I'll be speaking online at this event, at 10:00am Central US time, November 17th, so if you're interested in ants and philosophy you can come listen to me at this link! meet.google.com/hsw-ovdy-ogn

It’s in @andersonnfonseca.bsky.social's book "Are ant colonies conscious? Collective minds and philosophical implications", which is having an online book launch event tomorrow: www.instagram.com/p/DQY_5YWDlq...

This particular paper is more an exploration of what we might be able to say about the broad outlines of a hive mind’s consciousness, if we thought there was such a thing. static1.squarespace.com/static/66eb5...

...such as insect hiveminds! I’ve been arguing for a while that there’s a reasonable chance that colonies of ants, termites, honeybees, and so on are conscious individuals, with minds composed of the causally-interacting minds of their members.

This connects to panpsychism because the combination problem is harder to solve if this sort of sharing isn’t possible, but easier to solve if it is (Philip and I each say a bit about how it fits into our respective preferred forms of panpsychism) but it’s also an idea with broader applications...

It’s published here with a commentary by Donnchadh and our responnse. static1.squarespace.com/static/66eb5...

Our paper defends the idea that one token conscious experience could belong to more than one subject - in particular, could belong both to the mind of some larger system and also to the mind of some part of it. We consider a variety of arguments against this possibility, and reject all of them.

Second, a collaboration with @philipgoff.bsky.social in Donnchadh, Julien, and Martine's anthology “The Phenomenology of Self-Awareness and the Nature of Conscious Subjects” books.google.com/books?id=xuy...

I tried to give an accessible intro to what panpsychism does and doesn’t say, and why you might and might not believe it. (Obviously I don’t think it’s *too* weird to believe, but it’s pretty weird. You gotta believe some weird things, better to believe them based on arguments than based on vibes)

First is a chapter in @whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com's super-fun new book “Too Weird to Believe, Too Plausible to Deny”. www.routledge.com/Too-Weird-to...

Check out AAUP’s statement denouncing the Trump admin’s compact and undemocratic loyalty oaths here👇

This is big government run amok; will Texas students have to endure government officials censoring professors in the classroom? That isn’t Texas and it isn’t America.

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