Can supervenience and functionalism really explain consciousness, or do Mary-style cases, illusionism, and mind uploading reveal a deeper gap in the physicalist picture?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Pete Mandik is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University of New Jersey, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. Check out his channel and website:
https://www.youtube.com/petemandik
2. Interview Summary
Mandik starts by situating his work in debates about how the mental relates to the physical—especially the pressure points around ‘functionalism’, ‘type-identity’ views, and what exactly ‘supervenience’ is supposed to guarantee. He recounts reacting strongly against the David Chalmers/Andy Clark extended-mind picture, and he explains a worry that shows up when you combine the Otto-notebook case with John Searle’s Chinese Room: if you accept the “systems reply,” you can end up with what looks like two minds that both “supervene on the whole room,” which he takes to be a red flag about how liberally we’re individuating minds. He then connects this to a broader “regress” concern: once you “dig deep” into supervenience, you get a demand that differences must be physically underwritten (invoking Terry Horgan’s “super-dupervenience” and related arguments), and that strengthens supervenience in a way that can change the shape of the non-reductive physicalist’s position.
A big middle stretch focuses on the knowledge argument and variations on Mary. Mandik develops the “Swamp Mary” setup: a swamp-twin of post-release Mary who (by stipulation) has never actually seen red but is intrinsically like Mary after learning “what it’s like,” and he asks what that does to the claim that phenomenal knowledge requires the right experiential history. He explores the idea that pre-release Mary could get black-and-white, purely physical access to Swamp Mary and (in effect) “deduce” what it’s like—yet he also notes that the argument can feel “too easy,” and he flags that a lot turns on what we mean by the relevant “phenomenal knowledge” and by ‘deduction’ in these debates. Along the way he links the issue back to how ‘functionalism’ is often built to allow extreme multiple realizations—e.g., Ned Block-style “Chinese nation” cases—because once those implementations are in play, it affects what counts as an admissible physical basis for the mental.
Later, the conversation shifts to theories of consciousness and to some “meta” questions about how we should even frame the disputes. Mandik discusses Keith Frankish-style illusionism: the idea that many of us are under an illusion that there’s ‘phenomenal consciousness’ over and above access/functional notions, and he presses the challenge that the view is only interesting if that “illusion” is widespread and not just a philosopher’s artifact. He then contrasts illusionism with a more radical “qualia quietism,” where the thought is that the term ‘qualia’ is so damaged that we should refuse to assert or deny claims using it and instead talk in other vocabularies (like access consciousness). He also touches on Daniel Dennett-inspired themes—using a “retrospective judgment” analogy to frame how we might later come to say the transhumanists were right about mind uploading, drawing on Diaspora by Greg Egan—and closes with a defense of public-facing philosophy: philosophy needs to be made culturally “cool” and accessible, not treated as valuable only when it looks like journal-driven academic success.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:22 - Non-reductive physicalism
08:35 - Regress
14:57 - Benign regress?
17:07 - Another problem for supervenience physicalism
21:14 - Deviant phenomenal knowledge
30:40 - Phenomenal knowledge
35:05 - Answering Mary’s Room
46:24 - Primitiveness
50:22 - Varying the experiment
56:30 - Phenomenal concepts
1:06:24 - What is it like?
1:23:10 - Meta-illusionism
1:35:23 - Characterization and attribution
1:45:11 - Qualia quietism
1:49:33 - Use for qualia terminology?
2:01:03 - Quietism vs. abolitionism
2:08:08 - Keith Frankish and quietism
2:11:08 - Pragmatic use
2:13:52 - Color sensations
2:27:17 - Use for “sensation”
2:33:25 - Mind uploading
2:40:14 - Personal identity as vague
2:53:43 - Value of philosophy
3:02:27 - Conclusion
