Category: Mind
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Consciousness is an Illusion . . .
. . . but truth is not? An inconsistency in Dennett. Over at the Stack.
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Can Consciousness be Explained?
Top o' the Stack. Dennett debunked!
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The Phenomenal Principle
Ed Buckner sends this: “If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality”. (Howard Robinson, Perception, 1994, London: Routledge, p. 32) That is the question. If it sensibly appears to Jake that there is a…
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Body, Soul, Self
Tony Flood writes: Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question. Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God…
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Animal Awareness: Aristotle, Galileo, Kant
This just over the trans0m from Edward Buckner. I have added my comments in blue. Aristotle: Even if all animals were eliminated and thereby all perceptions (since only animals perceive), “there will still be something perceptible—a body, for example, or something warm, or sweet, or bitter, or anything else perceptible.” BV: Evaluation of the above…
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De Anima
David K. writes, I need some help. I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review. I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings. Presently, I am in…
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The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution
Hi Dr. Vallicella, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM Best, Chandler…
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Parallel Problems of God and Evil, Mind and Matter
For Bradley Schneider. ………………………………….. It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are collectively logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both (objectively) true, then they are collectively logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be collectively logically consistent. This…
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The Grand Central Polarity: Objective and Subjective
Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything. "When I die, the world ends." The thought expressed by this sentence is…
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Mark Sainsbury on Intentional Relations
Following A. N. Prior, Sainsbury sets up the problem of intentionality as follows: We are faced with a paradox: some intentional states are relational and some are not. But all intentional states are the same kind of thing, and things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational. (Intentional Relations, 327) Cast…
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Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence
Intentionality cannot be identified with object-dependence. Here is why. Suppose that I begin thinking about some faraway thing such as the Washington Monument (WM) and that I think of it without interruption through some short interval of time. Half-way through the interval, unbeknownst to me, the monument is destroyed and ceases to exist. Question: does…
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Demarcation and Directedness: Notes on Brentano
Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874): Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not…
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Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?
In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle. But…
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The Eliminative Materialist
The eliminative materialist in the philosophy of mind is a bit like a man who blows his brains out to be rid of a headache. No head, no headache, no problem!
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Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?
That depends. It depends on what 'world' means. Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page: [1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not…