“On Alien Philosophy”

by rsbakker

The Journal of Consciousness Studies published “On Alien Philosophy” today–a nice way ring in my 50th year on this planet! The quotable version can be found here, but I’ve also uploaded the preprint version (with a handful of errors, including one on Dennett caught by Dennett himself no less) here. This paper has it all, only laid out in a way that saddles critics with an enormous abductive challenge. Quibbling with this or that atom of my argument is easy–too easy. The challenge is to do so in a manner explaining as much as parsimoniously.

Abstract: Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we can presume that ‘humanoid’ aliens would be profoundly stumped by themselves, and that they would possess a philosophical tradition organized around ‘hard problems’ falling out of their inability to square their scientific self-understanding with their traditional and/or intuitive self-understanding. As speculative as any such consideration of ‘alien philosophy’ must be, it provides a striking, and perhaps important, way to recontextualize contemporary human debates regarding cognition and consciousness.

Having contributed my bit to the great endeavour to unravel the mysteries of consciousness and cognition, I now turn to more traditional methods of unravelling consciousness and cognition… gracefully, or not. 50 deserves a hangover.