Philosophy, et cetera

Suppose that our conscious experiences have a certain minimum duration , say 100 ms.  Take a subject experiencing a second of pleasure, and ...

Ordinary thought distinguishes two kinds of incapacity: I might lack (say) the brute strength to accomplish some task, or I might just not k...

Eric Schwitzgebel has a fascinating post on illusions , and whether they still count as such when the viewer is so familiar with them as to ...

The Guardian breathlessly reports: ' Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind '. As one would expect given journal...

Searle's Chinese Room argument : Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols...

Ookla-fry writes : If dualism were correct then brain damage wouldn't effect cognitive ability. Simple as that. This is a surprisingly c...

Contrast two competing models of belief: (A) [Full-blown existence.] Beliefs are something like sentences in the head , written in the langu...

This is interesting: If the brain sped up when in danger, the researchers theorized, numbers on the perceptual chronometers would appear sl...

Inspired by the discussion at Pea Soup , let's distinguish: (1) the external, physical duration of a phenomenal experience, (2) the int...

"The experience of being dead should never be expected to any degree at all, because there is no such experience." So writes David...

The old Scientism thread got a bit derailed by a side-discussion about the possibility of Strong Artificial Intelligence: the view that sim...

Suppose you will soon be subject to torture and degradation, such that you would prefer to die beforehand. Suicide is not allowed, but you a...

I'm thirsty - I desire that my thirst be quenched - so I drink some water. What is my reason for drinking the water? Is my desire itself...

In response to Edelman's claim that embryonic brain development "involves a dimension of randomness," Mark Vernon writes : It...

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments may be taken to suggest that we are all disposed to act wickedly in certain situations. How sh...

It's amazing what brains can do (if we assume that they "ground" every subject that we think about): Because Homo sapiens is...

Johnny-Dee quotes Swinburne's take on fission: Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however much we know about what has ha...

'Homunculi' are the metaphorical "little men" in your head that perform cognitive sub-tasks that contribute to your overal...

How is it that the following inference is invalid? (1) I feel a pain in my fingertip (2) The fingertip is in my mouth Therefore, (3) I feel ...

Michael Tye argues that "[t]he phenomenology of occurrent thoughts derives fundamentally... from the phenomenology of their associated ...