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MacArthur award


A prominent philosopher has just received a MacArthur Award, a/k/a a "genius grat". 

The MacArthur Awards -- half a million US dollars with no strings attached to an individual thought to show such originality and promise that he or she ought to have the freedom that sort of cash can provide -- has gone to Felipe de Brigard, a philosopher working on mind/body issues.  

Specifically, Felipe de Brigard works at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina. (Go, Blue Devils!) 

 Felipe De Brigard | Duke Institute for Brain Sciences 

He is the author of an article on "Vitalism in the age of AI," which sounds intruging from its title but sounds rather deadening from its abstract.  

Vitalism in the age of AI - PubMed

Apparently, he is in dialog with such scholars as Anil Seth and Andy Clark on the issue of whether consciousness is "substrate independent." I have never before heard of any of the three of them, so I should probably spend some effort soon working all of this through. 

My best guess so far is this: "substrate independence" would be the claim that consciousness is independent of its physical base.  It evidently arises from organic chemistry and neurology it could in principle also arise from algorithms run on silicon circuits. 

"Vitalism" in this day and age may simply mean the assertion that mind is not independent of the substrate, it MUST arise from organic chemistry to arrive at all. Anil Seth takes this view.  Andy Clark opposes that vitalism.  Perhaps the contributions of de Brigard that so impressed the grant bestowers are a matter of mediating between those views. 

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