I am working on a paper that I hope to be my writing sample for graduate school and I have been trying to track down some authors or articles that deal with physicalism or computational theory of mind and belief. Mainly, I am looking for evidence that supports or denies that there are physical states corresponding to things like a belief in God, or a belief in anything really, but my endgame is belief in God.

Any recommendations on either side of the argument would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,

Justin Charles Hite

• http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2609/2248

I have not yet read the full version of Joseph's book, but I can tell this ties directly into my own theoretical perspectives involving assessment, learning, behavior, and consciousness. To me, as laid out in my Education PhD dissertation at Colorado State University (2005), the core essence of being (reality) is individual and collective consciousness interacting and interconnecting with consciousness at every level of existence (seen and unseen) as an ongoing here and now creative process." Thus, primary learning is intuitive and secondary learning is rational-objective.

Rational objective, is by my definition, fixtional thinking that allows one to "fix" or position relations "as if" they were separate and disconnected in a cause and effect relationship and in which they must of necessity substantiate existence "as if" it were true. It entails a sort of machine mentality of parts, in which the parts equals the whole and the whole is what the parts c ... (read more)

References

There is a thought in McDowell that certain mediations are pernicious for our direct contact with the object while others are not (in fact they are necessary for any meaningful direct contact with the object). Thus in his discussion of Sellars, while he hails his insight that our immediate contact with the object in sense perception is conceptually structured and necessary for direct normative contact with the object, he thinks that Sellars' condition for “extra conceptual content” distorts our immediate contact with the object in intuition (and hence should be rejected) [this extra conceptual condition is supposedly Sellars' insistence that “the subject must know that the viewing circumstances are normal.”]. Now my question is this: what is it that makes the first type of mediation harmless, even necessary, for an immediate contact with the object, while the latter is damaging to it??

Ali

If I assume that experience is caused by an external world, I would like to say that while I perceive objects of the external world, my perceptions are not identical with the objects that cause them, that is, they do not fill the same portion of space-time.

Put more concretely, if I see a cat run across the room it would be absurd to think a cat just ran through my head (or my mind).

What exactly is the direct realist claiming is happening when I see a cat run across the room? And what is the representationalist claiming in contrast?

And I'm guessing a representationalist don't hold that I perceive my perceptions, since that would lead to an infinite regress. I've heard some talk like this, but that's probably just messy language.