Are all psychological properties multiply realizable?
Quick and dirty, short and sweet: Yes. Essentially every single known psychological property is multiply realizable by many, many distinct amino acid sequences.
Reduction, Emergence, Etc.
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 …
Philosophy by Counterexamples
In comments to a recent post, Ken Aizawa raised the following question: How is the development of a counterexample [to a philosophical theory] different than the development of a falsifiable/falsified prediction of a scientific theory? I think this is a fascinating question that gets at the heart of contemporaty philosophical methodology, and I’d be curious to …
Communicative Intentions vs. Intentionality
A foreign student emailed me the following questions.(1) According to Jerry Fodor, does intentionality reduce to the reference of mental symbols plus the relation between the subject and the symbols? (2) Under this theory, what happens to Gricean “communicative intentionality”? As far as I can tell the answer to (1) …
How Fruitful is This Debate?
In a recent post, I noticed that the debate over representationalism about consciousness is often conducted by discussing putative counterexamples, i.e., experiences that some philosophers find to be intuitively different even though according to some representationalist theories, they have the same representational content. These examples are usually met by representationalists who …
Why think there is a neural correlate of consciousness?
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 …
Philosophy Carnival 34
Here.