Category
Mind & Self
Consciousness, the self, emotion and perception — and whether machines could have minds.
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If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
I've been reading an introduction to Buddhist epistemology on the train, and I'm stuck on Dignāga's definition of perception (pratyakṣa) as "free from conceptual construction". As I understand it, the object of perception is the bare particular, and anything general, like "cup",…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen1 reply -
Autumn and mono no aware: an emotion, or a trained way of seeing?
The maples in the hills north of Osaka are only starting to turn, and I'm drawing autumn pages for a children's book. My editor wants "the feeling of autumn", and I keep reaching for mono no aware, which is usually translated as…
Started by Rin Matsuda2 replies -
Every cell in my body is replaced every seven years, so am I even the same person?
At Sunday lunch my uncle reminded me that I borrowed 20,000 shillings from him when I was fifteen. I said, as a joke, that every cell in my body has been replaced since then, so the boy who borrowed it is gone…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa4 replies -
Reading group: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
A short classic, first published in The Philosophical Review. Nagel argues that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Bats perceive by echolocation, a sense so different from ours…
Started by Priya Raghavan1 reply -
What did Ibn Sina mean by the “internal senses”?
In my history of psychology course, Ibn Sina was mentioned for his theory of "internal senses", and the lecturer said it was an early version of cognitive psychology. I'd love a clear explanation of what the internal senses were and how they…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
Does anger ever help? Seneca’s On Anger versus Aristotle
Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics IV.5, praises the person who gets angry at the right things, with the right people, to the right degree, at the right time. Not to be angry when you should be is a kind of slavishness. Seneca's On…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the “lived body”?
I am reading Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French and I keep circling the expression le corps propre, usually translated "one's own body" or "the lived body". I understand that he discusses the phantom limb and a patient called Schneider at…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies -
I have forgotten most of my childhood. On Locke’s view, am I still that child?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I can find. This week it was a summary of Locke on personal identity. As I understood it, Locke says you are the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches to…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
Eliminative materialism: how can anyone claim that beliefs don’t exist?
Another beginner question from me, sorry. I read a short summary of Paul Churchland's eliminative materialism and I can't get past the first step. As I understand it, he says that our everyday way of explaining people ("she went to the shop…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
This month my reading is about computers and minds. My cousin studies informatics in Bandung and he told me the Turing test is simple: if a machine can fool you in a conversation, it thinks. Done. Then I read an introduction that…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies -
What is functionalism, and why do people think it supports machine consciousness?
People in AI discussions often say that "on a functionalist view" a machine could be conscious. I have a vague sense of what that means but I'd like to understand it properly. What exactly does functionalism claim? Why do people think it…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen3 replies -
Did the Stoics really think all emotions are bad?
I keep hearing that the Stoics wanted us to feel nothing, to be like robots. But when I read Seneca's letters, he clearly feels grief, friendship and even joy. He writes very warmly to Lucilius. So what did they actually think about…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics course never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's no self, what is reborn? Who carries the karma? If I do something…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Reading group: the Mandukya Upanishad and Gaudapada’s Karika
The Māṇḍūkya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, only twelve verses. It analyses the syllable AUM in terms of four "quarters" of the self: the waking state (vaiśvānara), the dream state (taijasa), deep sleep (prājña), and the "fourth" (turīya), which is…
Started by Arjun Iyer4 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
How can a thought move an arm if physics already explains every movement?
Last week a lecturer said something I have been chewing on since. He said: decide to raise your arm, and it rises. Fine. But scientists say every movement of the arm has a complete physical cause, nerves, muscles, chemistry. So what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is Mary’s Room actually supposed to show?
Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room" is easy to present badly, and I'd like to present it correctly at a study circle I'm leading. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. She knows every physical fact…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The hard problem from a psychology student’s point of view
In 1995 David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" of consciousness (explaining discrimination, attention, reportability, the control of behaviour) from the "hard problem": explaining why any of this is accompanied by subjective experience at all. In my psychology courses we study the easy…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Consciousness is fundamental, not produced by the brain
Advaita Vedanta holds that consciousness is the one reality, and the material world appears within it. In recent years, several philosophers in the analytic tradition have defended views in the same family: Philip Goff's panpsychism (Galileo's Error, 2019), Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.…
Started by Arjun Iyer9 replies -
My daughter asked where her mind is kept. Is Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ the answer?
My daughter is seven. Last week, while I was plaiting her hair, she asked me where her mind is kept. "Is it in my head, like my brain? Or is it behind my eyes?" I said it was in her brain, and…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
This isn't idle for anyone who builds software on these models. I'll argue the thesis and see if it survives. John Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" imagines a man in a room who receives Chinese characters, follows an English rulebook…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen9 replies -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I am very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't touch the keyboard. A friend who…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux. The Buddhist doctrine of…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies -
Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
Reading Śaiva Siddhānta on my own, I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the most alive of the Upaniṣads, mostly because of Yājñavalkya and the two…
Started by Thamarai Raman5 replies -
What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks
One of my capoeira students brought me a question from her philosophy class that I can't stop thinking about: what is the difference between your arm rising and you raising your arm? In the roda this matters all the time. A good…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Are emotions judgments, feelings, or both?
In my emotion psychology course we covered three families of theories: feeling theories, like the James–Lange theory (1880s): an emotion is our perception of bodily changes, so we're afraid because we tremble, not the other way round cognitive or judgment theories, like…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
I spend my days answering my children's questions, and this one stumped me. We were cold, the heating clicked on, and my seven-year-old said, "The thermostat wants it warmer." Her brother said machines can't want anything. They looked at me. I said…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies