Coincidence and Consciousness

Session chaired by : Anouk Barberousse (Sorbonne University)

Abstract

Yablo 1987 is an early statement of modal profile pluralism (MPP): the idea that in the vicinity of every ordinary object there exist infinitely many coincident objects, one for each "modal profile" consistent with the categorical features of the original. This talk asks how the crucial notion of a categorical property is to be defined and argues that certain hyperintensional resources-grounding and essence-are useful for this purpose. The talk then argues that consciousness is categorical (hence that each of the infinitely many things coincident with you is conscious), and then asks whether self-consciousness is categorical, where self-consciousness is the capacity for reflective de se thought. Johnston 2016 has argued that pluralist views like MPP have disastrous consequences for ethics. The question is whether those consequences can be resisted in this context by insisting that of the many conscious beings coincident with a given person, most are incapable of thinking about themselves and so have no relevant moral status.

Gideon Rosen

Gideon Rosen is Stuart Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author (with John P. Burgess) of A Subject With No Object: Strategies of Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics, along with numerous essays in ethics and metaphysics, and editor of the Norton Introduction to Philosophy.