Let’s take the case of a thinker who feels that she knows a proper name but cannot yet retrieve it. There are three kinds of possible ways for explaining how her evaluation has been conducted: 1) she gets direct access to the content of her state; 2) she gets indirect, …
Why is metacognition central for contemporary philosophy? A first reason is that it is an essential ingredient in cognitive actions, i.e. actions that one performs in order to decide whether it’s worth trying to remember, solve a problem, and whether the result you obtained is valid or not. Metacognition offers …
One theme of this week’s posts has been the claim that dynamic entities are among the most metaphysically basic of the things in the mental domain. I’ve made only the vaguest gestures towards saying what I mean by this (in response to Gualtiero’s earlier comment). By dynamic entities, I mean …
An analogy may, at this point, be useful, even if the one that I propose — between satisfiable beliefs and colourable maps — can be grasped only by stretching.
The previous post argued that Theoretical Computer Science can show things to be naturalistically inexplicable—(where this is much stronger than showing them to be inexplicable with a Classically Computational Theory)—by showing those things to require more time than the universe allows. I’ve not yet said anything about which things might …
Theoretical Computer Science has a broader import than its name suggests. To appreciate it, remember what Turing proved: that a certain hypothetical machine would be able to compute every recursively definable function in a finite amount of time. If we supplement that theorem with a plausible assumption about physics then …
A lot of philosophers think that consciousness is what makes the mind/body problem interesting, perhaps because they think that consciousness is the only part of that problem that remains wholly philosophical. Other aspects of the mind are taken to be explicable by scientific means, even if explanatorily adequate theories of …
