Many parents who look into the eyes of their newborn baby encounter something wonderful, and awe inspiring. There in those eyes they get a glimpse of a new perspective, a new point of view on the world. A new consciousness. The idea that consciousness is the subjective perspective we each …
Yesterday, I sketched the priority structure framework: attention consists in the activity of regulating priority structures, which order the parts of the subject’s on-going mental life by their relative priority. Why would we organize our mind in this way? In other words, what is the function of attention? The answer, …
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 …
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
[Update: given really helpful discussion below, I’ve put a summary of some of the extended comments below] I want to begin with a distinction that I think is fundamental to our thinking about the mind and yet is not adequately characterized by philosophers or psychologists (the latter will beg to …
CALL FOR PAPERS Mental Actions and Mental Agency Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology Guest Editors: Anika Fiebich, and John Michael Deadline for Submissions: February 1st 2014 In recent decades, mental actions have been discussed intensively in the scientific debate on intentional actions. Within this debate ‘mental …
