Aim of Paper is to Defend Place’s position: that all states of consciousness are nothing more than mental processes.
‘When I ”report” a pain, I am not really reporting anything…[this is the] suggestion I wish if possible to avoid’. He believes that ‘I am in pain is a genuine report…what it reports it an irredcibly physical [...]
Archive for May, 2008
J Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes (The Identity Thesis)
Posted in Philosophy of Mind on May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
McDowell, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’
Posted in Knowledge and Perception, tagged criteria, defeasibility, Disjunction, Disjunctivism, empiricism, experience, experiental, finding knowledge, knowledge, McDowell on May 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
READING NOTES
‘On any question about the world independent of oneself to which one can ascertain the answer by say, looking, the way things look can be deceptive: it can look to one exactly as if things were a certain way when they are not…It follows that any capacity to tell by looking how things are [...]
The Argument from Illusion
Posted in Knowledge and Perception, Philosophy of Mind, tagged bent stick, deception, illusion, perception, sense data, sense datum, senses on May 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The argument from illusion is an argument for the existence of sense-data.
When we observe a straight stick half submerged in water, it appears bent. This is an illusion. Seems the stick is not in fact bent, the bent stick that we are seeing is an illusion. It is examples like this that have lead some [...]
David Chalmer’s ‘Consciousness and its place in nature’
Posted in Philosophy of Mind, Uncategorized, tagged causation, consciousness, David Chalmer, dualism, epiphenimenalism, Mind, nature, type-e on May 12, 2008 | 1 Comment »
5.10 Type-E Dualism (Epiphenomenalism)
This is the view that ‘phenomenal properties’ are different from physical properties. That phenomenal properties can have no effect on the physical. In other words, there are two properties, the physical and the mental.
‘Physical states cause phenomenal states, but not vice versa’. So the psychophysical laws run only from phenomenal to physical, [...]
On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History (T. H. Huxley)
Posted in Philosophy of Mind, tagged animals, automata, brutes, consciousness, dualism, fatalism, free will, materialism, Mind, monism, nature of thought, reflexes, soul on May 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
READING NOTES
Descartes’ doctrine states that brute animals are nothing more than automata and have no reason or consciousness. This is a doctrine that has caused much discussion.
Descartes comes to this conclusion because he believes that the entire behavioural aspects and movements of animals could be performed by machines. This is not the case for [...]
