The diachronic question of persons deals with personal identity over time: “In virtue of what conditions is a person, P1, at t1, the same person, P2, at t2?” To answer the question, I suggest expanding the constitution theory from a static definition to a dynamic definition. ‘Life’ is an event and the stream of consciousness is an event too. Reflective self-consciousness—which I take to be definitive of persons—is an event. Persons are irreducible constituted events who remain the same through time (...) while they undergo change. This idea faces neither the problem of substance dualism nor the fission problem. (shrink)

The mental realm seems different to the physical realm; the mental is thought to be dependent on, yet distinct from the physical. But how, exactly, are the two realms supposed to be different, and what, exactly, creates the seemingly insurmountable juxtaposition between the mental and the physical? This review identifies and discusses five marks of the mental, features that set characteristically mental phenomena apart from the characteristically physical phenomena. These five marks (intentionality, consciousness, free will, teleology, and normativity) are not (...) presented as a set of features that define mentality. Rather, each of them is something we seem to associate with phenomena we consider mental, and each of them seems to be in tension with the physical view of reality in its own particular way. It is thus suggested how there is no single mind-body problem, but a set of distinct but interconnected problems. Each of these separate problems is analyzed, and their differences, similarities and connections are identified. This provides a useful basis for future theoretical work on psychology and philosophy of mind, that until now has too often suffered from unclarities, inadequacies, and conflations. (shrink)

Here are some sentences from Fred Dretske's book Naturalising the Mind:For a materialist there are no facts that are accessible to only one person … If the subjective life of another being, what it is like to be that creature, seems inaccessible, this must be because we fail to understand what we are talking about when we talk about its subjective states. If S feels some way, and its feeling some way is a material state, how can it be impossible (...) for us to know how S feels? Though each of us has direct information about our own experiences, there is no privileged access. If you know where to look, you can get the same information I have about the character of my experiences. This is a result of thinking about the mind in naturalistic terms. Subjectivity becomes part of the objective order. For materialists, this is as it should be. (shrink)

Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an.