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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
Oxford University Press (1996)
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In his recent paper on the meta-problem of consciousness, Chalmers :6–66, 2018) claims that illusionism is one of the best reductionist theories available and that it is not incoherent, even if it is implausible and empirically false. Our paper argues against this: strong illusionism is poorly established. The first part presents the reasoning leading to strong illusionism; i.e., it describes the initial conditions and relations among them for its establishment. The second part of the paper argues that strong illusionism is (...) |
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Parsimony considerations are ubiquitous in the literature concerning the nature of mental states. Other things being equal, physicalist views are preferred over dualist accounts on the grounds of the fact that they do not posit new fundamental properties in addition to the physical ones. This paper calls into question the widespread assumption that parsimony can provide reasons for believing that physicalism is a better candidate than dualism for solving the mind–body problem. After presenting the theoretical core of physicalism and dualism, (...) |
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In contemporary philosophy of mind, the conceivability argument against physicalism is often used to support a form of dualism, which takes consciousness to be ontologically fundamental and distinct from physical matter. Recently, some proponents of the conceivability argument have also shown interest in panpsychism, which is the view that mentality is ubiquitous in the natural world. This paper examines the extent to which panpsychism can be sustained if the conceivability argument is taken seriously. I argue that panpsychism’s ubiquity claim permits (...) |
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In responding to Joshua Farris’ The Soul of Theological Anthropology, I suggest several reasons for questioning the theological need for substance dualism in any form. Specifically, I argue that it is not at the level of analytic argumentation that the mind or soul is best understood, and that the sciences do indeed challenge substance dualism. In making this argument, I examine the roles of intuition and theological pre-commitments in one’s determination of the correct understanding of the mind or soul. I (...) |
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In this thesis I set forth what I understand to be the criteria of a Christian anthropology. From this, I then evaluate the major anthropological systems that Christians tend to employ to develop their accounts of human persons, with special attention given to Christian materialism, substance dualism, and Thomistic hylomorphism. I contend that neither Christian materialism nor substance dualism adequately satisfy the criteria of a Christian anthropology, and that some of the best examples of these perspectives have unique philosophical problems (...) |
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We present Birch and colleagues with a dilemma. On one interpretation, they aim to chart the distribution of a sort of minimal perceptual awareness across the animal kingdom, where that awareness can be fully characterized in third-person psychological terms. On this interpretation, the project is worthy but dull, since it doesn’t touch the question that has excited most people: whether other animals are phenomenally conscious. On an alternative interpretation, in contrast, they hope to resolve this latter question, arguing that phenomenal (...) |
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In this paper I argue that the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness has an underlying emergentist metaphysics, specifically of a kind that has received minimal attention and we may call functionalist emergentism. I will try to show that in this scientific theory conscious experience is a functional-role property possessed by the whole system, not by their parts, which is dependent on, but also (purportedly) causally powerful over and above, the properties of the parts. However, I will argue that depicting conscious (...) |
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Um dos grandes desafios da era da informação consiste em filtrar informações claras, rigorosas e atualizadas sobre tópicos importantes. O mesmo vale para a filosofia. Como encontrar conteúdo filosófico confiável em meio a milhares de artigos publicados diariamente na internet? Para ir ainda mais longe, como encontrar uma introdução a algum tópico com uma lista de referências bibliográficas atualizadas e que seja organizada por um especialista da área? Já que você começou a ler este livro, é provável que tenha ouvido (...) |
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La teleosemántica es una teoría teleológica de las representaciones mentales, propugnada por David Papineau, que tiene como propósito ofrecer una explicación naturalista y evolucionista de dichas representaciones, en particular de las creencias. Mi objetivo será analizar las creencias y su relación con la verdad en la obra de Papineau. Según Papineau, los contenidos y las representaciones mentales, específicamente las creencias, cumplen funciones derivadas de la evolución biológica de la especie, y correlativamente, la finalidad de las creencias y los contenidos proviene (...) |
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Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...) |
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This article investigates a multiparty interaction in an accounting office by applying a multimodal approach to discourse. This approach allows the incorporation of all relevant communicative modes and is based on the following three notions: 1) the notion of mediated action; 2) the notion of modal density; and 3) the notion of a foreground– background continuum of attention/awareness. The article illustrates that a social actor in a multiparty interaction simultaneously co-constructs several higher-level actions with the various participants on different levels (...) |
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In this paper, I compare various theories of perception in relation to the question of the epistemological and ontological status of the qualities that appear in perceptual experience. I group these theories into two main views: quality externalism and quality internalism, and I highlight their contrasting problems in accounting for phenomena such as perceptual relativity, illusions and hallucinations. Then, I propose an alternative view, which I call qualitative relationism and which conceives of the subject and the object of perceptual experience (...) |
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The author juxtaposes two extreme approaches to the relationship between consciousness and the physical world: phenomenological-idealistic (represented by Edmund Husserl) and radically naturalistic (represented by Paul Churchland). These two positions are interpreted in terms of opposite if symmetrical types of reduction (on the one hand, the reduction of the world to a sense for consciousness, and on the other hand, the reduction of consciousness to an element of the physical world). They emerge as two ways of abstracting from the ambivalence (...) |
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G.E. Moore’s open question arguments have been targeted by unsympathetic philosophers for close to a century. Perhaps the most serious criticism directed towards Moore’s OQAs is that they be... |
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This paper critically assesses John Danaher’s ‘ethical behaviourism’, a theory on how the moral status of robots should be determined. The basic idea of this theory is that a robot’s moral status is determined decisively on the basis of its observable behaviour. If it behaves sufficiently similar to some entity that has moral status, such as a human or an animal, then we should ascribe the same moral status to the robot as we do to this human or animal. The (...) |
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This information-packed volume, without doubt a landmark event in the developing neuroscientific study of consciousness, deserves the attention of anyone interested in this subject. It is a sequel and companion to an earlier collection, The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology, also edited by Steven Laureys (2005), which contains the proceedings of a 2004 conference sponsored by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). Published initially as a special issue of Progress in Brain Research (volume 150), Boundaries has (...) |
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Evaluating counterfactuals in worlds with deterministic laws poses a puzzle. In a wide array of cases, it does not seem plausible that if a non-actual event were to occur that either the past would be different or that the laws would be different. But it’s also difficult to see how we can avoid this result. Some philosophers have argued that we can avoid this dilemma by allowing that a proposition can be a law even though it has violations. On this (...) |
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To which extent is it justified to adopt Kant as a godfather of cognitive science? To prepare the stage for an answer of this question, we need to set aside Kant’s general transcendental approach to the mind which is radically anti-empiricist and instead turn our attention to his specific topics and claims regarding the mind which are often not focus of Kant’s epistemological investigations. If someone is willing to take this stance, it turns out that there are many bridges connecting (...) |
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Franz Brentano is well known for highlighting the importance of intentionality, but he said curiously little about the nature of intentionality. According to Mark Textor, there is a deep reason for this: Brentano took intentionality to be a conceptual primitive the nature of which is revealed only in direct grasp. Although there is certainly textual support for this interpretation, it appears in tension with Brentano’s repeated attempts to analyze intentionality in terms of ‘notional constituents’ – aspects of intentionality which cannot (...) |
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ABSTRACT This essay has three goals. The first is to introduce the notion of fundamentality and to argue that physicalism can usefully be conceived of as a thesis about fundamentality. The second is to argue for the advantages of fundamentality physicalism over modal formulations and that fundamentality physicalism is what many who endorse modal formulations of physicalism had in mind all along. Third, I describe what I take to be the main obstacle for a fundamentality-oriented formulation of physicalism: ‘the problem (...) |
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This paper is a critique of the radical enactivism of Daniel Hutto, Erik Myin, and their collaborators, insofar as their approach pertains to the hard problem of consciousness. I argue that their valiant attempt to discard the hard problem is ultimately unsuccessful. More specifically, I argue that the hard problem of consciousness is best construed as a transcendental challenge and that no phenomeno-physical identity theory, and no “logic of identity”, successfully eliminate this challenge. Finally, I argue that the theoretical stance (...) |
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The argument from causal closure of the physical is usually considered the most powerful argument in favor of the ontological doctrine of physicalism. Many authors, most notably Papineau, assume that CCP implies that physicalism is supported by physics. I demonstrate, however, that physical science has no bias in the ontological debate between proponents of physicalism and dualism. I show that the arguments offered for CCP are effective only against the accounts of mental causation based on the action of the mental (...) |
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The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative, phenomenal nature of conscious experiences also cannot be communicated to others in the form of a message composed of classical bits of information. Because in a classical world everything physical is observable and communicable, it is a daunting task to explain how an empirically unobservable, incommunicable consciousness could have any physical (...) |
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In this dissertation, I develop and defend a model of causation that allows for dualist mental causation in worlds where the physical domain is physically complete. In Part I, I present the dualist ontology that will be assumed throughout the thesis and identify two challenges for models of mental causation within such an ontology: the exclusion worry and the common cause worry. I also argue that a proper response to these challenges requires a thoroughly lightweight account of causation, i.e. an (...) |
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I defend a how-possibly argument for Kantian (or Kant*-ian) transcendental idealism, drawing on concepts from David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. If we are artificial intelligences living in a virtual reality instantiated on a giant computer, then the fundamental structure of reality might be very different than we suppose. Indeed, since computation does not require spatial properties, spatiality might not be a feature of things as they are in themselves but instead only the way that (...) |
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I argue that to know that a proposition is true one must have justification for being certain that the proposition is true. That is, one must have infallible epistemic justification for believing the proposition. It is widely accepted among epistemologists that we rarely, if ever, have such strong justification for our beliefs. It follows that there is precious little that we know. That conclusion is unacceptable to many philosophers. I argue that the positions that lead to the skeptical conclusion are (...) |
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According to the scrutability argument against physicalism, an a priori gap between the physical and conscious experience entails a lack of necessitation and the falsity of physicalism. This paper investigates the crucial premise of the scrutability argument: the inference from an a priori gap to a lack of necessitation. This premise gets its support from modal rationalism, according to which there are important, potentially constitutive, connections between a priori justification and metaphysical modality. I argue against the strong form of modal (...) |
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In this paper I develop a theory of personhood which leaves open the possibility of construing the universe as a person. If successful, it removes one bar to endorsing pantheism. I do this by examining a rising school of thought on personhood, on which persons, or selves, are understood as identical to episodes of consciousness. Through a critique of this experiential approach to personhood, I develop a theory of self as constituted of qualitative mental contents, but where these contents are (...) |
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A new philosophy of nature is urgently needed. The received ontological view, physicalism, is unable to account for experiential phenomena and in particular for consciousness in all its varieties. We shall outline the concept of experiencing which should figure as a new conceptual primitive in natural philosophy. Experiencing refers to a process which comprises the interaction of an agent with its world through action based on phenomenal experience. This process can be viewed under two different aspects. One regards the subjective (...) |
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Clinical fields of the “sciences of the mind” (psychotherapy, psychiatry, etc.) lack integrative conceptual frameworks that have explanatory power. Mainly descriptive-classificatory taxonomies like DSM dominate the field. New taxonomies such as Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) aim to collect scientific knowledge regarding “systems” for “processes” of the brain. These terms have a supradisciplinary” meaning if they are considered in context of Systems Science. This field emerges as a platform of theories like general systems theory, catastrophe theory, synergetics, chaos theory, etc. It (...) |
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I investigate the status of subjectivity in Integrated Information Theory. This leads me to examine if Integrated Information Theory can answer the hard problem of consciousness. On itself, Integrated Information Theory does not seem to constitute an answer to the hard problem, but could be combined with panpsychism to yield a more satisfying theory of consciousness. I will show, that even if Integrated Information Theory employs the metaphysical machinery of panpsychism, Integrated Information would still suffer from a different problem, not (...) |
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I sketch a line of thought about consciousness and physics that gives some motivation for the hypothesis that conscious observers deviate—perhaps only very subtly and slightly—from quantum dynamics. Although it is hard to know just how much credence to give this line of thought, it does add motivation for a stronger and more comprehensive programme of quantum experiments involving quantum observers. |
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Methodological naturalists generally believe that science is the best and only method for discovering the properties of reality and what exists. A central tenet of methodological naturalism is that science is limited to evaluating only natural things. Science cannot allow for the possibility of supernatural objects because doing so would irreparably damage the scientific method. Or, it may be that evaluating the supernatural is beyond the capabilities of science. In this thesis, I challenge these assumptions. I defend a form of (...) |
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Artikkelissa tarkastellaan perusteellisesti ja kriittisesti David Chalmersin vaikutusvaltaista fenomenaaliseen tietoisuuden liittyvää argumenttia materialismia vastaan. Argumentissa tunnistetaan useampikin kuin yksi heikko lenkki. |
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Non-reductive physicalism is the view that mental events cause other events in virtue of their mental properties and that mental properties supervene on, without being identical to, physical properties. Jaegwon Kim has presented several much-discussed arguments against this view. But the much simpler causal closure argument, which purports to establish that every mental property is identical to a physical property, has received less attention than Kim’s arguments. This paper aims to show how a non-reductive physicalist should rebut the causal closure (...) |
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In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...) |
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Russellian panpsychism puts basic conscious properties at the bottom level and then grounds lowestlevel physical entities in them. This paper offers arguments against the view. The explanatory gap cuts both ways, making it as hard to get the physical out of consciousness as to get consciousness out of the physical. Russellian panpsychism can't explain how basic conscious properties yield high-level consciousness. Other non-physicalist views can evade the causal argument for physicalism at least as well as Russellian panpsychism. Simplicity and beauty (...) |
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The principle of complementarity in physics can be generalized and extended to information studies. It helps explain the dilemma faced by information studies today. The prevailing endeavor that going beyond the limitation of formal theories and to develop a unified theory of information falls in the dilemma which is structurally homologous to the dilemmas in quantum physics. The dilemma is caused by an epistemological paradox called assignment paradox. The paradox can be removed through generalized complementarity. It means that the concept (...) |
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Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that (...) |
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A philosophical appraisal of historical positions on the nature of thought, mentality, and intelligence, this survey begins with the views of Descartes, Turing, and Newell and Simon, but includes the work of Haugeland, Fodor, Searle, and other major scholars. The underlying issues concern distinctions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, where physical computers seem to be best viewed as mark-manipulating or syntax-processing mechanisms. Alternative accounts have been advanced of what it takes to be a thinking thing, including being Turing machines, symbol (...) |
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ABSTRACT First, I consider a few motivations to idealize epistemic logics1 in such a degree that brings up the problem of logical omniscience [LOP]. I argue that the main motivation to hold omniscience is of a philosophical-scientific2 background, in the sense philosophers have a not so peculiar way of investigating underlying mechanisms, i.e., the interaction of several different components of complex systems may be better understood in isolation, even if such components are not found isolated in a realistic context. It (...) |
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The paper explores the argument from introspection as a counterargument for the validity of reductive materialism and, in other cases, of any type of materialism. The author uses methods and conceptual apparatus of analytic philosophy, as well as the instruments of logical analysis to demonstrate falsity of this argument and impossibility of its usage for the defense of dualism and criticism of materialism. Theory of mind, proposed by David Chalmers, is revisited to demonstrate the epistemic asymmetry arises in case of (...) |
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Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) |
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