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 …
In subsequent posts I’ll focus on The Unexplained Intellect’s main claims. In this one I’ll identify the cause that those claims serve. I’m grateful to the blog’s editor for the opportunity to do this (and to you for reading).
Mind-body problems are persistent problems in understanding how thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena fit into the natural world described by our best science. Hylomorphists take mind-body problems to be symptomatic of a worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure.
Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford University Press 2016) is about hylomorphism and its implications for the philosophy of mind. I argue that hylomorphism implies elegant solutions to mind-body problems. Hylomorphism’s basic idea is that some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials …
Alex Carruth (Durham) discusses that question in a post at the OUP Blog, building on a recent paper in The Philosophical Quarterly, which — for now — is freely available. A few key paragraphs: … we can form a picture a human being in our heads, and say to ourselves ‘and it …
To be immersed, I said in the last post, is for there to be something it is like for me to be in a mental state–it is the phenomenology of a first-person stance. Yet the question “What is it like for me to be in a mental state?” and the …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for inviting me to outline here at The Brains Blog the main ideas in my book The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (Oxford University Press, new in paperback 2015). I’ll sketch the overall picture in this blog and follow up with two more in which I’ll draw …
