Specter of Reason

Deepak Chopra, a well-known spiritualist, does not like physicalism. Physicalism says that everything is physical and can be entirely explained in non-mental terms.  So, according to physicalism, consciousness can ultimately be explained in physical, non-mental terms.  Chopra says this view is an unreasonable dogma, and that it makes much more sense to believe that thoughts are non-physical.  When we think, he says, non-physical phenomena affect the workings of the brain.  To add muscle to his position, he has issued a challenge:  According to the New Statesman , he will award  a prize of $1 million  to anyone who can demonstrate, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that human consciousness is created by the brain.   This is not a challenge to demonstrate that Chopra has misunderstood physics, nor is it an invitation to critique his own arguments about consciousness.  The challenge is to scientifically demonstrate that brains create consc...

David Chalmers is famous for, among other things, claiming that zombies are conceivable.  Not movie zombies, but zombies of a different sort.  These zombies are beings which are physically and functionally identical to human beings, but which lack a certain kind of conscious experience.  They lack the "what it is like" that is said to characterize our experiences.  Another way of putting it:  They lack phenomenal consciousness. According to Chalmers, zombies act just like us, and that means they talk about things just the way we do.  They therefore have intentionality.  Their behaviours are about things.  It follows that, if zombies are conceivable (i.e., conceptually coherent) then there are intentional states that lack phenomenal content. This seems like a difficult position to hold.  My intuition is that all intentional states have phenomenal content.  I wonder what arguments have been made one way or the other.  The conceiva...

Thanks in large part to my recent email correspondence with L. A. Paul (see here and  here  for some background on that), I've formulated a position which, as far as I know, is novel in the philosophy of mind.  The basic assumption is this: (1) One knows *about* what it is like to X iff one knows some of the consequences and/or functional correlations associated with the experience of what it is like to X.   It follows that,  (2) one can know about what it is like to X without ever directly experiencing X.   This only requires that phenomenal properties have functional correlations (these can be statistical or accidental, and not intrinsic, of course) and/or that they are not epiphenomenal.  This is consistent with the common intuition that you can only know what it is like to X if you have some experience of X-ing.  (That is the new-knowledge intuition associated with Frank Jackson's Mary thought experiment:  When Mary the ...

A while back I posted an argument against Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) . At the time, I didn't do a whole lot of research about other arguments against EAAN, but I looked aroung a bit and didn't see anybody making the sort of argument that I was making. I let the topic go until just recently, when my interest in the subject was aroused by a discussion over at Russell Blackford's blog on a new book by Plantinga and Dennett . From what I can tell, the book is an extended version of a recorded debate between the two philosophers which took place a couple years ago. I haven't read the book, nor have I listened to more than the first fifteen minutes of the debate, so I won't speak about either directly. Still, EAAN is not new, and I don't think its formulation has changed significantly over the years. As I said, my interest was aroused. I've contributed a few lengthy posts over at Russell's blog, and I also did a littl...

Philosopher Alva Noe is discussing gender and neurobiology  on the NPR blog (see  here  and  here ). His primary goal is noble. He wants to counter the cultural forces which stereotype men and women and which, in some cases, lead us to devalue ourselves and sabotage our own potential. He appeals to a work of popular science by Cordelia Fine,  Delusions of Gender , which he says draws the following conclusion: "Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge." I haven't read Fine's work, so I cannot say how well Noe has represented her conclusion. In any case, the conclusion he attributes to her is much weaker than the three claims Noe himself puts forward in the name of science.  First, Noe says the science clearly tells us that there are " no cognitivel...

Over at Russell's blog , I was asked why I would call something an "alternative" if it was never physically possible. If this is a deterministic universe, how could anything ever rightly be called an alternative? My answer: It is represented to us as an alternative which we evaluate according to (often flexible) standards. The process of deliberation may be completely deterministic, but there's plenty of evidence that such processes occur. They occur frequently in plain sight, in public discourse. A comparison to natural selection might help. Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" might seem metaphorical, as if natural selection were fundamentally unlike artificial selection. I don't think that's the case. Perhaps you think determinism means that there is neither natural nor artificial selection --that the term is inappropriate in a deterministic universe. I don't think that makes much sense. As I wrote in my last post, postulat...

I once again find myself having to defend Ryle against confused interpretations of his work. In this instance, the false allegations are that Ryle hated science , that Ryle didn't understand science , and that Ryle denied that human behavior has internal causes . These claims were made during a discussion at PhilPapers by Jonathan C. W. Edwards (Jo, as he prefers to be called), who apparently is a retired university faculty member in the field of biomedical sciences, and who is now a graduate student in philosophy. Jo started the discussion to talk about Descartes' attitude towards science and physicalism. One of Jo's more bizarre claims is that Descartes' mind/body distinction is a scientific and metaphysical precursor to the contemporary boson-fermion distinction in particle physics. I challenged him directly on that point, but I won't go into the details here. I'm more interested in defending Ryle. Jo is interested in Ryle primarily because of Ryle...

Introduction In his introduction to Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge: An Interaction ( 2002 ), the late Terry Dartnall challenges his fellow cognitive scientists to pay attention to Wittgenstein in order to understand the central role of creativity in human intelligence. I want to explain why I think he is right, and why I think just as much attention should be paid to Gilbert Ryle. The main issue is the relationship between rules and behavior, an issue which may seem simple, but which implicates our very conception of what it means to be a person. It is sometimes said that, whereas people are creative, computers can only do what they are programmed to do. The idea is that creativity cannot be wholly rule-based. Our intelligence cannot simply be a matter of following rules. However, the truth may be more complicated.  Contemporary wisdom has it that the right kinds of programs can lead to creative behavior. Take genetic algorithms. They involve controlled processes of r...

Richard Brown, of Philosophy Sucks!, has posted some interesting ideas about dreams and consciousness, and whether or not we have (or can have) evidence of consciousness in dreams. I posted the following in the comments section: The question of consciousness in dreams is very interesting, and I like the idea of testing it by determining whether or not people can report dream experiences while dreaming. But I think the only way this could be done is if the dreaming subject were reporting the experiences to somebody else--that is, there must be interaction between the dreaming subject and another subject within the dream. The experimenter would have to interact with a person as a part of their dream, like in Dreamscape (1984) . We have no evidence that this sort of interaction is even possible, so it follows that we have no evidence that consciousness of this sort is present in dreams. But, as I suggested in my last sentence, perhaps we can talk about dream consciousness of another...

I say "possible paradox" because I am not ready to commit to the idea that there is a paradox here at all. I only want to suggest that there might be a legitimate paradox implicit in the notion of personal identity. It does not require an extreme amount of philosophical sophistication to recognize that personal identity is somewhat elusive. It is easy to see how the notion of identity breaks down when we think of it in terms of the body. For, we would still call ourselves by the same name were we to lose any or all limbs, organs, or bodily functions, so long as we had a set of memories or perceptions which defined ourselves as such. We are thus tempted to locate the essence of personal identity in the brain, in those processes which ground our memories and perceptions. Yet, even here we realize the notion of identity lacks foundation. For we can imagine our memories and perceptions being simulated by something other than our brain, a biological clone or computerized twi...

This is the second email I just sent to Stevan Harnad. ( See here for an explanation .) Hello again, Here is the rest of my response. It includes a response to earlier points about Descartes and skepticism, as well as a couple of points about categorization and definitions. SH: " the category in question is color, not difference in color or shape." I don't see a difference here. Categories are based upon differences. The category of "color" implies perceived differences in color, or else it is meaningless. SH: “People no more need a definition of feeling than they need a definition of green.” On the one hand, you say an ostensive definition is sufficient. On the other hand, you say that no definition is necessary. Isn't that inconsistent? Some kind of definition is necessary. And people can define green. The category “green” is complemented by other colors. We can ostend green. You cannot provide an ostensive definition for what you mean by ...

Stevan Harnad is an accomplished professor, having founded and edited a respected academic journal, Behavioral And Brain Sciences . He is not a professional philosopher, but he has published articles related to cognitive science and he has a lot to say about feelings and consciousness. I've been engaging him in a discussion at the PhilPapers forum devoted to the explanatory gap . We've touched on side issues related to Descartes, skepticism, and categorization. I am continuing our discussion by email for now, at David Chalmers' suggestion. The following is the first of two emails I just sent Stevan. (The second email can be found here: "Discussion with Stevan Harnad, continued" .) Stevan, David Chalmers has suggested that I take our discussion to email. I hope you do not mind. More and more of my point-by-point responses to you have been rejected by the editorial board (i.e., Chalmers) on the grounds that they are too long and too detailed to be of gene...