Category: Mind
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Galen Strawson versus Colin McGinn
Galen Strawson in Little Gray Cells: The intuitive puzzle is clear, and McGinn presents it with multilayered intensity. He is right that we can never hope to understand how consciousness as we know it in everyday life relates to the brain considered as a lump of matter. But it doesn't follow that consciousness is a…
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A Reader Defends Kurzweil against McGinn
Will Duquette e-mails and I respond in blue. Having followed your link to McGinn's review of Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind," it seems to me that there's something McGinn is missing that weakens his critique. Mind you, I agree that Kurzweil is mistaken; but there's a piece of Kurzweil's view of things that…
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Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News
First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token. The devastation…
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Sweet Dreams of Dennett
The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site. Here it is again, considerably reworked. ……….. I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it…
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The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?
According to the The New York Times, Daniel Dennett has a new book coming out entitled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Here are a couple of tidbits from the NYT piece: The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams. The elusive…
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Refutation By Joke
One behaviorist to another, "It was good for you, how was it for me?"
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More Nagel Commentary
If you haven't read enough already about Thomas Nagel's 2012 Mind and Cosmos, here are two more worthwhile articles. Nagel's Untimely Idea Thomas Nagel is not Crazy Related articles Any Good Reviews Yet of Nagel's New Book? Should Nagel's Book Be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Plantinga Reviews Nagel Thomas Nagel Reviews Alvin…
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Matter Thinks?
I dedicate this post to Victor Reppert who thinks along similar lines, and shares my love of the oldies. ………… If matter could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood. Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought,…
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Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano’s Thesis?
Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality. Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later,…
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Thinking Meat?
Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain. A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think. The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads. Of course we…
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Galen Strawson versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness
A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull. I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion. Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust:…
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Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness Be A Conjuring Trick?
The following statement by Nicholas Humphrey (Psychology, London School of Economics) is one among many answers to the question: What do you believe is true though you cannot prove it? I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is…
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Galen Strawson and Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness
Alex Kealy (Institute of Art and Ideas, London) writes: I'm getting in contact from the Institute of Art and Ideas in Britain as we've just released a video I thought you might be interested in. Called "The Mind's Eye", the video is of a discussion that took place at our philosophy festival HowTheLightGetsIn last year.…
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Ignorabimus
We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here. But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which — we will remain ignorant in this life.…
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On Light
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert: Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21) Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low…