Online research in philosophy

The brain has been described as the organ of thought. In the 18th century, Pierre Cabanis notoriously claimed that “The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” For some reason, the 19th century materialist Karl Vogt believed the point needed to be made even more emphatically so he declared: “The brain secretes thought as the stomach secretes gastric juice, the liver bile, and the kidneys urine.” Countless neuroscientists make claims like the mind is the brain, or the mind is the functioning brain, or the mind arises from the functioning brain. Fairly typical is a quote like the following: “Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self – is simply the activities of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains.There is nothing else.” (Ramachandram - A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness..

Consider John, the moon, a lump of cheese. These are objects possessed of divisible bulk. They can be divided, in reality or in thought, into spatially extended parts. They have interiors. They also have boundaries, which we can think of (roughly) asinfinitely thin extremal slices. The boundary of the moon is its surface. The boundary of John is the surface of his skin. But what of inner boundaries, the boundaries of the interior parts of things? There are many genuine two-dimensional (sphere- and torus-like) boundaries within the interior of John's body in virtue of the differentiation of this body into organs, cells, and so on. Imagine, however, a spherical ball made of some perfectly homogeneous prime matter. If the possession by an object of genuine inner boundaries presupposes either some interior spatial discontinuity or qualitative heterogeneity, then there is a sense in which there are no boundaries to be acknowledged within the interior of such an object at all.

The potential use of stem cells in the treatment of a variety of human diseases has been a major driving force for embryonic stem cell research. Another productive area of research has been the use of human stem cells to reconstitute human organ systems in animals in an attempt to create new animal models for human diseases. However, the possibility of transplanting human embryonic brain cells or precursor brain cells into an animal fetus presents numerous ethical challenges. This paper examines, from a Jewish perspective on human dignity, several bioethical concerns related to the reconstitution of animal brains with human neurons.

There are different ways to present a Presidential Address to the APA; the one I have chosen is simply to report on work that I am doing right now, on work in progress. I am going to present some of my further explorations into the computational model of the mind.\**.

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of...