The theme underlying the current NEH Seminar in Mind and Metaphysics is that there is a deficit of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy of mind and a deficit of ontological seriousness in contemporary metaphysics. According to John Heil, who is the seminar organizer and director, much of the talk of counterfactuals, …
A friend sent me this link: On giving computers the ability to recognize our emotions by observing our facial expressions.
Robert Kirk, Zombies and Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2005.Kirk is famous for inventing phenomenal zombies–creatures physically indistinguishable from us but lacking consciousness–and for using their possibility to refute physicalism. (The undelying idea goes back to Descartes.) Kirk published his original papers on zombies in 1974. In recent years, David Chalmers …
In our forthcoming paper, “Splitting Concepts,” Sam Scott and I argue, among other things, that the notion of concept may need to be split into linguistic representations (responsible for cognition that involves language) and nonlinguistic representations (responsible for the rest of cognition). Roughly, the reason is that linguistic cognition appears …
Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading, OUP, 2006.How do we understand other minds? I was introduced to this problem by a psychologist, Susan Johnson. In her course of Theory of Mind, the main debate seemed to be between those who think we have an innate …
In a previous post, I expressed scepticism about a recent argument by Gillett and Rives to the effect that determinable properties don’t exist: only determinate properties do. Yesterday, we discussed Gillett and Rives’ paper in the NEH Summer Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. Curiously, John Heil (who probably doesn’t read …
The workshop on the Origins and Nature of Computation is over. It was an amazing experience: many of the best computability theorists and computer scientists, philosophers of computation, and historians of computation discussing together. One of the presenters, Stewart Shapiro, has a new book on Vagueness in Context (OUP, 2006), …
