Philosophical Speculations

Have you read David Chalmer's paper on the "Hard Problem of Consciousness"? For any activity in consciousness (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intentions, etc.), there is, in theory, a "neural correlate" in the "physical" substrate of the brain. There is no clear reas...

Ashvin: I can understand the motivation to look for reasons behind the dominance of physicalist thinking. Physicalism is truly a disease and could lead to devastating consequences in not too distant future. However, I cannot agree with your analysis. Human consciousness has undergone significant evo...

Richard, From an idealist perspective we may say that consciousness is, but no more than that. If it’s the foundational thing we can’t get underneath it to say any more. So I suppose my answer is that we can’t understand consciousness. We can describe its material correlates to an ever finer degree,...

Here is the difference. If one assumes there is matter, then one has either the intractable interaction problem of the substance dualist or the intractable hard problem of consciousness of the materialist. By 'intractable' I mean no one has a clue for how the problem might have a solution. The idea...

Richard, Very interesting paper. A multi-pronged approach would be required to understand consciousness. Even more important is to think about what exactly we mean by ‘understand’ or ‘know’ something. Consciousness has an essential role in the act of ‘knowing’ and attempting to know consciousness ri...

Justin, Well written paper. I think evolutionary argument did not turn out to be the bomb it was expected to be because it did not go far enough. It could be viewed as an attempt to compromise with the apparent impenetrability of Darwinian theory by bringing in the subjective through backdoor. Causa...

Ashvin: It is important not to mistake differentiation for fragmentation. Differentiation is natural for any integrated system. Human body is a highly integrated whole of differentiated parts, in contrast to a colony of bacteria. Any integrated whole will include parts that are apparently at odds wi...

The reason for the third person scientific view is many layered. On a relatively surface level, we could say it's the rise of rationalism and dualism in the 15th to 16th centuries, which isolated inward mental stuff from outtward material stuff. Once we put that in the overall context of cognitive ...

We don't need to assume anything about the nature of the mental realm right now (although if we can agree there is only mental realm and no realms of different essence, i.e. idealism, that would help). We only need to answer the question of whether the assumptions arise from people independently fi...

Where did the "shared assumptions" about the triangle come from? We don’t know enough about ‘minds’ to answer this question. But the assumptions can be clearly stated and agreed upon and that is good enough to use geometry effectively. "Tracing back" means to start from where we...