I’m Gordon Swobe. I investigate questions in the philosophy of mind — what perception puts us in touch with, what phenomenal consciousness comes to, how words reach the world, and whether a machine could ever genuinely understand or feel. I have turned these questions over for most of my life and studied them seriously for the better part of three decades. My own road into them ran through a career in information technology — a working life among computers, begun in childhood, that has kept the questions here about what a machine can and cannot do from ever feeling abstract. This site, and the book it serves, gather the long result together.
It started, as these things often do, with a machine. As a boy I met ELIZA — Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 program that answered your typed sentences like a mechanical therapist — and could not shake the sense that something behind the screen might understand me, even as I felt sure nothing did. That small, stubborn uncertainty never fully left. (The longer version of that story opens the book, in the Preface.) Roughly thirty years ago it pulled me into the literature in earnest: the primary texts, the hard cases argued out with anyone who would take them up, and a great deal of my own writing toward whatever clarity I could reach.
For much of that time I had the answer wrong, and held it firmly. My commitments ran broadly dualist — property dualist, to be exact. The gap between physical processes and felt experience seemed to me too wide for any purely physical story to close, and I argued the point hardest against functionalism, along lines that tracked the later Hilary Putnam — an irony, given that the early Putnam is the man who put functionalism on the map. Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument crystallized the whole view for me: Mary the color scientist, raised in a black-and-white room, learns every physical fact about color vision and still seems to learn something new the day she first sees red. That asymmetry looked decisive. Some form of dualism simply had to be true.
What moved me off it came from Jackson himself, who in later work — and in Mind and Illusion (2003) — followed his own argument past its famous conclusion and let it go, deciding that what Mary gains is a new way of knowing, not a new fact known. Working through the broader physicalist reply to the knowledge argument his reversal sent me back to — the phenomenal-concept strategy of Brian Loar, David Papineau, and Tye, and the ability-hypothesis line of David Lewis and Laurence Nemirow — I came to see the explanatory gap as real but lodged in our concepts rather than in the world: a problem in epistemology, not ontology. The view I had moved to has a name: David Chalmers calls it type B physicalism — physicalism that grants the explanatory gap is fully real yet denies it cuts the world in two, treating the first-person and third-person grasp of an experience as two ways of knowing one physical fact rather than two facts.
The position I now defend is realist about perception, and physicalist and strongly representationalist about consciousness. Experience hangs no veil of inner images between you and the world; it presents the world directly, and its felt character consists entirely in what it presents. The key idea is older than any of it: the mind’s directedness at what lies beyond it — intentionality, the mark of the mental in Franz Brentano’s phrase. On this view — developed in their own ways by Michael Tye, Fred Dretske, and others — phenomenal consciousness names no extra property floating above the physical, but a relation between a living creature and its environment, wholly within the natural order. Dismantle the private inner theater that Descartes left us, and a surprising number of the old puzzles either dissolve or come within reach.
On artificial minds, Searle’s Chinese Room first drew me into the modern debate, and I have never stopped feeling the force of its central intuition: shuffling symbols by formal rules, understanding nothing of what they mean, never adds up to understanding, however convincing the output. I have also come to think the room settles less on its own than it first appears — the conclusion has to rest on the wider architecture of mind, not on the scenario alone. Artificial consciousness stays possible in principle, on my view, but only for a system with genuine embodied stakes: a body, a world, and a causal history that reaches past the text.
This site is the public face of Mind, Matter, and Meaning, a book in progress that works these commitments through in full. Some of it engages the central figures in contemporary philosophy of mind — Tye, Dretske, Harman, McDowell, Searle, Block, Crane, Chalmers — and some reaches further back, to Brentano, Austin, Reid, and all the way to Aristotle. Both the site and the book remain, by their nature, works in progress. The position they defend is one I was argued into, not one I started with — I held an opposing view for years and gave it up only when the arguments finally outweighed it, and it has grown sturdier under pressure since. I still follow the arguments where they lead; so far they have kept me here.
A note on method. I work with large language models as research assistants, editorial interlocutors, and informal peer reviewers: they surface objections, track down literature, and tighten prose. The arguments and the positions are mine; the assistance, real and substantial, I see no reason to hide. Writing philosophy this way has become its own education in what these systems can and cannot do — part of why I write about them at all.
Beyond philosophy, I photograph wildlife, and birds in flight above all. Most of that work still lives on Flickr, though I am moving it here. Both pursuits come down to the same discipline: attending carefully to what the world actually holds.
If you would like to reach me, the contact form is the best way.