14 December, Matteo GRASSO [WEBINAR]: "IIT VS RUSSELLIAN MONISM"

14 December 2018,
3 pm Greenwich Mean Time
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Matteo GRASSO
(University of Winsconsin)

IIT VS RUSSELLIAN MONISM:
A Metaphysical Showdown on the Content of Experience

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Abstract

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Oizumi, et al., 2014; Tononi, et al., 2016) attempts to account for both the quantitative and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, and in taking consciousness as fundamental and widespread it bears similarities to panpsychist Russellian monism (RM). In this paper I compare IIT’s and RM’s (in its categoricalist version) response to the conceivability argument, and their metaphysical account of conscious experience. I start by claiming that RM neutralizes the conceivability argument, but that by virtue of its commitment to categoricalism it doesn’t exclude fickle qualia scenarios (e.g. inverted or changing qualia). I argue that IIT’s core notion of intrinsic cause-effect power makes it incompatible with categoricalist versions of RM (Chalmers, 2013; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) and, to the contrary, best understood as entailing pandispositionalism, the view for which all properties are powers. I show that, thus construed, IIT can cope with both the conceivability and with the fickle qualia arguments, offers a promising way to account for the content of experience, and hence is preferable to categoricalist RM.