Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Articles

Selected articles, by subject

A selection of my writing, grouped by what it’s about and, within each group, ordered by how central and developed the piece is rather than by date. Each title carries a short summary of the argument it makes. Titles you can click are published; titles in plain text are drafts in progress that will go live as they’re finished. Together these articles form the spine of the forthcoming book, Mind, Matter, and Meaning.

Perception & the transparency of experience

  • The Bent Stick That Never Bent Your MindThe argument from illusion — the oldest engine for prying the perceiver loose from the world — turns on a single unargued premise: that when something looks bent, there must be something bent you are aware of. Following Austin, the essay exposes that “Phenomenal Principle” as a smuggled assumption rather than a datum, and shows the inference to sense-data trading on an equivocation in the word “looks.” Refute it and the veil of perception loses its first and most ancient support.
  • Look for the Seeing, Find the SeenTry to attend to your experience of seeing rather than to the thing seen, and you find only the thing — the experience proves “diaphanous,” in G. E. Moore’s word. The essay teaches this transparency directly, reads it with Harman and Tye as evidence that the felt character of experience consists in what it presents, and answers Ned Block’s mental-paint objection. It lays the foundation for the book’s central identity claim.
  • The Bedrock That Couldn’t Bear WeightEmpiricism’s bedrock was supposed to be the given — raw sensory data that justifies belief while needing no justification itself. The essay teaches Sellars’s Myth of the Given as the epistemological underside of the inner-theater critique: anything brute enough to be unquestionable turns out too brute to support a claim. The foundationalist’s bedrock cannot bear the weight placed on it.
  • The Time-Lag ArgumentBecause light takes time to arrive, the star you see may have died long ago — which seems to prove you never see the world itself, only a present inner image of a vanished cause. The essay traces this causal, time-lag route to the veil of perception, distinct from the argument from illusion, and diagnoses it as Searle’s “Bad Argument”: the step from “perception is caused” to “you perceive the cause’s effect” confuses the process of seeing with its object.
  • The Interface That Was Never TherePopular neuroscience says the brain “constructs your reality,” and Donald Hoffman’s desktop metaphor concludes you see a useful interface rather than the world. The essay grants the neuroscience and rejects the metaphor wrapped around it, drawing the vehicle/content distinction to show that your neural representation is what you see with, not what you see — a screen no one has ever managed to look at.
  • Transparency and the Inverted-Earth ObjectionDevelops the positive transparency datum: introspect on seeing and you meet the world, never an inner picture standing between you and it. Reading Moore and Harman against the sense-datum tradition, the essay argues that the very unfindability of the experience-as-object is what recommends representationalism — and sets up the claim that phenomenal character consists in world-directed content.

Representation, intentionality & meaning

  • Borrowed MeaningCan a large language model mean anything by the words it produces? Simon Grindrod’s recent and ingenious answer says yes — the model inherits a teleological lineage from the human texts it was trained on. The essay grants the cleverness, then argues the inheritance stays borrowed rather than earned: a system can stand downstream of meaning without thereby possessing it.
  • Why Meaning Requires ReferenceThe referential theory — meaning as the thing a word names — is the ancestral picture behind much confusion about language and mind. Working through Frege’s puzzles and Russell’s denoting cases, the essay shows that naming cannot be what meaning consists in, and clears the ground for the book’s larger thesis that syntax alone never delivers semantics.
  • The Job That Makes It RedThe identity claim says phenomenal character consists in representational content of the right kind — but which kind? The essay answers the question the claim leans on, drawing on Dretske and Millikan to spell out the world-tracking, biological function that earns a representation its standing, and shows how reliable misrepresentation (the frog’s eye, the malfunctioning detector) fits the account rather than breaking it.
  • The Spectrum That Wouldn’t FlipThe inverted spectrum — your red could be my green with no functional difference — is the second great objection to representationalism, the complement to the residue worry. The essay confronts the Block and Shoemaker inversion cases head-on and argues that a genuinely undetectable flip either makes no difference worth naming or quietly smuggles back the very inner qualia the identity claim denies.
  • Twin Earth and Semantic ExternalismPutnam’s 1975 Twin Earth thought experiment showed that “meanings just ain’t in the head”: what your words mean depends partly on the world your community has been pointing at, not solely on your inner states. The essay teaches semantic externalism from the ground up and draws out its sharpest contemporary consequence — for the confident claim that a text-trained machine already means what it says.
  • The Intentionality of MoodsFree-floating anxiety seems to refute Brentano’s thesis that every mental state is directed on an object — the consensus, from Searle onward, treats moods and pains as the killing counterexamples. The essay argues the consensus reads “about” too thinly: subtract a mood’s orientation toward the world and nothing remains, so the apparent counterexamples confirm the directedness thesis rather than sink it.
  • The Monster Under the Bed and the Puzzle of Intentional InexistenceA child fears a monster that does not exist — so what is the fear about? The essay uses the puzzle to recover what Brentano actually meant by “intentional inexistence” (immanence, not non-existence), corrects the century-old Chisholm misreading, and shows why the problem the misreading discovered remains genuinely productive.

The hard problem & consciousness

  • The Argument That Sent the Mind to the SidelinesJaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument threatens to make the mind a bystander: if every physical effect already has a sufficient physical cause, mental properties seem to do no work. The essay takes the threat seriously and argues the identity claim earns double duty — closing the explanatory gap and rescuing mental causation at once, since a mental state identical to a physical one never competes with it for the job.
  • The Easy Problem That Eats the Hard OneChalmers’s own meta-problem — why we feel so sure there is a hard problem — turns out to be a lever for deflating the thing it asks about. Taking the meta-problem seriously, the essay argues the explanatory gap lodges in our concepts rather than in the world, deflating the hard problem on epistemic grounds without sliding into illusionism.
  • Why the Hard Problem Doesn’t Prove DualismChalmers takes Levine’s explanatory gap — our inability to see why physical processes feel like anything — and escalates it into an ontological conclusion: consciousness must be something extra. The essay names that inference and refuses it, arguing the gap sits in our concepts and modes of access, not in the world, and so licenses no second realm.
  • How Qualia Got InventedThe feeling is real; the word is the addition. The essay traces how “qualia” came to wear the badge of the self-evident, and argues the term quietly imports a metaphysics — inner, intrinsic, ineffable properties — that the phenomenon it names never required. What you undeniably have is experience; what you do not thereby have is qualia.
  • The Zombie Conceivability TrapThe zombie argument — a being physically identical to you but devoid of experience seems conceivable, therefore possible, therefore consciousness is something extra — is the load-bearing instrument of Chalmers’s case for property dualism. The essay diagnoses the slide from conceivability to possibility, showing the apparent gap to be epistemic rather than metaphysical, and the dualist conclusion to outrun its premise.
  • The Re-enchantment of NatureThe worry that naturalism drains the world of meaning gets the history backwards. Drawing on McDowell, the essay argues that disenchantment was a self-inflicted picture, not a discovery — and that a relational, embodied naturalism re-seats significance in the world rather than banishing it to a second realm. The book’s titular payoff, made standalone.
  • The Case Against PanpsychismPanpsychism and Russellian monism are where today’s sophisticated reader actually defects: grant consciousness all the way down to the particles and the hard problem seems to dissolve. The essay positions this retreat generously, through Strawson and Chalmers, then presses the epistemic-slide and idle-wheel objections — the posited intrinsic natures do none of the explanatory work they were hired for.

Machines, computation & AI

  • The Perfect Digitally Simulated BrainSuppose we simulated a brain perfectly, neuron by neuron — would the simulation be conscious? The essay teaches the distinction the question turns on: simulating a process is not realizing it, and a model of digestion digests nothing. Drawing on Piccinini and Searle, it exposes the Church-Turing fallacy that slides from “the brain is computable” to “the brain is a computer.”
  • Multimodality and the Symbol-Grounding ProblemGrant that text-only models were ungrounded — does adding images fix it? The now-standard reply says multimodality solves the symbol-grounding problem. The essay answers that a captioned image is still a representation, not the world: stacking representations on representations never reaches the ground, and the grounding stays stolen rather than earned.
  • What a Machine Would Have to EarnWhat would genuine artificial understanding actually require? Setting aside both hype and dismissal, the essay works through the symbol-grounding problem (Harnad) and externalist semantics (Burge, Putnam) to itemize the bill: a body, a world, stakes, and a causal history — the conditions under which a machine’s states could be about anything at all.
  • What the Wiring Diagram Leaves OutFunctionalism gets something right — the correct causal organization is necessary for a mind — but mistakes it for sufficient. The essay argues the missing ingredient is not a non-physical residue, as the absent-qualia objector supposes, but world-involving content: organization with no world to be about leaves out exactly what makes a state mental.
  • The CTT Fallacy in Plain SightThe single most widespread bad inference in public AI discourse runs from the mathematical Church-Turing thesis to the metaphysical claim that the brain is a computer. The essay separates the two cleanly, using Piccinini to show that computability is a fact about functions, not a discovery about minds — and that the unnoticed slide between them does most of the heavy lifting in confident pronouncements about machine thought.
  • The Triviality Objection to ComputationalismPutnam’s own triviality argument says any open physical system can be read as implementing any computation — your wall, suitably described, runs WordStar. The essay turns this realizability result against unrestricted computationalism from the inside: if computation comes that cheap, computation alone cannot be what makes a mind, and embodiment is doing the work.
  • The Word “Hallucination” Was Already TakenThe AI industry’s term for a model’s confident falsehoods imports the very inner-theater picture this project rejects — and obscures the more interesting question of what misrepresentation could even mean in a system with no world to misrepresent. The essay shows the borrowed word smuggling in a metaphysics, and asks what genuine error would take.

The self, inner speech & felt experience

  • The Origins of Inner SpeechThe inner monologue feels like the native language of a private self, but Vygotsky and Mead suggest it began as speech aimed outward and was only later turned inward. The essay develops inner speech as internalized social behavior — a foundational anti-reification move that loosens the grip of the sealed inner chamber.
  • The Word for a Private AcheWittgenstein’s private-language argument shows that a word whose meaning you fix by a purely private ceremony, checked only by your own memory, collapses the distinction between being right and merely seeming right. The essay rescues the argument from its behaviorist misreading: it denies not the headache but the picture of inner life as a sealed, self-sufficient private chamber.
  • The Problem of Other MindsThe problem of other minds — how you can know anyone else is conscious — looks intractable only if you start from the inner theater, where each mind is a private show behind a face. The essay argues that the bad metaphysical starting point manufactures the very work it then claims to be doing, and that abandoning it dissolves the problem rather than solving it.
  • The Pain in the Toe That Isn’t TherePhantom limb pain — a vivid ache in a foot that no longer exists — looks like the decisive case against intentionalism: surely here the hurt is an inner item, not a representation of anything. The essay argues the opposite, using Tye and Bain to show that phantom pain represents a bodily location as damaged and simply gets it wrong, which is exactly what a misrepresentation does.
  • The Self That Wasn’t a StoryThe self looks like a story we tell — Dennett’s “center of narrative gravity,” a character generated by the telling, with no inner nugget behind it. The essay grants the deflation of the inner subject but argues, with Galen Strawson, that the word “narrative” smuggles in more than the view needs: some lives are lived episodically rather than storied, and the self can be a construction without being a tale.
  • The Toothache ArgumentPain is the canonical pressure test on intentionalism: Crane denies a pain is about anything at all, and if any state resists the world-directed account it should be this one. The essay works the hard case with Bain, Tye, and Crane, arguing that a pain represents a bodily location as damaged — the difference between a pain in the jaw and one in the ankle being a difference in what each is about.
  • What the Inner Voice Is ForIf the inner voice is only internalized social speech, does it do any real work — or is it mental tinnitus? Drawing on Vygotsky, Jorba, and Vicente, the essay argues that verbalizing a thought is part of having it in usable form, shows inner speech doing genuine cognitive labor in control, planning, and self-evaluation, and defends that constitutive reading against its expressivist rival.

Papers

Several of these arguments are being developed into journal-length papers — the same claims pitched to the working philosopher of mind, with full scholarly apparatus, aimed at peer-reviewed venues and academia.edu. None have landed yet. When they do, they will appear here with PDF downloads.

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