Columbus, OH. May 2019.
My research is in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. At the broadest level, I am interested in conscious thought. Conscious thoughts are interesting because they are a ubiquitous part of human mental life and raise a variety of long-standing questions in the philosophy of mind: what is the relationship between the phenomenal properties of thought (i.e., what they feel like from the inside) and the intentional properties of thought (i.e., what they are about)? Can the phenomenal character of thought determine its content better than rival views that appeal to rationality? Do conscious thoughts pose a special problem for representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness? Is there a kind of phenomenal character proprietary to thought, over and above the phenomenal character of the senses?
My previous and current work argues for the conjunctive thesis that (1) cognitive phenomenology exists and that (2) it can partially determine the intentional content of thought. I argue for this view by engaging in a variety of dialectical tasks, using both a priori arguments and drawing on empirical results in psychology. See the descriptions of the papers below for details.
In current and future work, I connect my work on conscious thought to debates over the value of consciousness for theories of well-being. I argue that cognitive experience is necessary to instantiate certain welfare goods, including intellectual achievements, friendship, humor, aesthetic experiences, existential experiences.
I have begun to think about AI ethics, and the tradeoffs involved in creating sentient machines versus the consequences of AI on humans we already believe are conscious due to algorithmic bias and automation of labor.
Further on the horizon, I plan to connect my work on conscious thought to work on abstract concepts in psychology, the emerging interdisciplinary science of mind wandering and spontaneous thought, and metaphor in aesthetics.
I also have a strong secondary research interest in the philosophy of sport. I like to think about athletes as being workers, and the implications for fandom such a conception of athletes entails.
The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence of a non-sensory phenomenology of thought. Moreover, this argument can be extended to show that this non-sensory phenomenology determines a thought content. Finally, it can potentially diagnose the disagreement over cognitive phenomenology in the philosophy of mind, as such disagreement may turn on interpersonal variation in mental imagery.
Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to cases of cross-modal perception, threatening representationalism about consciousness in general. I then give two responses to the challenge, both of which appeal to intentional modes. The difference in intentional mode between a thought and a visual perception can either explain why we should not expect any phenomenal overlap between the two experiences, or it can make it clear why the phenomenal overlap is easy to overlook. I show that these responses are available to the representationalist about perceptual consciousness, as well as the proponent of cognitive phenomenology. The upshot is that, when it comes to the matching content challenge, both perceptual representationalism and cognitive representationalism stand on equal dialectical footing.
Lennon, P. (2023). In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge. Erkenntnis 88: 2391-2407. [preprint] [journal]
I have presented this work at:
The North Carolina Philosophical Association, 2020
The 2020 Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, Chicago
The San Diego State Graduate Philosophy Conference, 2018
The Ohio State Graduate Student Workshop, 2018
The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content of thought is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view is extensionally inadequate: it entails mix-and-match cases, where the cognitive-phenomenal properties that determine thought content are mixed and matched with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because mix-and-match cases are metaphysically impossible, Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view should be rejected. This paper defends the cognitive experience view from Pautz’s argument. I build on resources in the philosophy of mind literature to show that cognitive-phenomenal properties are modally independent from sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. The result is that mix-and-match cases, though bizarre, are possible. The possibility of mix-and-match cases allows us to move from defensive posture to a critical one: it poses problems for any program of content with rationality constraints, including Pautz’s positive view, phenomenal functionalism.
Are there rationality constraints on the mind? David Lewis argues that it’s an analytic truth that people with beliefs and desires are at least minimally rational. Some argue against rationality constraints on the mind by appealing to empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning or the psychopathology of delusion. We argue that the empirical evidence is not only consistent with the thesis that human believers are minimally rational but has some tendency to confirm it. Even so, the empirical evidence provides the basis for a powerful conceivability argument, since we can imagine more extreme forms of irrationality that are continuous with human irrationality. We must abandon rationality constraints on the mind because it is conceivable that there are Lewisian madmen whose beliefs and desires are not even minimally rational.
The phenomenal view of thought holds that thinking is an experience with phenomenal character that determines what the thought is about. This paper develops and responds to the objection that the phenomenal view is chauvinistic: it withholds thoughts from creatures that in fact have them. I develop four chauvinism objections to the phenomenal view—one from introspection, one from interpersonal differences, one from thought experiments, and one from the unconscious thought paradigm in psychology—and show that the phenomenal view can resist all four.
Lennon, P. (forthcoming). Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? American Philosophical Quarterly.
I have presented this work at:
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, NYU, 2023
Method, Theory, and Reality Workshop, UMass Amherst, 2023
Smithies Student Workshop, OSU, 2022
Philosophers have argued that consciousness is necessary for a subject to be a welfare subject. I argue that cognitive consciousness in particular is necessary to instantiate certain welfare goods: intellectual achievement, friendship, humor, aesthetic experiences, and existential experiences. This is because cognitive experience expands the range of objects our valenced attitudes can take. It also explains what I call “the cognitive zombie intuition,” the intuition that our welfare would be drastically changed without cognitive experience. This intuition has been relied on by John Stuart Mill in his defense of hedonism against the philosophy of swine objection and Galen Strawson in his argument for the existence of cognitive experience.
The Value of Cognitive Experience in preparation
I have presented this work at:
The Ethics of Consciousness Summer School, Rice University Paris Center, Paris, France, 2023
I argue that sports fans, sports media, and consumers of sports generally should conceive of professional and collegiate athletes as workers. Doing so, I suggest, can provide a unifying framework for which to think about a number of applied ethical issues in the philosophy of sport, such as: should college athletes be paid? Should they be allowed to collectively bargain? What is the proper attitude for fans to take toward athlete drafts and trades, or collective bargaining agreements between players and owners?
Athletes as Workers in preparation
I have presented this work at:
The First Annual Philosophy and Activism Conference, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2022
The 2023 Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Montreal
Some AI ethicists worry about creating conscious machines; for in doing so, we create machines that are welfare subjects. I argue that the extent to which AI ethicists focus their attention on a particular issue should be a function of our credence that the entities involved in or affected by the issue are conscious. The result is that AI ethicists should spend comparably more time thinking about the effects of AI on labor automation and algorithmic bias on human beings that we believe are already conscious than they do worrying about the possibility of creating conscious AI.
Sentience and AI Ethics in preparation
I will present this work at:
C3: Complexity, Computers, and Consciousness, The Institute of Physics and Imperial College London, 2023