Oliver Sacks writes about Sue, who (through vision therapy) recovered stereoscopic vision (STEREO SUE., Sacks, Oliver, New Yorker, 0028792X, 6/19/2006, Vol. 82, Issue 18). She had lost it when she was very young, and then recovered it through intensive vision therapy. She was (is) completely thrilled by this. Sacks writes, …
Consider the following argument: 1. Eve’s believing that p is realized by having a token of p in her head. 2. Having a token of p in one’s head is realized by some detailed, neural state. So, 3. Eve’s believing that p is realized by some detailed neural state. …
John Heil has been arguing for a while (cf. his book From an Ontological Point of View, OUP, 2003) that an important source of problems in the metaphysics of mind (e.g., about mental causation) is the tacit though widespread endorsement of the following principle [I am simplifying Heil’s formulations a …
The EC literature contains two apparently different claims.Human cognitive systems extend into the body and environment.Human cognitive processes extend into the body and environment. Isn’t this second claim the more radical? There are lots of systems in which the identifying process does not pervade the whole of the system, e.g. …
Quick and dirty, short and sweet: Yes. Essentially every single known psychological property is multiply realizable by many, many distinct amino acid sequences.
In Ken Aizawa’s simple (and in my opinion compelling) argument against the extended mind hypothesis applied to consciousness, he assumed that properties and relations of lower-level enties determine those of higher-level entities. In the comments, Adam Arico asked about emergence and Flora Carpenter further elaborated as follows: Higher level states may …
This is the kind of question that might appear in the extended mind literature. Here is a quick and dirty kind of empirical argument. (Maybe this kind of argument has already been considered somewhere. If so, I’d be glad to hear.) Suppose that the properties and relations of lower-level entities …
