Online research in philosophy

This book argues that we are not equipped to understand the workings of conciousness, despite its objective naturalness.

Nuyen (this journal, vol 20, no. 4) contrasts "objectivity" in the natural science with a relation of "understanding" between knower and object in the human sciences. I present a different approach to natural science--a perspective in which the objects of the natural sciences are constructions that arise out of the interaction of the knower and the knowable world. From this perspective, it is inappropriate to to distinguish between the natural sciences and the human sciences in the way Nuyen does. Instead, the crucial point is that if the human sciences refrain from abstractions and generalizations in favor of the particularities of objects and situations, then they must employ some other way to constitute a separation between theory and data in order for the work to be "scientific" as that term is used in regard to the natural sciences.

Suppose that consciousness is a natural feature of biological organisms, and that it is a capacity or property or process that resides in a single organ. In that case there is a straightforward question about the consciousness organ, namely: How did the consciousness organ come to be formed and why is its presence maintained in those organisms that have it? Of course answering this question might be rather difficult, particularly if the consciousness organ is made of soft tissue that leaves at best indirect fossil records, or if it has been fixed in the populations for such a long time that there are few available examples of organisms that lack the consciousness organ on which to conduct comparative experiments. No doubt there are other confounding practical obstacles as well. But these are just the complications that face biologists and natural historians on a regular basis, and they do not reflect any special problems about the study of consciousness. This is just to say that if consciousness is a natural feature of biological organisms then its origins and history can be studied in the same manner as other features of the biological world. It’s a hard business, but biologists are pretty good at it.

Natural deduction is the type of logic most familiar to current philosophers, and indeed is all that many modern philosophers know about logic. Yet natural deduction is a fairly recent innovation in logic, dating from Gentzen and Ja?kowski in 1934. This article traces the development of natural deduction from the view that these founders embraced to the widespread acceptance of the method in the 1960s. I focus especially on the different choices made by writers of elementary textbooks?the standard conduits of the method to a generation of philosophers?with an eye to determining what the ?essential characteristics? of natural deduction are.

As we know, "Who can be said to be a conscious being?" is one of the hard problems in present science, and no method has been found to strictly differentiate the conscious being from the being without consciousness or usual matter. In this short paper, we present a strict physical method based on revised quantum dynamics to test the existence of consciousness, and the principle is to use the distinguishability of nonorthogonal single states. We demonstrate that although the dynamical collapse time can’t be measured by a physical measuring device, a conscious being can perceive it under the assumed QSC condition, thus can distinguish the nonorthogonal single states in the framework of revised quantum dynamics This in principle provides a quantum method to differentiate man and machine, or to test the existence of consciousness. We further discuss the rationality of the assumed QSC condition, and denote that some experimental evidences have indicated that our human being can satisfy the condition. This not only provides some confirmation of our method, but also indicates that the method is a practical proposal, which can be implemented in the near future experiments.

Whereas the majority view with regards to the understanding of human consciousness rests upon the metaphysical duality (the Cartesian mind/body dualism), the thought of the ‘thinker’, and descriptions from exclusively within the frame of reference of the scientific method; the purpose of this camp is to argue that the origin of such a metaphysical duality, the thought of the ‘thinker’ itself, and the scientific method itself (in which the ‘thinker’ is considered equivalent to God, and the thoughts of the ‘thinker’ concerning consciousness are considered equivalent to Revelations) is the ‘movement’ of self reflection, which gives rise to the consciousness of “the Fall”; a consciousness composed of both the consciousness of the ‘thinker’ and the ‘unconscious’. Thus, the most significant duality is not the metaphysical duality at all, but the duality which occurs between the consciousness Created ‘by and in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:27)—referred to here as the “observing consciousness”; and the ‘fallen’ consciousness—previously referred as the ‘classical’ consciousness. Thus, the following camp statement is a revision of a camp previously titled “Observing Consciousness Vs. ‘Classical’ Consciousness.

As an advocate of the empirical method in both science and philosophy, Reid believed that the central method for studying the mind should be internal observation, whose evidence he believed to be the most reliable in comparison with all other mental operations. The fact that his contemporary “science of mind” was not as highly developed as the natural sciences was explained by Reid to be the fault of philosophers, such as John Locke, who “confounded” two completely different powers of the mind: consciousness and reflection. In this paper I will present Reid's criticism of Locke, as well as Reid's own attempt to distinguish between consciousness and reflection, and the difficulties he is facing in this process. The paper concludes that Reid failed to depart from the essential Lockean characterizations of inner awareness, because of his failure to dissociate from premises he shares with Locke – such as the belief that we are conscious of all our thoughts, and the primacy of the introspective method in studying the mind. Therefore, while narrowing his concept of consciousness to an internal-sense, perceiving only present mental operations, he broadens respectively his concept of reflection.

This paper offers an evolutionary account of chronic pain. Chronic pain is a maladaptive by-product of pain mechanisms and neural plasticity, both of which are highly adaptive. This account shows how evolutionary psychology can be integrated with Flanagan's natural method, and in a way that avoids the usual charges of panglossian adaptationism and an uncritical commitment to a modular picture of the mind. Evolutionary psychology is most promising when it adopts a bottom-up research strategy that focuses on basic affective and motivational systems (as opposed to higher cognitive functions) that are phylogenetically deep.

It is well known that Husserl clearly recognized the importance of the introduction of idealization in physics and its contribution to the further advancement in natural sciences. The history of the successful applications of idealization in natural sciences encouraged attempts to extend the use of this sophisticated instrument of theoretical investigation and theory construction to other domains of science. Since Husserl designed his phenomenology as the rigorous science of consciousness we have to find out why he did not use the method he understood so well to study experiences, the objects located by him in the domain of consciousness. The paper offers an answer to this question. It explains why Husserl conceived of the method of idealization as a tool of objectivization of previously subjective knowledge. Since idealization is used to objectify knowledge its application to experiences, conscious acts would produce objective knowledge of consciousness. This, however, would contradict phenomenological assertion that subjectivity is an essential component of experience and that the reliable knowledge about conscious acts could not be objectified. It is the core of Husserl's argumentation that there is no place for idealization in the research on consciousness.