The following post is a bit of a rant, written in the tradition of the angry bloggers of yore…
The first part discusses Scholarpedia’s section on consciousness. The second part is a dialogue I overheard on higher-order theories of consciousness.
In the following I look at two fronts on which you might battle Chalmers’ arguments against physicalism about consciousness. The first is from Polgar’s recent paper (recently discussed by Richard Brown) in which he briefly critique’s Chalmers’ implicit theory of reduction. The second is the more common strategy of attacking him for assuming he can conceive of zombies in the first place. I argue that the second strategy is better, though they are not mutually exclusive.
The conceptual distinction between representational vehicles and representational contents is very old, probably older than Plato. Lately, however, I’ve been wondering when the first use of this actual terminology emerged. Pete Mandik took time out from hammering brains to tell me he thinks the first use of this terminology might …
Find out at my most recent consciousness post, and figure out how to decode graphs like this:Hint: line density equals photoreceptor density, and top is bottom because images are inverted on the retina. If that doesn’t make sense, check out the long version. It’s part of my eight-million post series …
The following is slightly revised set of questions I posted over at Words and Other Things. Since dipping my toe into Brandom’s inferential-role semantics about ten years ago, these are the questions that still linger. Most of them stem from the fact that (at least in the bits I’ve read) …
The most recent in my series of posts on consciousness presents some examples of ambiguous stimuli. Predictably, an anonymous commenter chimed in about how such illusions will never shed light on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. So, for posterity, here is my response to the hard problem reflex that is …
As part of a series on consciousness I am writing, I am presently writing up some notes on the Necker Cube. I have a question perhaps some of the more historically minded readers could answer. Most of you are familiar with the Necker Cube (see one to the left), a …
