Welcome to Gregg Rosenberg's career page. Standing out from the crowd for 35 years....
I am currently on hiatus after having started, grown and sold an Internet Security company called NetCertainty. I am on the lookout for positions in technology marketing or product development that require both business and technical depth. I have a double Ph.D. in cognitive science and philosophy, an MA in philosophy and an MS in artificial intelligence. My bachelor's is in business. I have experience developing software and MIS applications, and also selling systems and enterprise software solutions at the C and board level of customer accounts.
See my resume: Resume
It's finished!
My research and web page are currently sponsored by the Artificial Intelligence Center at the University of Georgia.
My work on the problem of consciousness is chiefly philosophical, driven by an interest in what is commonly called "the explanatory gap". The "gap" refers to the (semi-controversial) fact that an explanation of our cognitive functioning, in physical or information processing terms, seems unable to deliver all the facts about consciousness. Certain kinds of facts about the qualities of experience for the subject (and, even more controversially, perhaps the meanings of its thoughts) seem left out.
The paradigm-example is a bat using sonar to make its way around the spatial world. What is it like for the bat to sense the world using sonar? Are the qualities of its experience like those involved in our auditory perception (it is processing sound waves, after all), or is it like those involved in our visual perception (it is recovering spatial and movement information, after all), or is it qualitatively unlike either of these (the way fragrances are qualitatively unlike either visual qualities or auditory qualities) and so unprecedented in the way we experience the world? The physical facts about the bat's processing yield lots of information about
My work starts with reflections on the existence of this gap. Is it just a psychological shortcoming (in philosopher's jargon: epistemic) in our merely human understanding of the physical world? Is it a trivial consequence of the simple fact that we just can't be bats? Or does it mean there really are facts aside from the physical facts? I defend the latter conclusion at length, and in depth, finally rejecting materialism. Unfortunately, this just leads to problems.
The bulk of the work is spent sorting out these problems, especially problems centering around the causal role of consciousness if it's not physical. What the heck does it do? I propose, and elucidate in some detail, a model of what causation is. Within this model, I argue that there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional "mysterious" respects: a unified manifold of irreducibly intrinsic properties related essentially to an experiential context.
My work is interesting mainly because I motivate my proposals independently of the mind-body problem, by analyzing causation itself. Because of this approach, when consciousness shows up in the picture it is not introduced in an ad hoc way, and its most puzzling features can be explained from first principles. Also, the final solution gives consciousness a causally important role without making it either epiphenomenal, or interact with the physical. That a dual aspect view may avoid that dilemma is, I think, one of the more eye opening features of the proposal.
I'm inviting interested people to look at and comment on any part of the manuscript as I'm developing it. Of course, feel free to look it over even if you don't feel you will comment. I'm happy just to get the ideas out into circulation. To facilitate the process, I'm including a copy of it here.
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