Daniel Dennett gets credit (or, if you will, blame -- we'll come to that) for the expression "Cartesian Theatre" as a name for a flaw in many theories of the human mind. The idea behind the phrase is this: one intuitive way to think of perception is as the recreation of an outward reality within an inner space. Think of a little version of yourself watching a movie relating events that are happening outside the walls of the theatre. The movie is produced in something like real time due to sensors on the outer walls of the same building. Of course if we do think of perception that way, we are open to the question: can the little guy who is my real self be sure that the movie is accurate? Maybe an evil demon has tampered with the processes of production? The way to solve such puzzles, according to Dennett, is to abandon the idea of the Cartesian theatre altogether. Now comes Markus Gabriel, a philosopher I've been reading lately. You may remember that I menti...
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My recent reading includes a book entitled I AM NOT A BRAIN by Markus Gabriel, a prominent German philosopher who sometimes calls himself a neo-existentialist. I mentioned Gabriel's unorthodox view of 19th century Germany idealism in a post here last week. Today I wish to add only that the title of I AM NOT A BRAIN makes transparent one of its theses: that it is impossible to reduce the mind to facts about the brain or nervous system in the Dennett manner. He also debelieves in a transcendental soul, which works somehow within the otherwise mechanical human body. He acknowledges of course that the activity of the brain is a necessary condition for the activity of the mind. But he thinks it never a sufficient condition for understanding consciousness, or self-consciousness, or the self, or freedom. So far so good. But he seems to argue for this in a roundabout and very 'continental' way that makes me suspect this is all supposed to unclog my overly burdened angl...
A week ago I wrote here about cephalopods -- the octopus and similar creatures. I was then, and am now, motivated by some comments in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about them, OTHER MINDS. I want to add to those thoughts today. The reason Godfrey-Smith (a professor of philosophy at CUNY) is so interested in them is that they are arguably a case where mind, consciousness, and the use of language have emerged with an evolutionary path very different from our own. Most writing on other, non-human, minds focuses on creatures with whom we share a lot of adaptive history: the other primates, for example, or even the marine mammals. But on the tree of life, the branching off that separates octopuses, squids, etc. from humans and other mammals of land or sea took place a long, long time ago. This, Godfrey-Smith says, presents is with a situation similar to that which would occur were we to encounter a form of life that had evolved on another planet. So: what do we learn by way of com...
In a Facebook group recently, a FB friend asked me why I believe there is a "mind-body problem" that requires resolution. I responded with reference to the classic historical novel (and television mini-series) I,Claudius. Instead of thinking of something new and clever to say in this blog today, I'll repeat what I said there. There is in general the appearance of something intangible in the world, to which one person has privileged access, and the question of how it relates to the tangibles of the world, to which anyone has access. I, Claudius is about a man who appeared from his physicality, from all tangible and public evidence, to be a stuttering idiot. Yet "inside," in some intangible way, he was cunning and clear-eyed -- facts that allowed him to survive as others around him died and in time to become Emperor. (I don't think that really counts as a spoiler -- the charm of the series does not depend on how it will turn out.) ...
Buddhists believe in the following two propositions although, to non-Buddhists, they seem an odd fit. 1) I have no self or soul, no substantial thing that is "I" or "Me," and the idea that there is an I is an illusion. 2) I'll probably be reincarnated. The obvious response to this conjunction has to be: if there is no you, that what or who is to be reincarnated when "you" are? The Buddhist response, as I understand it, is that the illusion of me is a distinctive one, and this this illusion that there is a substantive me is what is reincarnated. A guest lecturer at a college course I took way back in the 1970s explained it this way. I may hold a lit match in my hand and transfer the flame from that match to something else -- another match, let us say. At SOME point both matches may be lit. Right after that, I may blow out the older match. It certainly appears that something substantial, a thing, the flame, moved from one match to the oth...
I recently read a tweet from a distinguished and academically credentialed philosopher, asking what it would be like to be a thermometer. Specifically, do thermometers have favorite temperatures? Do they ever think about anything other than temperatures? etc. The question was meant as a deliberately provocative way of opening a discussion of panpsychism, the idea that all matter is in some extended sense conscious. But I gave our philosopher a rather smart-ass reply. I said that being a thermometer would be a lot like being a barometer. If you can take the heat, you can take the pressure. Thrown your shoe at the screen. It's your screen, not mine, (and not its own) and it almost certainly won't feel pain.
John Randolph (JR) Lucas, pictured here, received his philosophical education at Oxford University in the 1950s. He was a student of R.M Hare, a central figure in mid 20th century debates over meta-ethics. Lucas never took to meta-ethics himself, though. His interests were in applied (business) ethics, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of mind. Probably the one contribution of Lucas' that will still draw the attention of the historians of philosophy in another century is his invocation of Godel's incompleteness theorem in the course of arguments about the human mind and artificial intelligence, which in turn inspired Douglas Hofstadter. Much of Godel, Escher, Bach was a reply to Lucas. Here's a Lucas paper on point: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html If I understand the argument, Lucas believed that humans will in principle always be able to outsmart computers (or "Turing machines") because such machines have limits that follo...
In 2008, Acta Analytica, which describes itself as an "international periodical for philosophy in the analytical tradition" ran a piece by Hilla Jacobson-Horowitz and Amir Horowitz called "Conceivability, Higher Order Patterns, and Physicalism." It is a contribution to the philosophy of the mind that argues that physicalism (roughly what used to be called "materialism") is a coherent plausible view and survives the so-called zombie argument. So ... what's the zombie argument? It is roughly this: 1. Physicalism suggests that the phenomenal properties of mind (the specific sensation of "seeing blue" and knowing that one sees blue for example) are fully necessitated and determined by the physical properties of the body, especially of the brain. 2. The "zombies" we are asked to imagine are beings in every other respect like ourselves, every material/physical respect, yet who lack these phenomenal properties. Their bodies ma...
Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...