Category
Mind & Self
Consciousness, the self, emotion and perception — and whether machines could have minds.
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Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation. Western readers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
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 Sfeir5 replies -
What is the epoché, and why would bracketing whether the world exists help anyone?
A friend who did philosophy says what I do at the wine-show judging table is "basically phenomenology", which flattered me until I tried to read about it. The bit I'm stuck on is the epoché, or "bracketing". As far as I can…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we perceive is largely the brain's best guess, corrected by prediction…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
We will never have a test for machine consciousness, and we should say so plainly
This is not a spiritual worry, and I say so as a materialist. 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. Do they…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
The lesson that works best with my class every year is Sartre on bad faith, from Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too quick, who bends forward a little too eagerly.…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
When I look at a plate, am I seeing the plate or a picture my brain makes of it?
I draw picture books for a living, and the first thing every drawing teacher tells you is "draw what you see, not what you know". The standard exercise is a dinner plate on a table. You know it is round. But if…
Started by Rin Matsuda4 replies -
When I play a Bach suite from memory, is that the same “memory” philosophers argue about?
I play cello in a chamber ensemble and teach children. This spring I memorised the third Bach suite for a recital, and something happened on stage that I keep thinking about. Halfway through the Bourrée my mind went blank. I could not…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies -
Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
My students memorise Wang Yangming's slogan, the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing he yi), without believing a word of it. Obviously, they say, you can know something and not do it. They know they should study. Wang's reply, in Instructions…
Started by Lin Pei-shan4 replies -
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 replies -
Is my red your red? Where does the inverted spectrum come from?
Is the red I see the red my sister sees? I have wondered since childhood. When I was eight I asked my mother and she said, "Of course, it's red." That was not an answer. Now I learn that this has a…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body
I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople. Translation: Donald Landes's…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
The replication crisis is a philosophical problem before it is a statistical one
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 then the standard diagnosis has been statistical:…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Reading group: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, one dialogue at a time
George Berkeley was born in County Kilkenny, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent the last part of his life as Bishop of Cloyne, about half an hour from where I'm writing. I've always felt we in Cork should know him better…
Started by Siobhán Keane5 replies -
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
A small puzzle from my temple that connects to the threads here about machines. The first case of the Gateless Gate collection is the famous one: a monk asks Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou answers "Mu" (in Chinese, wu).…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that he never catches himself without a perception, and never observes anything but the…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Thirty years of coaching while colour-blind: whose experience of red is the accurate one?
I was diagnosed red-green colour-blind at fourteen, when I failed the dotted-number test at the school nurse's office. I then spent thirty years coaching under-16 rugby while unable to tell our maroon bibs from the opposition's green ones, which my boys found…
Started by Gerrit Venter4 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
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 reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Thirty-four years in a GP surgery: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I managed a GP surgery in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often across the desk in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I came to philosophy from physics, 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…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
When the philosophy club I run at school reaches mind and body, I always 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…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Can you be argued out of a feeling? What is therapy doing when it works?
Telling someone their fear is irrational almost never helps, even when it's true. And yet some therapies built on exactly that idea work. Cognitive behavioural therapy has a clear philosophical ancestor. Albert Ellis, one of its founders, credited Epictetus, whose line in…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
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 the stick in water is brilliant. The argument from illusion says:…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies