Eric Schwitzgebel (2024), Princeton University Press, 376 pp., ISBN 9780691215679 (hardcover), 9780691239309 (e-book) — DOI-10.1515/9780691239309
Key takeaways
- Every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both bizarre (contrary to common sense) and dubious (not rationally compelling), so something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true.
Standing in the record
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-09-26, during the pass over the consciousness tag. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-188 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — Worth reading as the one place Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments are joined into a single case: US consciousness, crazyism, 1% skepticism, Kant meets cyberpunk, the garden snail, and the Full Rights Dilemma for AI. Chapter 3, the Universal Bizarreness and Dubiety argument, is the load-bearing contribution. Its individual chapters are informal arguments, and the manuscript that can be reached is not the published text. The published book reorders the chapters, moves the objections appendix to the end and updates the AI chapter.
The book gathers Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments. One of them is held as LIT-159 (If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious), which appears in the book as a chapter with substantial revisions; the reading says how. A second publisher DOI exists for the same book: 10.2307/jj.5104033 (JSTOR, dated to the US release of 2024-01-16). The DOI above is the De Gruyter/PUP e-book record.