Lecture in Celebration of Marc Sanders Prizes in Philosophy of Mind and in Metaphysics (Andrew Y. Lee, Toronto)

Join us for a lecture by Andrew Y. Lee, an assistant professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Department of Philosophy at St. George and in the Philosophy Department at UTSC, in honor of his winning two Marc Sanders Prizes in 2024, one in Philosophy of Mind, the other in Metaphysics.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Talk Title

Consciousness and Continuity

Talk Abstract

Let a smooth experience be an experience with maximally gradual changes in phenomenal character. Consider, as examples, your visual experience of a blue sky or your auditory experience of a rising pitch. Do the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences have continuous or discrete structures? If we appeal merely to introspection, then it may seem that we should think that smooth experiences are continuous. This paper (1) uses formal tools to clarify what it means to say that an experience is continuous or discrete, and (2) develops a discrete model of the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences. As a result, I’ll argue that introspection leaves open whether smooth experiences are continuous or discrete. Yet I’ll also argue—perhaps surprisingly—that the discrete theory may better fit our introspective evidence. Along the way, I explain why the sense of ‘continuity’ ascribed to smooth experiences is distinct from the sense of ‘continuity’ ascribed to
the stream of consciousness.