A series of blog posts featuring scholars in the philosophy and science of mind.
This is a post about a problem. How do largely informationally encapsulated processes ever nonacidentally operate in harmony with thinking? I will suggest that phenomenal expectations provide least part of the solution: phenomenal expectations matter because they tie different bits of the mind together.
Instead of answering this question directly, I want to start with another question, one that motivates asking the question of my title. How do humans first come to know about the categorical colour properties of things, properties like redness and blueness? Start with the simplest possible story. Red things visually …
Many thanks to Kristina and John for inviting me to write.
I’m very happy to introduce Stephen Butterfill, who will be joining us as a Featured Scholar on the blog this week. Steve holds a DPhil and BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford and is currently Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
Why isn’t a lucid dream just a dream within a dream? Suppose I’m having a flying dream and I think, “I must be dreaming.” I’m in a dream state, so why I am not just dreaming that I’m dreaming? To put the question another way, if there’s a difference between …
In 1890 William James introduced the metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” into Western psychology: “Consciousness… is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, …
