In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke takes up a question that had been posed to him by the Dublin politician and intellectual William Molyneux. Molyneux had asked Locke whether a man born blind who had learned to distinguish cubes from spheres by touch would, upon having his sight …
Recently there has been a lot of interesting work (including some by one of our own) done on the epistemic status of first-personal reports on conscious states. The usual target in this tradition is the assumption of a certain kind of first-person authority concerning what consciousness is like for someone …
I’ve recently been re-reading A. David Milner and Melvyn Goodale’s The Visual Brain in Action, as part of a project on the conscious control of behavior (concerning which I’ll hopefully have something to post rather soon). For those who aren’t familiar with the book, it presents a detailed empirical case …
By Manolo Martinez In my last post I was assuming familiarity with something not many people is familiar with. I apologise. Let me say a quick thing about the imperative content strategy to defend representationalism about pain. Before that, representationalism: this is the idea that the phenomenal character of experiences …
By Manolo Martinez [UPDATE] I have posted a quick summary of the imperative content strategy in dealing with affective phenomenology here. Hello everyone. This is my first post for Brains! So, yep: great to be here, etc. A quick caveat: I’m afraid this post makes a tl;dr response perfectly appropriate. …
By Brandon Towl In another thread (“What’s a good reading against type-identity theory for neuroscientists?”), I mentioned that I had a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Psychology that puts pressure on the IBE argument for identity theory. Below is the abstract. If anyone would like a draft of the paper, please …
By Brandon Towl Hello again Brains readers– I’m turning to you again for your help and insights. Here is a link to a draft of a paper I am working on tentatively entitled “Multiple Realizability without Multiply Realizable Properties”. I’d appreciate any feedback or comments on it from interested parties. …
