Degrees of Consciousness Think of the last time you sat opposite someone you know well and talked for a while. You had all sorts of conscious experiences: the look of the person’s face, the sound of his or her voice, and so on. At some point you may have said […]
Phenomenology of Memory We didn’t need Proust to teach us that memories can be remarkably vivid and emotion-laden, even distant memories. All of us experience those Proustian moments when we are pierced by the dagger of memory—pleasantly or unpleasantly. This is when “it all comes back as if it were […]
Universals of Consciousness “There is something it is like to be a conscious being”: let’s examine the logical form of this statement. There are two possible readings of it, depending on the scope of the quantifiers: one reading says, “For any conscious being B, there is something L it is like to […]
Expressive Language? There are obviously expressive vocalizations in both humans and animals: grunts, groans, sighs, moans, shrieks, laughs, barks, purrs, meows. Some of these vocalizations use the same sounds as spoken speech, such as the common utterance of Ach when something goes wrong; and some have a conventional […]
Games and Languages Evidently, play evolved among animals, including humans: there is a “ludic instinct”. The most likely explanation for this fact is that play provides the opportunity to practice skills that will be useful in the animal’s life—hence its appearance during childhood. But games in the formal cultural […]
Thought and Time A speech act occurs in time: it has a beginning, middle, and an end–it can be clocked. The more words a sentence contains the longer it takes to say it. Some people speak more quickly than others, thus taking up less time to utter the same sentence. Writing […]
Unity and the Universe The universe contains different sorts of unity. There is the kind of unity found in conscious subjects (psychic unity), the kind found in animals and artifacts (telic unity), and the kind found in inanimate objects like pebbles or snowflakes (geometric unity). There is phenomenological unity, functional […]
Complete and Incomplete Grammar books routinely inform their readers that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. The idea is that some groups of words fail to express complete thoughts and hence are not sentences. Do they then express incomplete thoughts? Are we […]
What is Remembering? Not much philosophical attention has been paid to the concept of remembering, in contrast to perceiving and communicating (as well as thinking, reasoning, knowing, believing, imagining, willing, intending, acting, feeling, consciousness, and other concepts). How should remembering be conceived? Nabokov entitled his autobiography […]
Russell’s Paradox Made Easy [1] Consider the set of all men: its members are men, though it is not itself a man but a set. Most sets are like this: they don’t have sets as members, but ordinary things—flowers, bees, motorcars. (Some sets do have sets as members, such as […]