Being in a ‘Blanked Out State’ - Extinction of Self/Consciousness of A Human -/- Author: Ayad Gharbawi 2023 -/- Word Count: 1,088 Key Words: Human Existence; Human Non-existence; Mind; Awareness; Non-awareness; Extinction of Mind, Self and Physicality -/- Dear Sir/Madam; -/- I hope this email finds you well. -/- This paper seeks to prove that in certain mental states, the Mind can be in what we call in the English language, ‘being in a blanked-out state.’ This (...) means the conscious person is not thinking, feeling, sensing, hearing, or smelling anything – his Mind is in a state of Nothingness precisely because he is not acting, reacting or interacting with the Constituents of his own Mind [CoM] or with anything in his surroundings. -/- So, what can say about such an individual? -/- In this manuscript, I will argue that the person in question no longer exists. -/- Why? Because the individual’s Awareness is non-existent. And this is the decisive reason for this phenomenon. -/- Neither his Mind is aware, conscious, alert to anything and nor is his body alert, aware, or sensitive to anything. Therefore, the Mind and the Physicality of the person are extinct. -/- It is no different to being in a coma or a dreamless state. Thus, our lives, and our existence cannot be a linear field precisely because every now and then we cease to ‘exist’, as just explained. -/- It is counterintuitive for people to think that when they blank out for a few moments, they ‘no longer exist’, but in every practical and functional sense, it is true. We like to think we are in ‘control’ of ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, but in truth, that is far from being the case. -/- . (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists have argued that the difference between phenomenally conscious states and other kind of states lies in the implicit self-awareness that conscious states have. Higher-Order Representationalist theories, attempt to explain such a self-awareness by means of a higher-order representation. Consciousness relies on our capacity to represent our own mental states, consciousness depends on our Theory of Mind. Such an ability can, at least conceptually, be decomposed into another two: mindreading and (...) metacognition. In this paper I will argue that consciousness cannot depend on mindreading. The tenability of HOR theories depends, therefore, on the relation between mindreading and metacognition. I analyze several views on such a relation and argue that none of them seem to be a plausible option for HOR theories. (shrink)

The chapter focuses on attributions of the transparency of thought to early modern figures, most notably Descartes. Many recent philosophers assume that Descartes believed the mind to be “transparent”: since all mental states are conscious, we are therefore aware of them all, and indeed incorrigibly know them all. Descartes, and Berkeley too, do make statements that seem to endorse both aspects of the transparency theses (awareness of all mental states; incorrigibility). However, they also make systematic theoretical (...) statements that directly countenance “unnoticed” thoughts or mental states, that is, thoughts or mental states of which the subject is unaware and has no knowledge. Descartes, having identified the essence of mind with thought or representation, distinguishes bare states of mind from states of which we have reflective awareness, thereby providing a theoretical tool for understanding both his seeming endorsement of transparency and his actual denial of it: Descartes distinguished between a basic perceptual state, or a basic awareness, and reflectively conscious states that involve explicit noticing and cognizing on the part of the subject. Leibniz (as is better known) directly endorsed a similar distinction between bare perception and reflective consciousness, using the term “perception” for the first and “apperception” for the second. In these cases, bare perceptions are not transparently available to the subject, and so in fact the subject does not have knowledge, hence does not have incorrigible knowledge, of all its occurrent mental states. This chapter gives evidence to support these claims; elaborates the complex psychology of the subject found in Descartes and other early moderns; and notes some ways in which these early moderns contributed to the genesis of the modern subject. Finally, it compares McDowell’s conception of the Cartesian mind with the conceptions of mind found in the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz, finding that his characterization caricatures the positions of early modern philosophers. McDowell's characterization has four elements: consciousness as essence of mind; intentionality as exclusively mental; the veil of perception; and the transparency of mind. Only the second point, about intentionality, fully fits Descartes. As a consequence of his own misdirection, McDowell misses the actual basis of his difficulty in connecting mind with world, which arises from a point of agreement between him and Descartes: the removal of intentionality from material sensory systems. But whereas Descartes could relocate (nonconceptual) sensory intentionality in mental states, McDowell is left to account for it with his overly cognitivized scheme of perceptual content as exclusively conceptual. (Paper first given at the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy, 2007.). (shrink)

The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs carefully to consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance (...) as to the real nature of the mind. On the other hand, to the extent that common-sense views are inaccurate, and perhaps even in gross conflict with the true nature of the mind, one interesting scientific question is: why do we hold such views, given our access to our own minds? Why should introspection be limited in a way that allows inaccurate views to hold sway? Now, common-sense views of the mind are revealed in natural language discourse that describes mental states, and such descriptions are largely metaphorical. The metaphors are used within thinking about the mind as well as in language. Therefore the study of metaphor is central to the study of mind. The present article is a preliminary study of the importance of metaphor in the scientific study of consciousness. It concentrates on analysing the nature of a range of important metaphors of mind, briefly discussing the extent to which they can be used to describe or qualify states of consciousness, and pointing to important questions about the nature of consciousness that the study of the metaphors raises. The article further conjectures that the reason people use metaphors in describing themselves is often not (just) that they have intellectually worked out some structural analogy --- e.g., between interactions of physical objects in physical space and interactions of ideas in the mind --- but rather that they {\it feel} their own minds to be as described by the metaphor --- e.g., they feel that the ideas in their minds are interacting physical entities. This matter of how a mind feels to itself is an aspect of the central issue of consciousness, namely its phenomenal quality. -/- (NB: The archived file is a preprint. However, it is substantially the same as the published version.). (shrink)

I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When this happens, the content of consciousness still is apprehended, but the feeling that the content “belongs to me” no longer is (...) secured. I discuss the implications of a mechanism enabling personal ownership for understanding a variety of clinical syndromes as well normal mental function. (shrink)

Elements of Mind (EM) has two themes, one major and one minor. The major theme is intentionality, the mind’s direction upon its objects; the other is the mind–body problem. I treat these themes separately: chapters 1, and 3–5 are concerned with intentionality, while chapter 2 is about the mind–body problem. In this summary I will first describe my view of the mind–body problem, and then describe the book’s main theme. Like many philosophers, I see the (...) mind–body problem as containing two sub–problems: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. I see these problems forming the two horns of a dilemma. Just as the problem of mental causation pushes us towards physicalism, so the problem of consciousness pushes us away from it. Each problem reveals the inadequacy of the solution to the other. Essentially the problem of mental causation is the conflict between (i) the apparent fact that mental states and events have effects in the physical world and (ii) a general principle about the causal nature of the physical world, which is sometimes called the ‘causal closure’ or the ‘causal completeness’ of the physical world. This principle says that all physical effects have physical causes which are enough to bring them about. The problem then is simple: how can a mental cause have a physical effect if that effect also has a physical cause which is enough to bring it about? Barring massive overdetermination of our actions by independent causes, it seems that the best answer is to identify the mental and the physical causes. And this is traditionally how physicalists have argued for their identity theory of mind and body. However, many physicalists reject the identity theory, and therefore they have to solve the mental causation problem in some other way. At present, there is no consensus among physicalists on which of the currently proposed solutions is correct. In chapter 2 of EM I propose an alternative, which I call ‘emergentism’. Inspired by the rejection of the identity theory, Emergentism is the idea that mental properties are genu.. (shrink)

This chapter explains how mindmelding — the direct experience by one person of another's conscious states — is in fact possible. The temporal lobes causally interact with the prefrontal lobes by way of fiber bundles that run underneath the cortical surface. This provides the perfect first experiment in mindmelding: to ‘branch’ those fiber bundles and run the other end into the brain of another person. Evidence is provided that these bundles have close connections to consciousness, in that whatever (...) affects them has immediate effects on consciousness. Then, before responding to several objections, the chapter considers another issue brought up by these experiments — the question of the relation between mindmelding and mindreading. Is mindmelding similar to mindreading? Does the existence of a mindreading system help us achieve mindmelding? (shrink)

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner’s Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence (...) of these evolutions due to quantum fluctuations. By assuming the supervenience of a conscious state on some sufficient underlying physical state, I show that the existence of two or more instances, whether spacelike or timelike, of the same conscious state leads to a logical contradiction, ultimately refuting the assumption that a conscious state can be physically reset to an earlier state or duplicated by any physical means. Several explanatory hypotheses and implications are addressed, particularly the relationships between consciousness, locality, physical irreversibility, and quantum no-cloning. (shrink)

Consciousness is known to be limited in processing capacity and often described in terms of a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. In this paper, we discuss a purely temporal pattern code, functionally decoupled from spatial signals, for conscious state generation in the brain. Arguments in favour of such a code include Dehaene et al.'s long-distance reverberation postulate, Ramachandran's remapping hypothesis, evidence for a temporal coherence index and coincidence detectors, and Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory. A time-bin resonance (...) model is developed, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation across large distances in highly plastic neural circuits. The temporal signatures are delivered by neural activity patterns which, beyond a certain statistical threshold, activate, maintain, and terminate a conscious brain state like a bar code would activate, maintain, or inactivate the electronic locks of a safe. Such temporal resonance would reflect a higher level of neural processing, independent from sensorial or perceptual brain mechanisms. (shrink)

The famous advaitic expressions -/- Brahma sat jagat mithya jivo brahma eva na apraha and Asti bhaati priyam namam roopamcheti amsa panchakam AAdya trayam brahma roopam tato dwayam jagat roopam -/- will be analyzed through physics and electronics and interpreted. -/- Four phases of mind, four modes of language acquisition and communication and seven cognitive states of mind participating in human cognitive and language acquisition and communication processes will be identified and discussed. -/- Implications and application of (...) such an identification and analysis to the fields of cognitive sciences, mind-machine modeling, natural language comprehension field of artificial intelligence and physiological psychology will be hinted. A comprehensive modern scientific understanding of human consciousness, mind and mental functions will be presented. (shrink)

Why are we conscious? What does consciousness enable us to do that cannot be done by zombies in the dark? This paper argues that introspective consciousness probably co-evolved as a "spandrel" along with our more useful ability to represent the mental states of other people. The first part of the paper defines and motivates a conception of consciousness as a kind of "double vision" – the perception of how things seem to us as well as what they are (...) – along lines recently explored by Peter Carruthers. The second part explains the basic socioepistemic function of consciousness and suggests an evolutionary pathway to this cognitive capacity that begins with predators and prey. The third part discusses the relevance of these considerations to the traditional problem of other minds. (shrink)

The massive debate in philosophy and psychology and neuroscience about higher-order theories of consciousness has not adequately distinguished between the following two claims. (Necessary Awareness): For any conscious mental state M and subject S, if S is in M, then S is aware of M. (The Higher-Order Theory): For any conscious mental state M and subject S, if S is in M, then M is conscious because S is aware of M. -/- While I will assume that (...) the first claim is true, I will argue that we should reject higher-order theories of consciousness. We should turn them on their head to go with the following theory: (The Ascending Road): For any conscious mental state M and subject S, if S is in M, then S is aware of M because M is conscious. (shrink)

I offer a close reading of the first part of Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, arguing that contrary to widely held interpretation, one of Sartre's main goals in that text is to defend the view that consciousness does not necessitate self-awareness, that not all conscious states need be, ipso facto, states of self-awareness. In addition, I explain that this view about the conceptual relationship between consciousness and self-awareness has important methodological implications. One of the standard strategies (...) for accounting for the possibility of the type of capacity to have I* thoughts and attitudes is based on the assumption that being conscious necessarily entails being self-aware in at least a minimal sense, and then proceeds to explain how it I*-thoughts and attitudes are possible on the basis of those minimal states of self-awareness. Yet if Sartre's account of self-awareness is so much as plausible, this kind of strategy is bound to be incomplete. By helping itself to a notion of minimal self-awareness that is purportedly constitutive of consciousness, it fails to account for what is, by its own lights, the most fundamental form of self-awareness. (shrink)

[This download contains the Table of Contents and Chapter 1]. I argue here that the claim that conscious states are private, in the sense that only one person can ever experience them directly, is false. There actually is a way to connect the brains of two people that would allow one to have direct experience of the other's conscious, e.g., perceptual states. This would allow, for instance, one person to see that the other had deviant color (...) perception (which was masked by correct linguistic practice). This could be achieved by connecting one person's set of executive processes (or cognitive control network) to the conscious perceptual states of the other. Chapter 5 contains an internalist physicalist account of color according to which colors exist only as brain states. Their function is to enable more precise causal interactions between the executive processes and the brain's perceptual systems. This in turn allows for more precise action: I can select the red apples and leave the green ones. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior (...) to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary exploration discusses the intricate conceptual linkages among Buddhism’s Eighth State of Consciousness, Quantum Holography, and the Jungian Collective Unconscious. Central to this study is examining the Eighth Consciousness in Buddhist thought—a realm that transcends the conventional sensory and mental states to connect with a more universal and profound awareness. Drawing parallels, Quantum Holography posits that every part of the universe retains information about the whole, much like a hologram. This notion seemingly mirrors the Jungian concept of the (...) Collective Unconscious, which postulates a shared reservoir of memories and ideas across humanity. The paper contends that the intricate dance of photons, oscillating between particle and wave states, mediates perception through resonance and hints at a multi-layered consciousness stratum that mirrors the vast, enigmatic quantum reality expanse. The study illuminates the intersections and divergences among these frameworks through meticulous comparative analysis, positing that an integrative understanding of quantum theories and Buddhist wisdom can unravel the human psyche’s profound depths. By weaving Eastern philosophies with Western psychological and quantum theoretical tapestry, the discourse unveils a multifaceted consciousness comprehension, championing integrative approaches as invaluable tools for decoding the mind and universe's enigmatic interplay from a quantum viewpoint. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of consciousness aims to investigate and explain our thinking about phenomenally conscious states. Based on empirical studies, researchers have argued (a) that we lack a folk concept of consciousness, (b) that we do not think entities like Microsoft feel regret, (c) that unfelt pains are widely accepted, and (d) that people do not attribute phenomenally conscious states to duplicated hamsters. In this article, I review these and other intriguing claims about people’s understanding of phenomenal (...) consciousness. In doing so, I also show why experimental philosophy of consciousness is challenging, although perhaps not quite as daunting as studying phenomenal consciousness itself. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature on consciousness and the mind-body problem, the conceivability argument against physicalism is usually taken to support a form of dualism between physicality and phenomenality. Usually, the discussion focuses on the qualitative character of experience, which is what the phenomenal feel of a given experience is like. By contrast, the subjective character of experience, or its individuation to a given first-person subject, tends to be set aside. The aim of this paper is to present a new (...) and more robust version of the conceivability argument for dualism that appeals to the subjective character of experience. Drawing on insights by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, I conceptualise the first-person subjective character of experience as a transcendental condition of possibility for phenomenality that cannot be reduced to third-person facts about the physical world. Given this, the mind-body problem as it pertains to consciousness does not merely concern the inability of the set of physical facts about a brain state to capture the qualitative character of experience, but concerns the existential issue of why this brain state is accompanied by first-person subjectivity at all. This allows us to reconceive the conceivability argument in a way that presents a stronger case for dualism than the traditional version of the argument. (shrink)

Human consciousness, the result of breathing process as dealt with in the Upanishads, is translated into modern scientific terms and modeled as a mechanical oscillator of infrasonic frequency. The bio-mechanic oscillator is also proposed as the source of psychic energy. This is further advanced to get an insight of human consciousness (the being of mind) and functions of mind (the becoming of mind) in terms of psychic energy and reversible transformation of its virtual reflection. An alternative analytical (...) insight of human consciousness and mental functions to other theoretical approaches is developed based on Upanishadic insight and presented.That reversible transformation of virtual psychic energy reflection termed as maya, creating various consequential / parallel / simultaneous conscious-states, phases, cognitive and communicative states, modes of language acquisition and communication, and kinds of function of human mind is visualized. The concept is extended to delineate form, structure and functional mechanism of human mind and to know how it facilitates human mental acquisitions, retention, communications, including language abilities. This proposal is extensively discussed and the hardware and software of mind as envisaged in Indian philosophical systems are put forward.All this presentation is translated to neuro-biology in terms of brain wave modulation / demodulation terms. Also a preliminary proposition of physic-chemical nature of human thoughts and ideas is given. (shrink)

A key failing in contemporary philosophy of mind is the lack of attention paid to evolutionary theory in its research projects. Notably, where evolution is incorporated into the study of mind, the work being done is often described as philosophy of cognitive science rather than philosophy of mind. Even then, whereas possible implications of the evolution of human cognition are taken more seriously within the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of cognitive science, its relevance for cognitive science (...) has only been appreciated relatively recently, and the approach still comes in for some major criticism from prominent theorists within the field. This paper explores some of the reasons for this state of affairs and finds that it might have less to do with due consideration and well-founded scepticism about the relevance of evolutionary theory to these disciplines and more to do with historical accident and faulty assumptions on the part of key theorists in these disciplines. It is also noted that where cognitive scientists are taking evolution into account in their work on the mind, they straying more and more into domains that used to fall exclusively under the purview of philosophy of mind as it is traditionally conceived – qualia, consciousness, perception, intentionality and so forth. The point is made that in ignoring the work being done on the evolution of mind, philosophy of mind runs the risk of becoming obsolete. (shrink)

Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof (...) of a mental substance or soul. Although emergence does not entail classical theism, it is compatible with a variety of religious positions. Clayton concludes with a defence of emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence. (shrink)

Nietzsche's thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical community as well as to philosophers of a more phenomenological and hermeneutic background. The volume aims to appeal to both communities of scholars as it seeks to deepen the growing interest and appreciation of Nietzsche's contribution to our understanding of the mind. The 16 essays by leading Nietzsche scholars examine Nietzsche's understanding of consciousness and investigate its continuities with current developments in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, (...) neuroethics, psychology, linguistics, and metaphysics. Recent work in philosophy of mind emphasises non-reductive approaches to consciousness and self-consciousness. The mental is understood as always already embodied as well as situated or embedded in and emerging from a complex system. Nietzsche's thoroughly naturalistic philosophy has received renewed attention as it challenges any reductivist attempt to understand the mental exclusively as a physical phenomenon using the methods of the natural sciences. His understanding of nature and the physical, informed by but not reducible to the natural sciences of his time, is highly idiosyncratic. It posits the mental at several levels, from unconscious and proto-conscious drives, affects and emotions, to reflective, higher-order conscious states, intentionality and language. (shrink)

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the (...) modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward. (shrink)

Recent neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state, which have commanded great media attention, are reviewed. They show that psychedelic trances are consistently accompanied by broad reductions in brain activity, despite their experiential richness. This result is at least counterintuitive from the perspective of mainstream physicalism, according to which subjective experience is entirely constituted by brain activity. In this brief analysis, the generic implications of physicalism regarding the relationship between the richness of experience and brain activity levels are rigorously examined from (...) an informational perspective, and then made explicit and unambiguous. These implications are then found to be non-trivial to reconcile with the results of said neuroimaging studies, which highlights the significance of such studies for the mind-body problem and philosophy of mind in general. (shrink)

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position (...) to make sense of them both as natural phenomena. (shrink)

Explanation does not exist in a metaphysical vacuum. Conceptions of the structure of a phenomenon play an important role in guiding attempts to explain it, and erroneous conceptions of a phenomenon may direct investigation in misleading directions. I believe that there is a case to be made for thinking that much work on the neural underpinnings of consciousness—what is often called the neural correlates of consciousness—is driven by an erroneous conception of the structure of consciousness. The aim of this paper (...) is lay bare some connections between the explanation of consciousness and the structure of consciousness, and to argue for a conception of the structure of consciousness that is more adequate than that which currently drives much research into the neural correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being (...) in question has. We experimentally investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

A model of human consciousness is presented here in terms of physics and electronics using Upanishadic awareness. The form of Atman proposed in the Upanishads in relation to human consciousness as oscillating psychic energy-presence and its virtual or unreal energy reflection maya, responsible for mental energy and mental time-space are discussed. Analogy with Fresnel’s bi-prism experimental set up in physical optics is used to state, describe and understand the form, structure and function of Atman and maya, the ingredients of human (...) consciousness. A description of phases of mind in terms of conscious states and transformation of mental energy is given. Four states of consciousness and four modes of language communication and understanding processes are also given. Implications of above scientific awareness of Upanishadic wisdom to the modern scientific fields of physiological psychology, cognitive sciences, mind-machine modeling and natural language comprehension are suggested. -/- . (shrink)

Human consciousness, as dealt with in the Upanishads, modeled as a mechanical oscillator of infrasonic frequency (the Atman/Brahman), the result of breathing process, is further advanced to get an insight of functions of mind. An analytical approach is followed in parallel to and separette from quantum mechanical, quantum field and other theoretical propositions, approaches and presentations. Pure consciousness, unoccupied awareness and occupied awareness are identified, defined, classified and discussed together with fresh insight about time-space and time. A reversible transformation (...) (vivartanam) of virtual mental energy reflection (maya), creating various consequential / parallel / simultaneous conscious-states, phases, cognitive and communicative states, modes of language acquisition and communication, and kinds of function of human mind, which forms and facilitates human mental acquisitions, functions and communications, is proposed and discussed. Alternative analytical insight of human consciousness and mental functions to other theoretical approaches is given. All this is presented in brain wave modulation / demodulation terms. -/- . (shrink)

According to what I will call the “appearance-is-reality doctrine of mind,” conscious mental states are identical to how they subjectively appear or present themselves to us in our experience of them. The doctrine has had a number of supporters but to date has not received from its proponents the comprehensive and systematic treatment that might be expected. In this paper I outline the key features of the appearance-is-reality doctrine along with the case for thinking that doctrine to (...) be true. I also defend the doctrine from some objections. Finally, I spell out the important metaphysical and epistemological implications of the appearance-is-reality doctrine of mind. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Mind consists of problems concerning aspects and properties of the human mind. The most important of these problems is that of the relation between mind and body, or, more generally, between mental and physical phenomena. Usually referred to as the "mind-body problem", this has been one of the fundamental problems in Philosophy since Descartes (1596-1650) and his critics introduced it four centuries ago. The mental seems, at first glance, completely different from the physical. (...) Physical properties are public, i.e. equally observable by everyone, but mental properties are not. It can be deduced that someone feels pain by his behaviour, but only that person can feel it directly. Conscious mental events are private in the sense that the subject has privileged access to them that no one has for the physical. Conscious experiences, such as the smell of jasmine, are completely different from the configurations and movements, however complex, of particles, atoms and molecules, or the physical changes of cells and tissues. Despite this, conscious phenomena do not seem to arise out of nothing, but from physical-biological processes in the body, especially from neural processes in the brain. But how can physical-biological systems have states such as thoughts, fears and hopes? (shrink)

In 1976, Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) made an important statement in his work titled "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind''. As modern humans, we are conscious beings and can think about our thoughts. However, in ancient texts it is observed that human self-awareness and self-awareness have not yet been formed in humans. Jaynes calls this way of thinking, which emerged in the 2000 BC and evolved over time, bicameral thinking. Citing exceptional examples taken from (...) Homer and the Old Testament, he argued that historical heroes could not attain consciousness and therefore could not yet become real subjects. Ancient heroes attributed the voices in their minds to supernatural powers. Janes argues that the characters in the Iliad do not sit and think about what to do like we do, nor do they have alert and introspective minds like us. According to Jaynes, the concepts of thumos, phrenes and kradie found in Homer's works can be considered primitive consciousness. Jaynes argues that the bicameral mind lacks the capacity for metacognition (reflective thinking). The bicameral mind, where episodic and semantic memory, introspection and mastery of consciousness have not yet been formed; It evolves with language use over time. In the 2000s BC, marginal social and environmental changes began to collapse due to societal needs. The stress created by new conditions requires neurological adaptation, leading to the development of consciousness and self-awareness. The heroes of tragedy have experienced traumatic events and have changed and transformed as a result; He gains consciousness as introspection and inner monologue, and provides an important example of spiritual transformation as an immortal psycho-mythological figure. During a period that can be described as a transition from myth to logos, the spirit underwent a rupture. The great social transformations and disasters experienced over time have led to the renewal of the human spirit. In fact, there have been attempts such as divination and communication with supernatural forces to reach voices that can no longer be heard. When all this state of conflict is interpreted through the inner conversations and mental transformation of the person, the dynamic structure of the mind will emerge, where the thinking patterns of the person change depending on environmental conditions. (shrink)

Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist — it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism and overzealous naturalism. However, Jay Garfield has endorsed illusionism by explicitly drawing support from the classical Yogācāra Buddhist (...) philosopher Vasubandhu. In this paper, I assess the degree to which Garfield’s illusionist interpretation accurately captures the views of Vasubandhu and his commentator Sthiramati in their extant Sanskrit works. As it turns out, Vasubandhu and Sthiramati converge with contemporary illusionists in taking an unconscious causal basis of cognitive/linguistic processes to be responsible for generating the illusion of representational states with apparently phenomenal contents. Within their constitutive understanding of the mind as the “imagination of what is non-existent” (abhūtaparikalpa), I raise possible candidates for what might seem to be real instances of phenomenality — mental appearances (pratibhāsa), affective sensory experience (vedanā), and “intrinsic luminosity” (prakṛtiprabhāsvara) — and consider possible responses on behalf of an illusionist interpreter. I conclude that Vasubandhu and Sthiramati really do appear to be strong illusionists about phenomenal consciousness, particularly if phenomenal states are assumed to be essentially representational. (shrink)

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is (...) ‘physical’ while the first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.2 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this paper, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. (shrink)

The thesis of experiential revelation—Rev for brevity—in the philosophy of mind claims that to have an experience—i.e., to be acquainted with it—is to know its nature. It is widely agreed that although at least moderate versions of Rev might strike one as plausible and perhaps even appealing, at least up to a certain extent, most of them are nonetheless inconsistent with almost any coherent form of physicalism about the mind. Thus far, the issue of the alleged tension between (...) Rev and physicalism has mostly been put in the relevant literature in terms of phenomenal concepts—those concepts which refer to phenomenal properties, or qualia, and characterize them in terms of the peculiar quality(ies) they exhibit—and some kind of “special feature” those concepts allegedly possess. I call this version of Rev C-Rev. This paper aims to suggest that while it is true that phenomenal concepts reveal the nature of their referent(s)—i.e., it is a priori, for a subject possessing the concept and just in virtue of possessing it, what it is for the referent(s) of the concept to be part of reality—this feature of them, in turn, rests on a non-conceptual non-propositional kind of knowledge, namely, sui generis introspective knowledge by acquaintance of one’s own phenomenally conscious states. I call this version of Rev A-Rev. §1 provides some introductory material. In §2 I discuss two arguments that have recently been put forth to undermine the cogency of C-Rev against physicalism. §3 elaborates on the historical roots of C-Rev. §4 presents some of the major arguments which have been offered for A-Rev. A few concluding remarks close the paper. (shrink)

Mind-body parallelism is the view that mind and body stand in the same “order and connection,” as Spinoza put it, or that corresponding mental and physical states have corresponding causal explanations in terms of other mental and physical states. This dissertation investigates the nature and role of mind-body parallelism, as well as other forms of parallelism, in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind. In doing so, it also considers how Spinoza’s views relate to current discussions. In (...) present-day philosophy of mind, mind-body parallelism is almost never defended. It is seen as a historical dead-end with insurmountable problems. By contrast, I argue that parallelism powerfully responds to the post-Cartesian mind-body problem (which remains with us today) and that it points a way forward in current debates. The dissertation contains five independent chapters. After an introduction that situates parallelism in relation to both Spinoza’s time and to present discussions, Chapter 1 presents an argument for parallelism aimed at a present-day audience. Chapter 2 discusses Spinoza’s own arguments for parallelism. Both chapters help to clarify what parallelism is, in part by distinguishing between several versions of the view. Chapter 3 discusses what is often considered parallelism’s most problematic feature, its rejection of mind-body interaction. I argue that by distinguishing between the post-Cartesian context in which Spinoza wrote and present-day discussions, we can see that parallelism is compatible with mental causation. Chapters 4 and 5, finally, discuss specific ways in which parallelism is at work in Spinoza’s view of the mind. In Chapter 4, I argue that parallelism is at work in Spinoza’s interesting and distinctive positions on the nature of agency and motivation. In Chapter 5, I show the role of parallelism in his representationalist theory of consciousness. A guiding thread throughout the dissertation is that parallelism presents a distinctive and interesting way to combine realism, non-reductionism and naturalism in relation to those features of human self-understanding that seem difficult to fit into a naturalistic worldview. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. I consider two broad claims about this relationship: a constitutive claim, according to which all conscious experiences constitutively involve self-consciousness; and a typicalist claim, according to which ordinary conscious experiences contingently involve self-consciousness. Both of these claims call for elucidation of the relevant notions of consciousness and self-consciousness. -/- In the first part of the thesis ('The Myth of Constitutive Self-Consciousness'), I critically examine the constitutive claim. I start by (...) offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish between two concepts of self-consciousness: consciousness of one's experience, and consciousness of oneself (as oneself). Each of these concepts yields a distinct variant of the constitutive claim. In turn, each resulting variant of the constitutive claim can be interpreted in two ways: on a 'minimal' or deflationary reading, they fall within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on a 'strong' or inflationary reading, they point to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary readings of either variant of the constitutive claim are plausible and illuminating, but would ideally be formulated without using a term as polysemous as 'self-consciousness'; by contrast, the inflationary readings of either variant are not adequately supported. -/- In the second part of the thesis ('Self-Consciousness in the Real World'), I focus on the second concept of self-consciousness, or consciousness of oneself as oneself. Drawing upon empirical evidence, I defend a pluralist account of self-consciousness so construed, according to which there are several ways in which one can be conscious of oneself as oneself – through conscious thoughts, bodily experiences and perceptual experiences – that make distinct determinate contributions to one's phenomenology. This pluralist account provides us with the resources to vindicate the typicalist claim according to which consciousness of oneself as oneself – a sense of self – is pervasive in ordinary conscious experiences, as a matter of contingent empirical fact. It also provides us with the resources to assess the possibility that a subject might be conscious without being conscious of herself as herself in any way. (shrink)

The received view in physicalist philosophy of mind assumes that causation can only take place at the physical domain and that the physical domain is causally closed. It is often thought that this leaves no room for mental states qua mental to have a causal influence upon the physical domain, leading to epiphenomenalism and the problem of mental causation. However, in recent philosophy of causation there has been growing interest in a line of thought that can be called (...) causal antifundamentalism: causal notions cannot play a role in physics, because the fundamental laws of physics are radically different from causal laws. Causal anti-fundamentalism seems to challenge the received view in physicalist philosophy of mind and thus raises the possibility of there being genuine mental causation after all. This paper argues that while causal anti-fundamentalism provides a possible route to mental causation, we have reasons to think that it is incorrect. Does this mean that we have to accept the received view and give up the hope of genuine mental causation? I will suggest that the ontological interpretation of quantum theory provides us both with a view about the nature of causality in fundamental physics, as well as a view how genuine mental causation can be compatible with our fundamental (quantum) physical ontology. (shrink)

Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? (...) Aren't they motivated by a sort of 'will to goodness', a preferencing of one affective dimension over others? It would seem that groundlessness for Varela and Thompson doesn't apply to the thinking of affect and desire. Despite their claim that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will, they appear not to recognize that the positive affectivities they associate with meditative practice are, as dispositions of feeling opposed to other dispositions, themselves forms of willing. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity( blissful, self-less compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Thus, the basis of our awareness of a world isn’t simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. (shrink)

In recent years, a central debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science concerns the role of the body in perception and cognition. For many contemporary philosophers, not only cognition but also perception is connected mainly with the brain, where the processing of input from the senses takes place; whereas for the proponents of ‘embodied cognition’ other aspects of the body beyond the brain, including the environment, play a constitutive role in cognitive processes. In terms of perception, a (...) new theory has emerged which stresses perception’s active character and claims that the embodied subject and the environment, with which it interacts, form a dynamic system. Supporters of ‘enactive perception’ such as Susan Hurley and Alva Noë maintain that the physical substrate or the supervenience basis of perceptual experience and phenomenal consciousness may include besides the brain and the nervous system other bodily and environmental features. Yet, it will be argued in this paper that the interaction between the subject and the environment forms a system of causal relations, so we can theoretically interfere in the causal chains and create hallucinations, which cannot be distinguished from veridical perception, or a virtual reality as in the film Matrix (1999). This kind of argument and its related thought experiments aim to stress the primacy of the brain in determining phenomenal states, and show that the body and certain interactions with the environment have a causal, but not a constitutive or essential role, in forming phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The author presents an autobiographical story of serious peripheral motor nerve damage resulting from chemotoxicity induced as a side effect of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma treatment. The first-person, phenomenological account of the condition naturally leads to philosophical questions about consciousness, felt presence of oneself all over and within one’s body, and the felt constitutiveness of peripheral processes to one’s mental life. The first-person data only fit well with a philosophical approach to the mind that takes peripheral, bodily events and states (...) at their face value, and not as a body-in-the-brain, which has been popular with most neuroscientists. Thus the philosophical tradition that comes closest to the idea of the peripheral mind is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s bodily phenomenology. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of (...) being in the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

With neurons emergence, life alters itself in a remarkable way. This embodied neurons become carriers of signals, and processing devices: it begins an inexorable progression of functional complexity, from increasingly drawn behaviors to the mind and eventually to consciousness [Damasio, 2010]. In which moment has awareness arisen in the history of life? The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior and mind, which ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in (...) natural history. It is in this context of biological evolution of conscious brains that we raise the question: how conscious brains connect with each other? In order to answer it, I will explore how brain states and conscious states each participate in dynamic interactive processes involving the whole organism. I will argue that a possible way to overcome the hard problem of consciousness might be based on the notion of embodiment as a process of embedding the mental in the living organism relating dynamically with the environment through the sensorymotor experience. In order to do so, I will provide an assembly between an anthropologic perspective of consciousness with contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Interaction Theory [Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009]. (shrink)

Important conceptual and metaphysical issues arise when we try to understand the mental lives of “split-brain” subjects. How many distinct streams of consciousness do they have? According to Elizabeth Schechter’s partial unity model, the answer is one. A related question is whether co-consciouness, in general, is transitive. That is, if α and β are co-conscious experiences, and β and γ are co-conscious experiences, must α and γ be co-conscious? According to Schechter, the answer is no. The partial (...) unity model faces some serious objections. Its underpinnings are suspect, and ways of working out the model fall into trouble of various sorts: incoherence, emptiness, or unacceptable indeterminacy about the identity of (token) conscious states. One apparent lesson is that a subject can host two distinct conscious experiences of the same sort. Another is that the co-consciousness relation is transitive after all. (shrink)

Metaphysical underdetermination arises when we are not able to decide, through purely theoretical criteria, between competing interpretations of scientific theories with different metaphysical commitments. This is the case in which non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM) finds itself in. Among several available interpretations, there is the one that states that the interaction with the conscious mind of a human observer causes a change in the dynamics of quantum objects undergoing from indefinite to definite states. In this paper, we (...) argue that there seems to be also a metaphysical underdetermination concerning London and Bauer’s theory of measurement between two methods of phenomenological reduction: the eidetic and the transcendental approaches. Recently, Steven French argued that both methods can be combined in order to interpret London and Bauer’s formalism. However, in this paper we argue that the eidetic one is the only viable phenomenological way to interpret this particular theory of measurement in QM based on the formalism presented by London and Bauer, hence breaking this phenomenological underdetermination. (shrink)

Williamson’s “anti-luminosity” argument aims to establish that there are no significant luminous conditions. “Far from forming a cognitive home”, luminous conditions are mere “curiosities”. Even supposing Williamson’s argument succeeds in showing that there are no significant luminous states his conclusion has not thereby been established. When it comes to determining what is luminous, mental events and processes are among the best candidates. It is events and processes, after all, which constitute the stream of consciousness. Judgment, for instance, is plausibly (...) self-conscious. If I am judging then plausibly I must know that I am. Similarly, deliberation is plausibly self-conscious. To be deliberating about some matter I plausibly must know that I am. That one is judging and that one is deliberating are thus plausibly luminous conditions. Furthermore, I argue, Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument fails to speak against this suggestion. This reveals that Williamson’s argument is more limited in scope than has been thought—something likely missed due to a misplaced focus on mental states in the luminosity debate as well as in epistemology and the philosophy of mind more generally. For all Williamson shows, there may be luminous events and processes of a sort apt to constitute a cognitive home. I conclude by considering how the anti-luminosity argument might be reinstated in the judgment case and argue that the natural way to do so fails. (shrink)

In “Radical Interpretation” (1974), David Lewis asked: by what constraints, and to what extent, do the non-intentional, physical facts about Karl determine the intentional facts about him? There are two popular approaches: the reductive externalist program and the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue against both approaches. Then I sketch an alternative multistage account incorporating ideas from both camps. If we start with Karl's conscious experiences, we can appeal to Lewisian ideas to explain his other intentional states. This account (...) develops the multistage Lewisian approach presented at the end of my earlier "Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?" (2013). (shrink)

دراسة فى فلسفة العقل عند جون سيرل، مع التركيز على مفهوم القصدية John Searle is one of the most important and influential living philosophers of the last thirty years. The core concept of his philosophy is intentionality. Intentionality is the mind's capacity to direct itself at things or represent them. How does the mind work? How can the human mind represent the external world? Representation is the primary function of our minds. When we believe, think, plan, hope, (...) desire, conceive, we are representing the world, and this makes our mental states intentional states. Do all mental states exhibit intentionality? Do only mental states exhibit intentionality? What is the structure of intentional states? What is the intentionality of perception and action? What is the relation between intentionality and consciousness? What is the relation between the intentionality of mind and intentionality of language? In this monograph, I try to answer these questions and others, and I will reconstruct Searle’s theory of intentionality and evaluate it in the light of the history of intentionality, especially Brentano’s thesis, and recent developments in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The nature of human mind has been an open question for more than 2000 years and it is still today a mystery. There has been during the last 30 years a renewed interest from science and philosophy on that subject. Among the existing research domains is neurophilosophy, an interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy looking at neuronal aspects of access consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness and at functional aspects of consciousness. We propose here to look if self-consciousness could have a (...) place in neurophilosophy by using an existing evolutionary scenario that can introduce possible links between neural processing and some aspects of self-consciousness. The scenario is about an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness where evolutions of inter-subjectivity and meaningful representations may have led our ancestors to identify with their conspecifics. The scenario proposes that this process has brought our pre-human ancestors to represent themselves as existing entities like the conspecifics they identified with were represented. Such a representation of oneself as an existing entity may have created an elementary version of self-consciousness that we name “ancestral self-consciousness”. But identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics has also produced an important anxiety increase. To limit that anxiety our ancestors have developed mental states and behaviors like caring, imitation communication and simulation. These performances have introduced evolutionary advantages leading to an evolutionary engine that has favored the development of ancestral self-consciousness toward our human self-consciousness. We begin by presenting a model for the generation of meaningful information based on a system submitted to an internal constraint (the Meaning Generator System). We use that model to introduce meaningful representations as networks of meaningful information. We then present the evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness that uses meaningful representations and the performance of inter-subjectivity. The scenario leads to propose two links between self-consciousness and neural processes: mirror-neurons as neural introduction to inter-subjectivity and self-consciousness as neural computation on meaningful representations. Possible continuations are highlighted. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that the late twentieth century conception of consciousness in analytic philosophy emerged from the idea of consciousness as givenness, via the behaviourist idea of “raw feels”. In the post-behaviourist period in philosophy, this resulted in the division of states of mind into essentially unconscious propositional attitudes plus the phenomenal residue of qualia: intrinsic, ineffable and inefficacious sensory states. It is striking how little in the important questions about consciousness depends on this (...) conception, or on this particular division of mental states. So accepting this division and its associated conceptions of intentionality and consciousness is not an obligatory starting point for the philosophy of mind. A historical investigation of how these ideas came to be seen as inevitable can also help us see how we might reasonably reject them. (shrink)