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 […]
Ethics and Other Minds There is a close connection between ethics and the problem of other minds, which I have not seen remarked (though it is obvious). Belief in the latter supports commitment to the former; skepticism undermines it. If you don’t believe in other minds at all, you can have no morality worthy of […]
“Baby, I Love You” The first thing I did after waking up from a twelve-hour operation on my neck was to vomit into a plastic bag (a normal reaction to all the anesthetic, I was told). I was semi-delirious on a gurney. The next thing I did was feebly sing the chorus to the song […]
William James on Mind and Brain In chapter VI of The Principles of Psychology William James writes: “The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in the study of the relations of thought and brain, is to understand why and how such disparate things are connected at all. But before that problem is solved (if it […]