Category: Qualia
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Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?
Top o' the Stack. Thomas Beale writes, Getting back to the topic of consciousness . . . . I think you will find this Royal Institution lecture by British neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey of interest. He provides an outline of subjective phenomenal consciousness and how it could have evolved. One very interesting claim is that sentience…
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The Analysis of Qualia
London Ed sends the following for our rumination and delectation: This is not mine (Lycan's). But it is tricky: 1) Bertie is experiencing a green thing. 2) Suppose that there is no physical green thing outside Bertie’s head. But 3) There is no physical green thing inside Bertie’s head either. 4) If it…
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Does Omniscience Require Incarnation? Pursuing Some Consequences
Dr. Vito Caiati occasioned in me a new thought the other day: that divine omniscience might require divine incarnation. The gist of the thought is as follows. If God is all-knowing, then he possesses not only all knowledge by description, but also all knowledge by acquaintance. But it is not easy to see how God…
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Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?
Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron: In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he…
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Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia
Reader K. G. writes, I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Like, What Does It Mean? Notes on Nagel
Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 165-180) is a contemporary classic in the philosophy of mind, and its signature ‘what is it like’ locution has become a stock phrase rather loosely bandied about in discussions of subjectivity and consciousness. The phrase…