In a pragmatic everyday sense, what you say about the objects of experience is similar to my own view. However I would instead say we are experiencing...
I agree that, per ordinary usage, machines (and robots) are insentient. But you seem to accept that it is possible, in principle, to create a sentient...
I don't really follow you here. We can say that the dinosaurs appeared on earth millions of years ago, despite no-one being around to see them. Or, in...
Yes, we can certainly treat people's health in psychological terms and that will have physical effects. But this does not imply that there are immater...
In ordinary use, perceptual terms like "see" have success criteria. Gilbert Ryle called such terms achievement verbs. So to see Alice cross the street...
Because he doesn't preclude robots being conscious. Searle similarly says, "'Could a machine think?' The answer is, obviously, yes. We are precisely s...
They are both abstractions and they are both real. But there is a dependency and a direction of dependency. Mind depends on matter, just as universiti...
That's right, matter, minds and selves are real independent of whether anyone ever forms the abstractions. But we need to form the abstractions if we ...
That's right, minds are not conscious, human beings are. Mind is the category that mental terms belong to just as matter is the category that physical...
I disagree. This is taking us into perception now, but it also relates to the qualia theme. In ordinary usage "observe", and related terms like "see" ...
No. Mind and matter belong to different categories and to suppose that mind reduces to matter is a category mistake. Mind is not matter. Instead, mind...
OK, but you're using the word "experience" in a subjective sense here. In its objective sense ("practical contact with and observation of facts and ev...
For the non-eliminativists about mind, mind is an abstraction over matter. People are capable of shifting particles around. They can change the world ...
What we think and feel may not always be noticeable in everyday observable behavior but, per materialism, there is always some material instantiation ...
I think the debate is whether there are subjective phenomena. Everyone agrees that smelling a rose is a qualitatively different experience to seeing s...
Dennett, unlike eliminative materialists, generally accepts our ordinary common-sense mental terms which he describes as the "intentional stance". Wha...
It seems to me that you are describing materialism there. But why do you say it is eliminative? To say that a solid chair is really a distribution of ...
I think it helps to understand Dennett's OLP and Wittgensteinian roots. Dennett is not denying the beetle-in-the-box. He is instead saying that langua...
I don't think anyone denies that pain hurts or thinks that science will someday explain it away. Instead, the objection is that the term lacks a meani...
That latter may well sum up philosophy. :-) OK, so to connect this back to an earlier point: Our experience of feeling like we're being pushed back in...
Then you're really talking about how your experience seems to you which I agree doesn't commit you to any particular explanation. It does feel like we...
The scientific explanation does not relegate our lived experience to the status of "fictitious" (how could it?) It relegates a particular scientific e...
Your body is actually at rest and it is the seat that accelerates forward towards you. Imagine that you are in a motionless rocket in space with you a...
I think those are really philosophical issues rather than statements about science itself. In its most basic form, science is methodological naturalis...
I agree. But I think that Sellar's distinction assumes and reinforces a particular (Humean) idea of science and causality that leads to just the kinds...
Right, I reject Sellar's distinction and representational realism generally. Anyway thanks - that clarifies for me the view you hold now. Though I'm n...
Most of the time we would just say that Alice fell off the cliff rather than invoke scientific terms like "gravity" or "space-time curvature". But on ...
I would say our experience of (what we call) gravity just is our experience of space-time curvature under General Relativity. Similarly, if we live in...
Fair enough, but this may just be a semantic difference over the meaning of "locality". The SEP page on Action at a Distance in QM says, "Yet, the que...
Hanson's experiment rules out local hidden variable theories but not local realism. In particular, it doesn't rule out Many-Worlds since Many-Worlds d...
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