What are you, really—and if consciousness can’t be reduced to mindless matter, what does that imply about where minds come from and how free we can be?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Joshua Rasmussen is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, and his research focuses primarily on metaphysics, necessary existence, theology, truth, and a number of big, related topics.
2. Interview Summary
Rasmussen sketches his forthcoming book Who Are You Really? as an inquiry into both the nature of consciousness (what thoughts, feelings, and selves are like “from the inside”) and the origin of conscious beings (what sort of reality could produce persons at all). He emphasizes writing for a broad audience without giving up technical precision, and he frames the whole project around shared “tools of inquiry”: introspection (as a way of detecting experience and examining the structure of thought), reason (as a way of checking and extending what introspection reveals), and the scientific method (as a disciplined way of fitting hypotheses to observations). Along the way, he argues that radical doubts about consciousness (or about introspection’s reliability “to any degree”) undercut themselves, since even running those skeptical arguments seems to presuppose some introspective access to one’s own judging and reasoning.
From there, the conversation moves into Rasmussen’s strategy for making progress on what consciousness is: start with the “data” of experience and then test identity-claims carefully. He introduces a “direct comparison test,” where (roughly) if two items can be held together in conscious awareness, you can compare them; and if one item is directly available in acquaintance while another isn’t, that difference can itself support a non-identity verdict. This is used to carve away certain overly quick identifications (e.g., treating a felt quality like happiness as literally identical to some mindless item like a triangle/pinecone), while still leaving room for a “dual-aspect” picture where neurological and phenomenal aspects are deeply related. He then connects this methodological posture to his “counting argument” about thought: by focusing on the combinatorial/logical structure of thought-contents and using Cantor-style reasoning, he argues there are more possible thoughts than (mindless) microphysical states—pressuring any neat one-to-one reduction from thought to brain states, and motivating further distinctions about functionalism and the uniformity of what thoughts are across different possible kinds of thinkers.
Finally, Rasmussen zooms out to the “origin question” and the broader metaphysical stakes. He proposes reframing familiar debates about the “physical” by asking whether reality is fundamentally mindless or fundamentally mental, and suggests that once we’re clearer on the nature of conscious properties, the classic origin-puzzles (the hard problem, identity/accommodation-style worries, etc.) come into sharper focus. He notes that a “fundamental mentality” thesis can sit within many bigger pictures—e.g., priority monism, idealism, panpsychism, or various theistic options—and the discussion also touches free will as a graded notion centered on whether we are genuinely sources of our actions rather than merely having our behavior pulled by external strings. The interview closes on the practical “why care?”: for Rasmussen, getting clearer on consciousness and its origin is tied to seeing more accurately the intrinsic value of persons and their power to choose—culminating in the thought that each of us is an “extraordinarily valuable unit of reality.”
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:05 - Goal of the book
02:35 - Audience
05:20 - Tools of inquiry
10:32 - Eliminativism
18:10 - True nature
23:04 - Direct comparison
25:04 - Contents of perception
28:53 - Contents vs. objects of perception
30:59 - Comparing mental state with external object
31:54 - Aspects of mental states
34:41 - Counting arguments
40:35 - Individuating thoughts
44:26 - Philosophical distinctions
46:06 - Uniformity of thought
53:03 - Reductive functionalism
54:04 - Functional view of thoughts
55:43 - Token thoughts vs. the thought
56:44 - Physical properties
1:01:01 - Fundamentality
1:03:06 - Idealism
1:05:04 - Free will
1:08:19 - Verbal disputes
1:11:37 - Window theory of perception
1:17:15 - Direct acquaintance
1:19:19 - Value of the philosophy of mind
1:22:03 - Conclusion
