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  1. The Ghostly Illusion of Freewill.Brent Silby - 2012 - Cafe Philosophy 4 (Jan/Feb 2012).
    During my childhood I was fascinated by videogames. One game that stands out in my memory is Pacman. It wasn’t the gameplay that interested me so much as the behavior of the ghosts. As you watch them roam around the maze, you get the feeling that they are intelligent. They seem to be making decisions about how best to catch Pacman. But how free are their decisions? One of the interesting things I noticed was that I could play exactly the (...)
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  2. The Simulated Universe.Brent Silby - 2009 - Philosophy Now 75 (75):28-30.
    This article explores the Simulated Universe argument with particular reference to Nick Bostrom’s formulation. After providing an exposition of the argument, I address two problems and conclude that we reject the possibility that we exist in a simulation.
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  3. Dennett's reduction of Brentano's intentionality.Brent Silby - 2008 - Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 7.
    In this paper I compare two different approaches to the supposed distinction between the mental and the physical: 1. Brentano's theory of `Intentionality', which, in its early formulation, proposes a true distinction between physical objects and the objects of thought; and 2. Dennett's `Intentional Systems Theory', which is an attempt to naturalise the mind and to reduce mental phenomena such as beliefs and desires to simple physical systems.
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  4. The Problem of Qualia.Brent Silby - unknown
    One of the major concerns for the contemporary philosophy of mind involves the problem of qualia. The word qualia refers to our subjective experience of the world and includes the properties of our experience that cannot be located in the world external to our minds. For example, the ineffable feel of a blue experience when one looks at the sky, or the pain one feels when one is stuck with a pin. These sensations are the essence of our experience and (...)
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  5. Revealing the language of thought.Brent Silby - 2024 - Christchurch: Amazon.
    Language of thought theories fall primarily into two views. The first view sees the language of thought as an innate language known as mentalese, which is hypothesized to operate at a level below conscious awareness while at the same time operating at a higher level than the neural events in the brain. The second view supposes that the language of thought is not innate. Rather, the language of thought is natural language. So, as an English speaker, my language of thought (...)
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