Category
Consciousness
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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 reply57 views -
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 de Jong3 replies120 views -
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 replies216 views -
What is Mary’s Room actually supposed to show?
I teach an intro cognitive science seminar and want to present Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room" correctly. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. She knows every physical fact about colour vision. When she leaves…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies160 views -
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 replies202 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 -
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 Selvi Raman4 replies194 views -
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 Selvi Raman4 replies164 views -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered, limbs apart so they don't touch, with no sensation at…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies210 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 -
Does general anaesthesia remove experience, or only our memory of it?
I'm an internist, not an anaesthetist, but I've watched hundreds of patients go under and come back. Most say the same thing: one moment they were counting backwards, the next they were in recovery. No time passed. But there is a technique,…
Started by Omar Farouk5 replies226 views -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies174 views -
What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. Every Sunday I play hymns the congregation has sung hundreds of times, and every Sunday the same puzzle comes back to me. When the third note of a…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies150 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 -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I'm a physicist, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a ripe tomato. If…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies210 views -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
Every year I teach the mind–body unit in Accra, and every year I start with Anton Wilhelm Amo, the philosopher born near Axim on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken to Germany as a child, educated at Halle and Wittenberg, and the…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies201 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 -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
My dissertation is on Sor Juana, and one of the things that work keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern…
Started by Valentina Ríos6 replies173 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 -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong and work on Yogācāra and Husserl, two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies213 views -
Does Spinoza solve the mind–body problem or just rename it?
I came to this site for philosophy of mind and stayed for Spinoza, so I owe the question. Spinoza's move, as I understand it: there is one substance, with infinitely many attributes, of which we know two, thought and extension. A mind…
Started by Pieter de Jong4 replies220 views -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies286 views -
The mind–body problem: a beginner’s guide
How can a thought move an arm? The main answers, from Descartes and Elisabeth to functionalism, with stops in classical India and eighteenth-century Wittenberg.
Started by Derek Hollis0 replies109 views -
Reading group: Nagel’s bat, Chalmers’s hard problem and Dennett’s case against qualia
I write formal-verification tools for a living, and I like threads where the argument can be pinned down. Consciousness is the place where that's hardest, so let's read three short classics together, in the order that shows the debate developing. Week 1.…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies222 views