "Actuality and Knowability" is forthcoming in Analysis.

There will be a workshop on "The Phenomenology of Synesthesia", sponsored by the NYU Consciousness Project, on Saturday November 20.   It will be held in the first floor lecture theatre at 5 Washington Place (between Broadway and Washington Square in New York City).

Synesthesia is the syndrome in which a stimulus in one sensory modality reliably yields an experience associated with a different sensory modality.  The focus of the workshop will be the question "What is it like to be a synesthete?".  There will be talks and discussion from philosophers, psychologists, and synesthetes.  All are welcome.  The program is below.

9:30              Coffee

10-11            Carol Steen (artist and synesthete)
                     "Do you see what I see?"

11:15-12:15  Lawrence Marks (Yale, Psychology)
                     Three (scientific) questions about synesthesia".

12:15-2         Lunch

2-3                Berit Brogaard (Missouri, Philosophy)
                     "Does color synesthesia differ phenomenally from visual imagery?"

3:15-5           Panel Discussion (led by Jon Simon, Philosophy, NYU)
                     Panel: Berit Brogaard, Patricia Lynn Duffy, Lawrence Marks, Maureen Seaberg, Carol Steen

We have just posted a number of new results from last year's PhilPapers Philosophical Survey.  The results include correlations (over the responses from 930 target faculty) between the main answers to the survey, and correlations of those answers with background factors include gender, age, nationality, and much else.  We've also posted an attempt at a factor analysis, and a list of all public respondents.

The correlation results largely speak for themselves.  There are some fairly predictable geographic effects: e.g. a UK affiliation correlates most strongly with disjunctivism and a belief in a priori knowledge; Australasia with consequentialism and B-theory; US with deontology and Millianism; Europe with Fregeanism.  The strongest gender effects are that being female correlates with holding an epistemic view of truth, with not switching on the trolley problem, with rejecting apriority and analyticity, and with scientific anti-realism, while being male correlates with the opposite.  The strongest age effects are correlations of youth with Humeanism, B-theory, teletransporter survival, content externalism, and knowledge invariantism (and with being accurate on the metasurvey!).  There's much else of interest on the "highest correlations page" as well as on the pages for specific variables.

The factor analysis is not especially sophisticated, but the first four or five factors seem reasonably identifiable, corresponding roughly to naturalism, realism (especially about values and abstracta), rationalism, externalism, and epis