Online research in philosophy

This book looks at the possible research and clinical applications of psychedelic substances. Instead of considering the experiences one can have with psychedelics or their uses in psychotherapy, this book views psychedelics' implications for a number of topics "coming over the psychedelic horizon," so to speak.

In this article, I examine and criticize John Searle's account of the relation between mind and body. Searle rejects dualism and argues that the traditional mind-body problem has a 'simple solution': mental phenomena are both caused by biological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. More precisely, mental states and events are macro-properties of neurons in much the same way that solidity and liquidity are macro-properties of molecules. However, Searle also maintains that the mental is 'ontologically irreducible' to the physical, a view which follows from his understanding of the status and nature of consciousness. Consciousness is essential to the mind; subjectivity is essential to consciousness; and no purely objective, physical description of consciousness could ever capture or explain its essentially subjective character. None the less, Searle maintains that irreducibility is a 'trivial' result of our 'definitional practices' and is entirely compatible with his theory. I contend that this latter claim is based on an equivocation: Searle's conclusion only seems to follow because he alters and trivializes what philosophers ordinarily mean by 'reduction'. I also maintain that Searle's position is reductionist in the ordinary, nontrivial sense. For this reason, his theory fails to accommodate the subjective character of consciousness and fails to solve the traditional mind-body problem. Finally, I briefly discuss Searle's claim that he is not an epiphenomenalist, and argue that given the assumptions of his view there is no interesting causal role for consciousness in the physical world.

Most discussions of Spinoza and consciousness—and there are not many— conclude either that he does not have an account of consciousness, or that he does have one but that it is at best confused, at worst hopeless. I argue, in fact, that people have been looking in the wrong place for Spinoza's account of consciousness, namely, at his doctrine of "ideas of ideas". Indeed, Spinoza offers the possibility of a fairly sophisticated, naturalistic account of consciousness, one that grounds it in the nature and capacities of the body. Consciousness for Spinoza, I suggest, is a certain complexity in thinking that is the correlate of the complexity of a body, and human consciousness, for Spinoza, is nothing but the correlate in Thought of the extraordinarily high complexity of the human body in Extension. In this respect, Spinoza anticipates the conception of mind that is presently emerging from studies in the so-called ‘embodied mind’ research program. Moreover, this research program, in turn, may hold out hope for a clearer understanding of some of Spinoza's more difficult claims. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

Descartes’ epistemologies of meditation and sense imply that we cannot know anything about the mind-body union, either in the Cartesian sense of having scientia or, more interestingly, in terms of any other concept of knowledge available to Descartes. After considering the implications of this conclusion for what we may know about mind-body interaction, it becomes clear that, on Descartes’ view, we at best can be said to know that mind-body interaction, if it does in fact take place, does not violate a set of causal principles, without knowing how mind and body interact, or even if they interact at all. (This article is the winner of the 2010 Rockefeller Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association.).

Introduction -- Consciousness : what is the problem? -- Consciousness : how should it be studied? -- Is the mind physical? -- How is your mind related to your body? : how is it related to the world? -- What is the self? -- What can pathological cases teach us about the mind? -- How can we know whether-and what-non-human animals think? -- Can machines think? -- Is there intelligent life on other planets?

The contributors to this volume examine current controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories (belief, desire, intention, consciousness, emotion, and so on) tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice, or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science?

Can one sense one’s own mind, as one senses nonmental entities in one’s environment and body? According to many contemporary philosophers of mind, the fraudulent commonsense idea of a "mind’s eye" obstructs clearheaded attempts to explain introspection and consciousness. I concede that inner sense cannot directly explain consciousness and introspection in all their forms, but I do think a carefully specified kind of inner sense can account for one very special kind of introspective consciousness. It is special because it is the key to explaining the most puzzling kind of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness—there being "something it is like" to have certain mental states. My aim in this paper is to defend this view against accusations— twenty-two in all!—rather than to argue positively for the view. However, I begin by indicating some of the motivation for the account I defend.

The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between mind and body, or nowadays - between mind or consciousness and the brain. As a relationship, this can be viewed from two perspectives: from body to mind and from mind to body. In this note I point out that the two readings of the problem are not symmetrical and that there are categorical differences between them. In particular, whereas the body to mind problem constitutes a mystery (cf. the contemporary hard problem), the mind to body problem may be approached from a psychological (as contrasted with philosophical) orientation that allows for concrete phenomenological investigation.