Peter B. Lloyd

Peter B Lloyd is a freelance writer and software consultant, based in London, England, and in Birgu, Malta. His published writings have promoted the concept of consciousness as an irreducible and fundamental contituent of reality. His essay Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (in Alexander Batthyany & Avshalom Eltzur’s edited compilation of essays, Mind and its Place in Nature: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness, 2006) was a substantive defense of this view. This theoretical position and its implications were originally presented in his self-published books Consciousness and Berkeley’s Metaphysics (Ursa, 1999) and Paranormal Phenomena and Berkeley’s Metaphysics (Ursa, 1999).
 
Peter Lloyd has also published on the popularization of philosophy in science fiction, especially the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix film trilogy, in his book Exegesis of the Matrix (2003), and in his contributions to Benbella Books SmartPops series: (in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth, 2003), SIG: Military uses of Artificial Consciousness (in So Say We All: An Unauthorized Collection of Thoughts and Opinions on Battlestar Galactica ed. Richard Hatch, 2006), Superman’s Moral Evolution (in The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman, edited by Glenn Yeffeth, 2006). Peter Lloyd was interviewed on the science and philosophy of the Matrix in the Warner Brothers DVD Roots of the Matrix (in The Ultimate Matrix Collection). His two Matrix essays, Glitches in the Matrix … and How to Fix Them and Glitches Reloaded are online on Ray Kurzweil’s web site.
 
He is currently working with Susan Waitt on a DVD series entitled Metatopia, comprising interviews and discussions with researchers and practitioners in fields associated with consciousness studies.
 
Peter graduated in mathematics at Cardiff University, Wales, where he stayed on to carry out research in solar engineering from 1981. From 1987, he worked as a software developer in the Clinical Trials Service Unit at the University of Oxford. The ISIS group at the CTSU carried out what were, at the time, the largest clinical trials of medical interventions ever executed. With tens of thousands of patients recruited from intensive care units around the world, the trials were able to demonstrate the efficacy of emergency treatments for heart attacks such as streptokinase, a clot-dissolving drug that had previously been dismissed as too dangerous to use. And to demonstrate the lack of advantage of an expensive equivalent drug, tPA, derived from genetic engineering.
 
While in Oxford, he pursued what had previously been a private interest in philosophy by studying under Dr. Michael Lockwood at the Oxford University Department for External Studies (now renamed and endowed as Kellogg College), and sitting in on seminars and lectures in philosophy. His main interest was consciousness and the mind-body problem.
 
Having previously become convinced that George Berkeley had solved the mind-body problem in 1710, he found it disappointing and frustrating that academic philosophy was lagging behind in this area. In the 1990s, he started publishing articles arguing for Berkeley’s theory of mental monism in the popular magazine Philosophy Now, and presenting papers at the Tucson conferences, Toward a Science of Consciousness. Frustrated by the refusal of the philosophical community to address mental monism seriously, he self-published his two books in 1999.
 
Since 1994 he has worked as a freelance software developer, carrying out work for the UK National Grid, the European Space Agency, and Nortel, among others.
 
Listen to him discuss Thinking Matter: If your brain can be conscious, why can’t your chair? What light does Frank Jackson’s Black and White Mary throw on the nature of consciousness?
 
Listen to him discuss Cyborg Experience: What is it like to be a cyborg? What would you feel if your brain cells were to be replaced, one by one, with electronic devices? Does this thought-experiment provided solid support for materialism?