Bajan Philosophy The last three papers have been metaphysics Barbados-style, boldly black and white, bright as a beach. Now I will turn to Bajan epistemology, in which clear lines are drawn and compromise not tolerated. You either know or you don’t know. You either see it or you don’t. It is sturdy or it is […]
Language, Self, and Substance I will offer some sketchy remarks on meaning and the self in the light of the anti-substantialist view of the mind. First, there has to be something wrong with the Cogito as traditionally conceived, since the self (reference of “I”) is not a substance. We can’t say, “I think, therefore I […]
Ontology of Mind What is the ontology of the physical world? What is its ontology and how do we conceive it? The best answer to this is that it is a substance ontology: the physical world consists of physical substances qualified by what are traditionally called accidents.[1] For example, animals, artifacts, and inanimate lumps—cats, tables, […]
What Makes Consciousness Mysterious? Today it would be widely agreed that consciousness is mysterious, rather mysterious or extremely mysterious. It would not, however, be widely agreed what makes it mysterious—what precise characteristic confers the mystery. Some would say there is no mystery at all: consciousness is nothing but higher-order thought or self-ascription or not being […]
The Barbados Files My trip to Barbados was not intended to be a “working holiday”. On the contrary, it was intended to be a non-working holiday (totally in vacanza). I made a point of not taking my computer with me just in case I felt tempted to write something. (I had a companion.) However, a […]
An Argument Against Idealism Imagine we lived in a world in which idealism was the dominant philosophy (in fact, it is the actual world, but that’s another story). The prevailing doctrine is that everything that exists is mental, i.e., a state of consciousness. Not just the mind itself but also the so-called physical world—mountains, molecules, […]
I am going to Barbados on August 2nd for two weeks and will not be posting anything during that time. So, my absence is not an indication of some sort of disaster. I will, however, have access to comments.
On “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel’s great paper “What is it Like to be a Bat?” begins resoundingly enough: “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps this is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong.” These words slip smoothly […]
Conscious, Unconscious, and What It’s Like What is the relationship between consciousness and what it’s like? There are two questions: is the latter a necessary condition of the former, and is it sufficient? We could add a third question, which is really the central question: what is the real essence of consciousness—its intrinsic nature, its […]
An Even Harder Problem People like to talk about “the hard problem”, meaning the problem of consciousness. The phrase itself invites scrutiny: it contains the definite article and thus implies uniqueness, unlike “a hard problem”; and “hard” is an attributive adjective associated with cognate words, i.e., “harder” and “hardest”. So, we must ask: is the […]