Swampman is a (imaginary) physical duplicate of Donald Davidson created by a freak accident by a lighning bolt hitting a swamp. Questions: do swampman’s parts (e.g., the parts shaped like a heart, liver, brain, etc.) have functions? Does swampman have intentional states? Does he have qualia? These questions have been …
Bernhard Nickel, “Against Intentionalism,” forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.Today, at the NEH seminar in Mind and Metaphysics, we discussed Nickel’s forthcoming paper. Nickel proposes a counterexample to representationalism, i.e., the view that the phenomenal aspects of experience are represented features of what is represented by the experience.The counterexample is a tic-tac-toe …
This week, Bill Lycan is visiting the NEH Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. The main purpose of his visit is to discuss representationalism about qualia.(According to representationalism, as Lycan formulates it, qualia are represented features of what is represented by a phenomenal experience (e.g., the redness of a tomato quale …
The theme underlying the current NEH Seminar in Mind and Metaphysics is that there is a deficit of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy of mind and a deficit of ontological seriousness in contemporary metaphysics. According to John Heil, who is the seminar organizer and director, much of the talk of counterfactuals, …
A friend sent me this link: On giving computers the ability to recognize our emotions by observing our facial expressions.
Robert Kirk, Zombies and Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 2005.Kirk is famous for inventing phenomenal zombies–creatures physically indistinguishable from us but lacking consciousness–and for using their possibility to refute physicalism. (The undelying idea goes back to Descartes.) Kirk published his original papers on zombies in 1974. In recent years, David Chalmers …
In our forthcoming paper, “Splitting Concepts,” Sam Scott and I argue, among other things, that the notion of concept may need to be split into linguistic representations (responsible for cognition that involves language) and nonlinguistic representations (responsible for the rest of cognition). Roughly, the reason is that linguistic cognition appears …
