28 found
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  1. Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism.Brian Cutter & Dustin Crummett - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.
    This paper develops a new argument from consciousness to theism: the argument from psychophysical harmony. Roughly, psychophysical harmony consists in the fact that phenomenal states are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. For example, phenomenal states are correlated with behavior and functioning that is justified or rationalized by those very phenomenal states, and phenomenal states are correlated with verbal reports and judgments that are made true by those very phenomenal states. We argue that psychophysical (...)
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  2. Tracking representationalism and the painfulness of pain.Brian Cutter & Michael Tye - 2011 - Philosophical Issues 21 (1):90-109.
  3. The Problem of Nomological Harmony.Brian Cutter & Bradford Saad - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate solutions and identify some of their virtues and vices. Candidate solutions invoke the likes of a designer, (...)
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  4. The Many-Subjects Argument against Physicalism.Brian Cutter - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the (...)
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  5. From Moral Realism to Axiarchism.Brian Cutter - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47:73-101.
    Moral realism faces a well known genealogical debunking challenge. I argue that the moral realist’s best response may involve abandoning metaphysical naturalism in favor of some form of axiarchism—the view, very roughly, that the natural world is “ordered to the good.” Axiarchism comes in both theistic and non-theistic forms, but all forms agree that the natural world exists and has certain basic features because it is good for it to exist and have those features. I argue that theistic and non-theistic (...)
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  6. The mind-body problem and the color-body problem.Brian Cutter - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (3):725-744.
    According to a familiar modern view, color and other so-called secondary qualities reside only in consciousness, not in the external physical world. Many have argued that this “Galilean” view is the source of the mind-body problem in its current form. This paper critically examines a radical alternative to the Galilean view, which has recently been defended or sympathetically discussed by several philosophers, a view I call “anti-modernism.” Anti-modernism holds, roughly, that the modern Galilean scientific image is incomplete – in particular, (...)
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  7. Paradise Regained: A Non-Reductive Realist Account of the Sensible Qualities.Brian Cutter - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1):38-52.
    This paper defends a non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities—roughly, the view that the sensible qualities are really instantiated by the external objects of perception, and not reducible to response-independent physical properties or response-dependent relational properties. I begin by clarifying and motivating the non-reductive realist view. I then consider some familiar difficulties for the view. Addressing these difficulties leads to the development and defence of a general theory, inspired by Russellian Monist theories of consciousness, of how the sensible qualities (...)
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  8. Perceptual illusionism.Brian Cutter - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (4):396-417.
    Perceptual illusionism is the view that perceptual experience is, in general, radically illusory. That is, perceptual experience presents objects as having certain sensible properties and standing in certain sensible relations, but nothing in the subject’s environment has those properties or stands in those relations. This paper makes the case for perceptual illusionism by showing how a broad set of philosophical and scientific considerations converge to support illusionism about the full range of sensible properties and relations. After clarifying the illusionist thesis, (...)
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  9. The AI Ensoulment Hypothesis.Brian Cutter - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a (...)
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  10. Pains and reasons: Why it is rational to kill the Messenger.Brian Cutter & Michael Tye - 2014 - Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256):423-433.
    In this paper, we defend the representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness against a recent objection due to Hilla Jacobson, who charges representationalism with a failure to explain the role of pain in rationalizing certain forms of behavior. In rough outline, her objection is that the representationalist is unable to account for the rationality of certain acts, such as the act of taking pain killers, which are aimed at getting rid of the experience of pain rather than its intentional object. If (...)
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  11. The metaphysical implications of the moral significance of consciousness.Brian Cutter - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):103-130.
  12. A puzzle about the experience of left and right.Brian Cutter - 2020 - Noûs 55 (3):678-698.
    Imagine your mirror‐inverted counterpart on Mirror Earth, a perfect mirror image of Earth. Would her experiences be the same as yours, or would they be phenomenally mirror‐inverted? I argue, first, that her experiences would be phenomenally the same as yours. I then show that this conclusion gives rise to a puzzle, one that I believe pushes us toward some surprising and philosophically significant conclusions about the nature of perception. When you have a typical visual experience as of something to your (...)
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  13. Color and Shape: A Plea for Equal Treatment.Brian Cutter - 2016 - Philosophers' Imprint 16.
    Many philosophers, especially in the wake of the 17th century, have favored an inegalitarian view of shape and color, according to which shape is mind-independent while color is mind-dependent. In this essay, I advance a novel argument against inegalitarianism. The argument begins with an intuition about the modal dependence of color on shape, namely: it is impossible for something to have a color without having a shape. I then argue that, given reasonable assumptions, inegalitarianism contradicts this modal-dependence principle. Given the (...)
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  14. What is the consequence argument an argument for?Brian Cutter - 2017 - Analysis 77 (2):278-287.
    The consequence argument is widely regarded as the most important argument for incompatibilism. In this paper, I argue that, although the consequence argument may be sound in its standard formulations, it does not support any thesis that could reasonably be called ‘incompatibilism’.
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  15. Indeterminate perception and colour relationism.Brian Cutter - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):25-34.
    One of the most important objections to sense data theory comes from the phenomenon of indeterminate perception, as when an object in the periphery of one’s visual field looks red without looking to have any determinate shade of red. As sense data are supposed to have precisely the properties that sensibly appear to us, sense data theory evidently has the implausible consequence that a sense datum can have a determinable property without having any of its determinates. In this article, I (...)
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  16. Against the Middle Ground: Why Russellian Monism is Unstable.Brian Cutter - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (2):109-129.
  17. The Inconceivability Argument.Brian Cutter - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    This paper develops and defends a new argument against physicalist views of consciousness: the inconceivability argument. The argument has two main premises. First, it is not (ideally, positively) conceivable that phenomenal truths are grounded in physical truths. (For example, one cannot positively conceive of a situation in which someone has a vivid experience of pink wholly in virtue of the movements of colorless, insentient atoms.) Second, (ideal, positive) inconceivability is a guide to falsity. I attempt to show that the inconceivability (...)
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  18. Pain and representation.Brian Cutter - 2017 - In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain. New York: Routledge. pp. 290-39.
    This chapter focuses specifically on the case of pain. Despite traditional opposition to the representational thesis, the latter has won widespread assent. The most important early proponents of the representational thesis were David Armstrong and George Pitcher, both of whom held that pain is a form of perception. Following Armstrong and Pitcher, intentionalists have traditionally held that the experience of pain has a content with roughly the following form: there is a disturbance with such-and-such features at location L. Since the (...)
     
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  19. The modal argument improved.Brian Cutter - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):629-639.
    The modal argument against materialism, in its most standard form, relies on a compatibility thesis to the effect that the physical truths are compatible with the absence of consciousness. I propose an alternative modal argument that relies on an incompatibility thesis: The existence of consciousness is incompatible with the proposition that the physical truths provide a complete description of reality. I show that everyone who accepts the premises of the standard modal argument must accept the premises of the revised modal (...)
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  20. Spatial Experience and Special Relativity.Brian Cutter - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (9):2297-2313.
    In recent work, David Chalmers argues that “Edenic shapes”—roughly, the shape properties phenomenally presented in spatial experience—are not instantiated in our world. His reasons come largely from the theory of Special Relativity. Although Edenic shapes might have been instantiated in a classical Newtonian world, he maintains that they could not be instantiated in a relativistic world like our own. In this essay, I defend realism about Edenic shape, the thesis that Edenic shapes are instantiated in our world, against Chalmers’s challenge (...)
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  21. Why Nearly Everything Is Knowable A Priori.Brian Cutter - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (1):80-100.
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    Illusion, delusion, and neural sense data: comments on Adam Pautz’s Perception.Brian Cutter - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2283-2293.
    This commentary on Adam Pautz's excellent book, Perception, explores the consequences of “spatial illusionism,” the view that the spatial properties presented in experience aren't instantiated in the extra-mental world. First, I consider whether spatial illusionism entails that our ordinary beliefs about the physical world are mostly false. I then argue that spatial illusionism threatens to undermine two arguments Pautz's defends in Perception: his argument that sense data theory is incompatible with physicalism, and his central argument against the internal physical state (...)
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  23. Artificial Intelligence and Moral Theology: A Conversation.Brian Patrick Green, Matthew J. Gaudet, Levi Checketts, Brian Cutter, Noreen Herzfeld, Cory Andrew Labrecque, Anselm Ramelow, Paul Scherz, Marga Vega, Andrea Vicini & Jordan Joseph Wales - 2022 - Journal of Moral Theology 11 (Special Issue 1):13-40.
  24. Down the Labyrinthine Ways.Brian Cutter - 2019 - In Brian Besong & Jonathan Fuqua (eds.), Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. pp. 79-96.
  25. Unknowable Colour Facts.Brian Cutter - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):909-941.
    It is common for an object to present different colour appearances to different perceivers, even when the perceivers and viewing conditions are normal. For example, a Munsell chip might look unique green to you and yellowish green to me in normal viewing conditions. In such cases, there are three possibilities. Ecumenism: both experiences are veridical. Nihilism: both experiences are non-veridical. Inegalitarianism: one experience is veridical and the other is non-veridical. Perhaps the most important objection to inegalitarianism is the ignorance objection, (...)
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  26. Color and a priori knowledge.Brian Cutter - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (1):293-315.
    Some truths about color are knowable a priori. For example, it is knowable a priori that redness is not identical to the property of being square. This extremely modest and plausible claim has significant philosophical implications, or so I shall argue. First, I show that this claim entails the falsity of standard forms of color functionalism, the view that our color concepts are functional concepts that pick out their referents by way of functional descriptions that make reference to the subjective (...)
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  27.  68
    Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Reflections.Matthew J. Gaudet, Paul Scherz, Noreen Herzfeld, Jordan Joseph Wales, Nathan Colaner, Jeremiah Coogan, Mariele Courtois, Brian Cutter, David E. DeCosse, Justin Charles Gable, Brian Green, James Kintz, Cory Andrew Labrecque, Catherine Moon, Anselm Ramelow, John P. Slattery, Ana Margarita Vega, Luis G. Vera, Andrea Vicini & Warren von Eschenbach - 2023 - Eugene, OR: Pickwick Press.
    What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...)
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  28.  38
    Review of Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness (edited by Paul Coates and Sam Coleman). [REVIEW]Brian Cutter - 2016 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016.
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