Why Does Consciousness Exist? I mean this question to be a question of biology: what adaptive purpose was served by the evolution of consciousness? Consciousness, like other biological traits, evolved because it contributed to the survival of the organisms that possess it, so there must be an answer to the question of […]
Mind and Behavior Philosophical behaviorism has a curious reputation: on the one hand, it can seem eminently reasonable, on the other, completely wrong. Thus it is natural to be uncomfortably ambivalent about it, veering from acceptance to rejection as the mood strikes. On the side of rejection we have the inverted spectrum, […]
Religion as Science I wish to put forward an unfashionable and provokingly simple point of view: religion is just outmoded science. Religion is the science of an earlier age, yet still clinging on in some places. I don’t just mean the cosmological parts; I also include ethics. That is, religion consists of […]
Objects The word “object” occupies a prominent place in philosophy, but it is seldom scrutinized in any depth. What is an object exactly? On the face of it the word has two uses or meanings: it may be used as a descriptor of a certain type of entity in contrast to other types, […]
Empty Materialism As everyone knows, Newton abandoned the materialism of his day by introducing the “occult” force of gravity. Clerk Maxwell expanded physics further into the immaterialist camp with his theory of electromagnetic fields of force. These developments cast the whole notion of materialism (or physicalism) into doubt. But was physics before […]
Qualia When philosophers talk about qualia they are typically discussing the mind-body problem and the prospects for materialism. They are not interested in the general theory of qualia. They may cite some examples of qualia, but they don’t enquire into the general structure and function of qualia—as a linguist might study the […]
An Identity Theory of Identity The identity theory I have in mind says simply this: identity is identical to indiscernibility. That is, the identity relation reduces to the indiscernibility relation. Why would anyone endorse this theory? First, there is a very clear connection between identity and indiscernibility, enshrined in Leibniz’s Law: x […]
A Day in the Life I began the day by putting the finishing touches to my essay “A Triple Aspect Theory”, on a subject I have been thinking about for over fifty years and still find inexhaustibly interesting. This was the usual intense intellectual effort in which the mind seems both to […]
A Triple Aspect Theory Does pain have a nature that goes beyond the feeling of pain? Pain has a phenomenology, which we experience internally, but does it have any other properties? Apparently it does, since it has a functional role—a way it functions in the mind and in relation to the body. […]
The Prudent Gene Humans are capable of two types of selfishness, the prudent kind and the imprudent kind. Imprudent selfishness is quite common: a glutton grabs the cake from someone else and gorges himself on it, much to his future detriment. The genes, however, do not go in for this kind of […]