My current project aims to establish that if there is a profound, principled division between mind and world, then it is only occurrent states that are within the mind. But my discussion in these posts is confined to a hypothesis I plan to use in establishing that thesis, namely: (H) …
In the previous post, I introduced some questions at the center of my current book project, concerning the boundary between the mental and the non-mental. In this post I sketch that project in very broad outline. Many thanks for the useful comments about my list of 5 characteristics that are …
I’m delighted to be guest blogging here at Brains. My plan for my series of posts here is to introduce the set of questions at the center of my current project; shamelessly exploit the brilliant readers of this blog for my own purposes invite others to weigh in on these …
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 …
I’m very glad to be able to kick off this symposium on Paul M. Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness, recently reissued in a new (third) edition by the MIT Press. Below the fold is a brief introduction to the symposium, followed by essays from our three contributors, Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna), William Ramsey (UNLV), …
Just a quick note that I recently published an article in The Philosophical Forum , “A New Theory of Free Will“, that may be of interest to readers (a free PDF of the penultimate draft is available here). Here’s the abstract: This paper shows that several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses – including …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
