Themed seminar Summer 2026
Starts:
Finishes:
Venue:
Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
No booking required
Two of our new faculty discuss problems of the self. Is there an unconscious 'dark side' of the mind? Does the self have obligations to itself?
Where: Room 501, 30 Russell Square.
When: 3-5 p.m. on 30 April, 14 May, 4 June, 18 June and 2 July.
The first three seminars will be led by Sam Coleman. Sam's title for these is Dark Mind: Subjectivity without Consciousness His abstracts for the series as a whole, and for each seminar individually, are below.
The final two seminars will be led by Jules Salomone-Sehr. Jules's title is Self-regarding Morality, and his abstracts are also below.
SAM'S ABSTRACTS
Dark Mind: Subjectivity without Consciousness
Thomas Nagel defines consciousness by saying a creature is conscious if there is ‘something it is like’ to be that creature, referring to the distinctive qualitative properties of conscious states that, for instance, bats enjoy when they echolocate, which are presumably quite different to those colour qualities that determine what it is like to employ, say, normal human vision. Such ‘what it is like’ qualitative properties, also called phenomenal qualities, or qualia, are said by philosophers of various stripes to be centrally involved in mental states of different sorts – in their functioning and effects: in sensation, perception, imagination, emotion, and even thought. That is, many philosophers see, e.g., visual qualia as key to our visual discriminative capacities, emotional qualia or feelings as determining, and explaining, our emotional behavioural responses, cognitive or thought qualia as settling decisively fine-grained thought content, and so on. But, it is also widely acknowledged that much of mental function occurs unconsciously – plausibly, in particular, there are such things as unconscious perception, unconscious thought/cognition, even unconscious emotion. And here a puzzle arises, because the philosophers who see qualia as central to the mind and mental function also overwhelmingly hold that qualia cannot exist unconsciously – even that the very idea of their doing so is incoherent or violates the definition of ‘qualia’. In my book I am arguing that this set of commitments is inconsistent: in fact, unless we posit unconscious qualia, belonging to the unconscious instances of the relevant mental faculties, the conscious qualia that philosophers see as central to the workings of these faculties will end up causally redundant and/or explanatorily irrelevant as regards the mind’s workings and the subject’s behaviour. In other words, to hold onto the picture of the mind where qualia figure centrally, we must in fact posit a lot of unconscious qualia. I believe this is what is involved in our taking consciousness sufficiently seriously while acknowledging that our mentality and subjectivity must extend well beyond what is in consciousness at any one time. Across three sessions of the Themed Seminar we will look at a published argument I have given for unconscious qualia, and two chapters of my book where I try to clarify and defend the very notion of unconscious qualia and the accompanying picture of the ‘dark mind’.
1. An Argument for Unconscious Qualia
Conscious mental qualities, aka phenomenal qualities or qualia, are seemingly a leading factor in much of our behaviour. Pains make us recoil from painful stimuli, itches make us scratch, feelings of anger sometimes make us shout, visually perceiving red leads us to halt at stop lights, and so on. To relinquish this claim about the efficacy of conscious mental qualities would mean surrendering a major component of our everyday, intuitive self-conception; hence, the claim enjoys considerable prima facie plausibility. Unconscious mental qualities, however, have been posited by a mere handful of philosophers historically, and are nowadays almost universally rejected. Via a case study of ‘restless legs syndrome’, I argue that there is a hitherto unnoticed cost to this prevailing rejection of unconscious mental qualities: the causal efficacy of conscious mental qualities is threatened. In fact, I argue, we face a dilemma: To endorse epiphenomenalism about conscious mental qualities, or to posit unconscious mental qualities. Since it is so plausible that conscious mental qualities are causally efficacious, this reasoning constitutes an argument for unconscious mental qualities. Moving beyond the sensory case, I explain how analogous reasoning might apply to other mental faculties where phenomenal qualities seem causally involved: notably, emotions and mental imagery.
2. The Dark Side of the Mind
The dark side of the Moon is not ‘dark’ at all. We just do not see it, because the moon is tidal-locked with the Earth in such a way that one side only of the moon faces us at all times. In fact the dark side of the moon is more or less continuous in nature with the facing side, apart from the contingent setup of our situation with respect to the moon which means that we never see it (unless we fly there, as the Artemis crew recently did). I want to say something similar about the unconscious, or ‘dark’ side of the mind in this book. I defend a ‘continuity thesis’, on which the unconscious mind is more or less continuous in nature with the conscious mind, whose defining characteristic I take to be the presence and operation of qualia of different sorts – the qualitative properties we know from conscious experience of various sorts: sensory/perceptual, emotional, and cognitive in particular. In this introductory chapter of my book I explain the dominant ‘dualist’ picture of the mind, on which the conscious mind and the unconscious mind are radically different in kind, with only the former, notably, possessing qualia, and begin to explain the alternative picture as framed by the continuity thesis, highlighting some general tensions in the dominant picture and certain advantages of my view - e.g. in capturing how consciousness and the unconscious interact, as they constantly do. The dark side of the moon is ‘dark’ only in so far as we do not know it. Similarly, philosophers have stressed that the principal way we know about qualia is via consciousness of (sometimes called ‘acquaintance’ with) them. But the general fact of the independence of the object of knowledge from the epistemic mode of access to it should then suggest that qualia, the immediate objects of the conscious mode of knowledge, can exist without consciousness - just as the moon’s dark side goes on existing all the while we do not see it. And like the dark side, qualia experienced and qualia unexperienced are no different in nature, aside from the experiencing of them.
3. Unconscious Qualia?
Qualia are generally introduced as qualitative properties of conscious experiences, and some philosophers even define them in terms of consciousness, professing to find the notion of unconscious qualia to be incoherent or ruled out by definition. In this chapter I argue that we can get a fix on qualia, via demonstration, in such a way as to leave the question as to whether they are essentially conscious in fact completely open, similar to the way that we can, in Kripkean-style, pick out a sample of water by demonstration and then, through subsequent research, investigate whether, e.g., liquidity belongs to water essentially or necessarily, or, rather, is only among the contingent reference-fixing features we used to pick out a sample of water for further investigation. I suggest something very similar could be true of qualia: there is nothing incoherent in the idea that the consciousness of qualia belongs primarily to the context in which we know them, by being consciously aware of them, and fix reference to them as ‘qualitative properties of conscious experiences’. For all that, the consciousness of qualia could be, like water’s liquidity, only a contingent feature of qualia. Whether that is the case is something to be settled by discussion and argument (such as the argument given in the first session), not by definition or stipulation. I explore some philosophical views that are seemingly committed to unconscious qualia, such as certain variants of the sense-datum theory and naïve realism, with a view to claiming that the notion of unconscious qualia is intelligible.
Here's a link for the article for session 1
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2024.2379272#abstract
JULES'S ABSTRACTS
SELF-REGARDING MORALITY
It is commonly thought that morality’s main function is to regulate our relationships with others (and thereby to protect some of their most fundamental interests). Many moral philosophers contend, however, that this is far from being its sole function. According to these philosophers (not least among them Immanuel Kant), morality also serves to regulate our relationship with ourselves. And in the same way that we have moral obligations to others, they claim that we have moral obligations to ourselves (for instance, obligations against negligent self-harm).
Are these philosophers right? Do moral obligations shape how we ought to relate to ourselves in addition to shaping how we ought to relate to others? During two sessions of the Themed Seminar, we will explore this question by reading and discussing recent scholarship on the topic.
1. Are Self-Directed Obligations Coherent?
During the first session, we will explore the paradox of self-release. In a well-known article, Marcus Singer argues that the very idea of obligations to self is incoherent. His argument proceeds roughly as follows. Obligations and rights are two sides of the same coin: if I have an obligation to you, you therefore have a corresponding right against me—a right that you are at liberty to waive. If this is correct, then if I had an obligation to myself, I would therefore have a corresponding right against myself—a right that I would be at liberty to waive. This would imply that I could release myself from this obligation. But, Singer argues, it is impossible to release oneself from an obligation.
Is this argument compelling? To answer this question, we will read Singer’s article alongside recent scholarship that critically engages with it.
2. Is Morality Self-Other Symmetric?
Do we have the same moral obligations to ourselves as we do to others? In other words, is morality self-other symmetric? If you believe, as many philosophers do, that morality is fundamentally about what we owe to each other, your answer is likely to be ‘no’. Interestingly, some have recently argued that morality is self-other symmetric. The aim of our second session will be to determine whether they are right.
Contact name: Keith Hossack
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