Reduction Redux I have been too harsh on reductionism; it really isn’t such a bad thing, correctly understood. It all depends on the kind of reduction. Materialist reduction has given it a bad name, because it is just not plausible (as typically formulated anyway). The OED defines “reduce” as “make or become smaller or less […]
Hi Colin: Happy New Year! As you know, I’m a fan of your blogs, save them all. Two I find especially relevant for the Landscape of Consciousness, as they are original and insightful, and encourage new ways of thinking. I took each of the blogs and framed them in Landscape style, using your words as […]
Explore Berggruen Prize Essays Theories Maps Implications Landscape Explore Ask AI Home / Materialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary / McGinn’s Living Consciousness McGinn’s Living Consciousness Elementary consciousness does not exist in all things, but it does exist in all organic things. The mind is confined to animate things. There are traces of it in all living tissue, […]
Explore Berggruen Prize Essays Theories Maps Implications Landscape Explore Ask AI Home / Materialism / Relational / McGinn’s Brain Perception McGinn’s Brain Perception Consciousness is perceiving your own brain. This isn’t because all consciousness is a brain state; it’s because all consciousness is brain perception. Consciousness is brain awareness—awareness of the brain. All consciousness […]
A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge This is a big subject—a long story—but I will keep it short, brevity being the soul of wisdom. We all know those books about the history of this or that area of human knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, psychology (not so much biology). They are quite engaging, partly because they […]
Knowledge and Time I shall make some remarks about a topic neglected by epistemologists—the relationship between knowledge and time, particularly future time. The relationship is not simple or easily grasped; there is a reason for the neglect. I will try to keep it as uncontroversial as possible; this is to be preliminary groundwork. Truisms not […]
An Answer to the Skeptic Skepticism gains traction from the true justified belief theory of knowledge, because it can be argued that our beliefs are seldom if ever justified. But that is just one theory, not a datum. What if we adopt another type of theory? I observe, to begin with, that other types of […]
Augustine and Wittgenstein Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with a quotation from Saint Augustine (in Latin). He then comments: “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of […]
Space, Time, and Logic Philosophy needs a metaphysical vision. Humbly (and pretentiously), I will provide one. As far as I know, it has no predecessor, though echoes of other theories will be apparent. Neither does it have a name: it might be called “Logical Spatio-Temporalism” (LST), or just “Spatialism” because space is central to it. […]
Nabokov and Music It is well known that Nabokov didn’t like music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” But he doesn’t say why. The affliction didn’t run in his family and his son was an opera singer. Moreover, as has been remarked, his […]