Hi, thanks for visiting. I’m Trevor Mendham and this site is a place for me to gather and share my thoughts on various philosophical topics. I’m mainly interested in consciousness, free will and associated areas such as morality, determinism and luck – but nothing’s off limits. Expect more questions than answers.
Constructive comments on posts are welcome, whether you agree with my position or not.
About Me
It’s important to stress that I’m a lay person in the field of philosophy. My degree is Mathematics (Warwick, 198x) and most of my early career was in IT. I have no formal training in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, etc.
What I do have is a lifelong interest in those subjects and so have read a huge amount. Not having been through the standard academic philosophy channels arguably makes it easier to embrace unpopular positions such as incompatibilism.
All my writings (not comments) on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence. The “NoDeriv” bit means you can’t modify an article and republish it – but you are, of course, allowed to quote sections inside your own work.
You can contact me by email.
My Views On Consciousness
Forty years ago, I believed strongly that consciousness was some form of emergent phenomenon resulting from the complexity of the brain’s physical neural network. Since then I have become increasingly dissatisfied with both reductive physicalism as it currently stands and with emergent property dualism. At the moment I have no answers, though there are some suggested answers that I have rejected.
Although I admit to certain biases, my position is not fixed.I am currently a libertarian: I believe the universe is indeterministic and that we have free will. In fact these two statements go together: determinism is fundamentally incompatible with free will.
My position changes. Currently (2025) I favour some form of interactionist substance dualism with consciousness being a fundamental non-physical entity that interacts with the physical, possibly via the loopholes in physical determinism introduced by quantum mechanics. This would be a source of agent causation. Under such a theory consciousness would be perfectly natural and subject to natural laws, however it would be outside the scope of physics as it stands today. To incorporate consciousness our current science needs a shake up as significant as relativity or quantum theory.
Unfortunately I also find mysterian position depressingly believable.
Students
You’re very welcome to quote from and comment on my writing in your own work. But note that I am not an authority and nothing on this site has been peer reviewed. Despite that, you might find something here useful as an argument, explanation, thought experiment, hypothesis, etc – in which case you’re welcome to quote it. Please cite as “Mendham, Trevor” with the URL of the appropriate post and the date on that post.
Dropping me a quick email would also be appreciated but is not necessary.