Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Mind

  • Are There Indexical Facts? Are They a Threat to Materialism?

    1. Ernst Mach Spies a Shabby Pedagogue. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote:      Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was     very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at     the other end.…

  • Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

    I've been studying Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton UP, 2005).  Here are some notes and questions. 1. It's clear that mental causation must be saved.  If Kim is right that nonreductive physicalism is not viable, then by his lights our only hope of saving mental causation is via "physical reductionism." (159).  It…

  • The Irreducibility of Intentionality: An Argument From the Indeterminacy of the Physical

    If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.  There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are…

  • Searle, Subjectivity, and Objectivity

    John Searle is a marvellous critic of  theories in the philosophy of mind, perhaps the best.  He makes all sorts of excellent points in his muscular and surly way.  But his positive doctrine eludes me, assuming it is supposed to be a coherent doctrine.  The problem may reside with me, of course.  But I am…

  • Could Intentionality be an Illusion? A Note on Rosenberg

    Could intentonality be an illusion?  Of course not.  But seemingly intelligent people think otherwise: A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the…

  • Telescope and ‘Cerebroscope’

    If God cannot appear through a telescope, why do you think that mind can appear through a 'cerebroscope'?

  • Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

    Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly…

  • More on Intentionality as a Problem for Functionalism

    1. Even if every mental state is a brain state, it is quite clear that  not every brain state is a mental state: not everything going on in the brain manifests mentality. So what distinguishes the brain states that are mental states from the brain states that are not? This question cannot be evaded. The…

  • Intentionality Not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?

    The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism.  The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable.  An earlier post discussed a version of the knowledge argument, which is one of the qualia-based objections.  (Two others are the absent qualia…

  • On Paul Churchland’s ‘Refutation’ of the Knowledge Argument

    If this post needs theme music, I suggest Party Lights (1962) by the one-hit wonder, Claudine Clark:  "I see the lights/I see the party lights/They're red and blue and green/Everybody in the crowd is there/But you won't let me make the scene!"  (Because, mama dear, you've kept me cooped up in a black-and-white room studying neuroscience.)…

  • Against Functionalism in the Philosophy of Mind: Argument One

    In my last philosophy of mind post on property dualism I posed a problem: My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process) can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties. Why should there be a problem? Well,…

  • Property Dualism and Supervenience

    A reader asked why I didn't mention supervenience in my recent posts on property dualism.  He opines that "the notion was invented to make sense of the position you are arguing against."  Let's see. My Problem With Property Dualism Roughly Stated I take a property dualist to be one who maintains all of the following propositions: 1.…

  • Property Dualism, the Red Ball Analogy, and Emergence

    This post advances the discussion in the ComBox attached to Could Brains Have Mental Properties? It would be very easy to be a property dualist in the philosophy of mind if one were also a substance dualist.  What I am having trouble understanding is how a property dualist can be a substance monist. In contemporary discussions, the…

  • Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

    1. Many philosophers of mind who eschew substance dualism opt for a property dualism.   Allowing only one category of substances, material substances, they allow at least two categories of properties, mental and physical.  An example of a mental property is sensing red, or to put it adverbially, the property of sensing redly, or in a Chisholmian…

  • Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms Have the Same Reference?

    I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail: . . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this…