Category
Mind & Self
Consciousness, the self, emotion and perception — and whether machines could have minds.
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Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, and I'd like to hear the best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies193 views -
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 replies244 views -
Large language models understand nothing: the Chinese Room still applies
I build software on top of these models every day, so this isn't idle. 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…
Started by Pieter de Jong9 replies333 views -
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 replies249 views -
We will never have a test for machine consciousness, and we should say so plainly
I'm a materialist and I work on perception, so this is not a spiritual worry. It's a methodological one. Three questions get blurred in public talk about AI. Can machines behave intelligently? That is an engineering question and the answer keeps moving.…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies210 views -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies158 views -
The replication crisis is a philosophical problem before it is a statistical one
I'm a data scientist in Nairobi and I've followed the replication crisis in psychology closely. A large collaborative project published in 2015 tried to repeat about a hundred published studies, and fewer than half produced results as strong as the originals. Since…
Started by Wanjiru Kamau5 replies244 views -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
I teach classical Chinese at a senior high school in Taipei. My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies158 views -
Functionalism is officially neutral, but in practice it is materialism with better manners
Functionalism says mental states are defined by their causal roles: pain is whatever state is caused by damage, causes distress and avoidance, and so on, regardless of what realises it. Putnam's argument from multiple realisability in the 1960s made it the default…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies200 views -
Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
I build machine learning systems, including some that generate images, and lately I have been rereading J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), the lectures reconstructed after his death in which he takes apart A. J. Ayer's sense-datum theory. Austin's treatment of…
Started by Pieter de Jong5 replies187 views -
Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it
I came to Nishida late, through zazen at a small temple near my house in Kyoto, after a career designing structures. Here is my thesis, stated as sharply as I can. The hard problem assumes a split. On one side, a physical…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 replies214 views -
William James was wrong: an emotion is not the perception of a bodily change
I'm a psychology student, and our textbooks still teach the James–Lange theory with a kind of affection. William James's essay "What Is an Emotion?" (1884) proposes that the order we assume is backwards. We don't tremble because we're afraid; the bodily change…
Started by Elif Yıldız6 replies204 views -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies276 views -
The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
I'm a logician, so I care about analyses that can be stated precisely, and this one, I'll argue, can't be. Davidson's causal theory: a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a belief–desire pair.…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies274 views -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist working on perception, and I'll defend the position most people here find hardest to swallow. Illusionism, associated with Dennett and developed by Keith Frankish, says the hard problem is generated by a misleading introspective model. When we introspect, the…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies144 views