SSP Forum: Joshua ORourke on Consciousness and Moral Status + Watch Party for Alumni Panel

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

The Rationalizing Role of Consciousness and the Moral Status of Fish, AI, and Zombies

Joshua ORourke
Philosophy Department

Tuesday, May 23, 2023
4:30-5:20 pm PDT
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126

(see below for a follow-on event happening in the same room from 5:30 to 6:30 pm)

ABSTRACT:

It is intuitively obvious that our conscious experiences play a part in rationalizing our behaviors, at least sometimes. How is this possible? Theories that explain consciousness in terms of mental representation have an easy answer. If conscious states are reducible to mental representations, then it is the contents of these more basic representations that rationalize our behaviors. Theories that do not tie conscious states directly to mental representations have a harder time, but they do have a story to tell. Conscious states do not have representational content built into them. Rather, they pick up representational content because we use them in certain ways, as signals of outward phenomena. It is in virtue of this derived representational content that conscious states can rationalize behavior. I will argue that if this is the right way of looking at things, then the phenomenal character of a creature’s experiences cannot make a moral difference to how we should treat that creature. No matter what your theory of consciousness is, I think that tells us something interesting about what matters morally. I will go on to draw some lessons for hard cases of moral status: philosophical zombies, fish, and AI.

Following the above event, we will continue in the same room with a watch party for the following virtual event aimed at SymSys students and alums:

A NOTE ON THE RECORDING OF EVENTS:

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