Today I would like to write about dualism and the origins of the mind-body problem. Dualism is of course a view that comes in quite a number of different forms, but Descartes’ form was two-way interactionist dualism. He himself did not allow the existence of the mind-body problem, much less …
I wrote my little book on The Mind-Body Problem (MIT, 2016, in the Essential Knowledge Sequence), partly because I was attracted to the idea of a little book that would tell you all you need to know about the problem. The other titles in the series are about things like …
[This post by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, co-editors of Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2016), originally appeared at the OUPblog, and is reposted here with their generous permission.] The traditional view puts forward the idea that the vast majority of what there is in the universe is mindless. Panpsychism however claims that …
Understanding the nature of “vertical” relations whether in science, nature, mathematics, logic, or anywhere else, is a hot topic in philosophy. What is unfortunate is that, as yet, too little attention is paid to focused issues about what frameworks work best for the “vertical” relations in particular areas. However, it …
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 …
