Entries by Colin McGinn

Memes, Dreams, and Themes

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                                                Memes, Dreams, and Themes     This is to be an exercise in the taxonomy of ideas. It is characteristic of ideas to be shared by many minds. Why is this? One reason is that ideas spread from mind to mind. Here is where the concept of a meme comes in: a meme […]

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Atoms, Genes, Ideas

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                                                Atoms, Genes, Ideas     I propose to ruminate briefly on the analogies between the three topics of my title. What do they have in common? The most obvious point is that they are each discrete isolable units that combine to form complexes with like units. Atoms combine with other atoms to produce molecules, […]

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The Evolution of Color

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                                                The Evolution of Color     According to projectivist views about color, color properties do not precede color vision. It is in virtue of color experiences in perceivers that things come to be colored. Color is mind-dependent. I will assume this view here. My concern is with the consequences of this view for […]

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The Cruel Gene

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                                                                The Cruel Gene     I can forgive the genes their selfishness; it is their cruelty I can’t forgive.  [1] I understand their need to build survival machines to preserve themselves until they can replicate: they need the secure fortress of an animal body. But why did they have to build suffering […]

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Particles and Identity

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                                                Particles and Identity     In the case of statues and similar objects we can separate the identity of the thing from its substance. Thus the statue is not identical to the piece of bronze that composes it, because the piece but not the statue survives being melted down. The piece is the aggregate […]

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Appearance Without Reality

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                                                Appearance Without Reality     Is it possible for everything to be an appearance? Might there be nothing in the world but appearances? Granted, there may be many appearances for which there is no corresponding reality (of the kind that we normally suppose), but could this be universally true? Is the pure-appearance world […]

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Truth and Existence

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                                                Truth and Existence     The concepts of truth and existence form a natural pair. They are both highly general abstract concepts. They have both been suspected of being pseudo-properties, expressed by logically misleading predicates. They have both been declared redundant, adding nothing to their bearers: calling a proposition true amounts to no more […]

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A Refutation of Positivism

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      A Refutation of Positivism     The positivists maintain that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable. Thus a sentence can be said to be both meaningless and unverifiable. Here is a possible counterexample to that claim: “It’s raining”. This sentence is not meaningless, but it is not […]

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