Category
Mind & Self
Consciousness, the self, emotion and perception — and whether machines could have minds.
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Reading group: Augustine’s Confessions Book X, the books of memory, in Chadwick’s translation
There are already threads here on Book XI (time) and Book IV (the death of a friend), so I'd like to propose Book X, which sits between them and which I think is the most philosophical book of the Confessions. Having told…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Reading group: Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” with the replies, over three weeks
The Chinese Room is cited constantly and read rarely, and most people who have opinions on it have only met the thought experiment, not the paper. So let's read it properly. Text: John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
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 replies -
William James was wrong: an emotion is not the perception of a bodily change
Our psychology 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 comes first, and the…
Started by Elif Yıldız6 replies -
Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly
I have spent years reading Sor Juana, and one of the things she 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 replies -
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 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Reading group: Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, Part One, over four weeks
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is long, so I suggest we read only Part One, which sets out the theory that the rest of the book applies to compassion and love. The book opens with Nussbaum's own…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
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. Davidson's own counterexample, the…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Illusionism is the only view of consciousness that takes neuroscience seriously
I'm a materialist who builds machine-perception software, 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,…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach religious studies at a Catholic secondary school in Enugu and run a philosophy club for the senior students. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are 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 about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
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 van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
Is “depression” one condition or several? A reader’s doubts
One question has followed me through years of my own analysis and of reading psychiatry: when two people receive the same diagnosis of major depression, do they have the same thing? Consider how the diagnosis works. A person needs five of nine…
Started by Martín Iriarte4 replies -
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 Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think the thinker of thinking,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Are talk therapy and antidepressants treating the same thing?
I have been in psychoanalysis for years in Buenos Aires, and like many people here I have also seen a psychiatrist and taken medication. At some point I started asking whether the two were working on the same problem from two sides…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
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 replies