Specter of Reason

Several scientists have made a declaration on consciousness .  (You can read coverage from a  Scientific American blog  here .) Unfortunately, I think the declaration is more likely to promote confusion rather than clarity. What does it mean to "experience affective states?" What characterizes intentional behavior as such? These are problematic questions and I don't see this declaration helping matters. They seem to be ignoring the difficulties, not overcoming them. One basic difficulty is that the word "consciousness" has multiple recognized definitions. For most people, I think if you told them octopuses had consciousness, they'd think that octopuses had self-awareness, higher order thoughts about their lives and experiences, and such. But that is not what the science shows. (I'm not saying octopuses don't have these things, but only that the science doesn't show it.) I suspect that the scientists making this declaration take "consciou...

I've completed my masters thesis.  It's over one hundred pages, by far the longest thing I've ever written.  And it's not half bad, in my opinion, though there are a few arguments I would have liked to flesh out in more detail. The first half is on the history of the concept of subsidiarity and its relation to the foundations of human rights law, including some criticism of the liberalism we find in Mill, Rorty and, most recently, Nussbaum.  I advocate an alternative, which I call pragmatic secular constructivism .  It is secular in the sense that it does not give religious belief a privileged place in political discourse; however, I take an accepting position towards the inclusion of religious language in political affairs.  My argument is that religious perspectives are going to influence politics one way or another, so long as religion is an influential factor in social life; and that if explicitly religious language is barred from entrance into the politic...