Are you not aware of the philosophical literature on physicalism or materialism? It's weird being in a philosophy forum where poster pretend that term...
I'm not so sure about this anymore, after having listened to an episode of Radio Lab in which a scholar of Homer noticed that he almost never used the...
It's only a problem if biology isn't necessitated by physics. Physicalism is the modern version of materialism, which is an ontological monism. Matter...
Right, but let's say we want to know what bat sonar experiences are. We can only know about bat perception indirectly, since we're not bats and don't ...
The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective, and thus there are only objective facts. That's why Mary's room, the p-zombie ar...
Your pain is real, but pain is dependent on creature with nervous systems existing. It's not a property of the hammer. The question of what's real com...
Right! I should have just said that in the OP. That's a good defense of color realism, but the physical facts about perception still leave out the exp...
No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-i...
Physicalism. Stating that some things can't be described, they have to be experienced supports experience being something additional to the physical. ...
When a rock is dropped on my foot and I say that it hurts, I certainly don't mean the resulting behavior, I mean the felt pain. Similarly, when I comm...
Going back to this: Hurting means to feel pain. It's an experience. It can be accompanied with behavior, but not always. It's also not a neurological ...
But what does a behaviorist mean when when they say that dropping a rock on your toe "hurts"? If they mean you hop up and down and yell, then that's n...
It's easier to see this is not the case if we avoid the word consciousness and stick with qualia and behavior. It's clear that when speaking of qualia...
They're referring to the same phenomenon in the night sky, yes. This started with behaviorism. The physicalist is more challenging, because they might...
If by same "thing", you mean using the same word, then sure. But words can have multiple meanings, and consciousness is one of those words. I love ice...
So when we talk about inner, private, subjective states, we're really just talking about behavior or brain states, according to behaviorists or physic...
I read an interesting short science fiction story set in the future where humans travelling in deep space come across a five million year old escape p...
I know where you got that from. It's from the eliminative materialism, where beliefs and desires are eliminated from an explanation of in favor or neu...
It is a redefinition of consciousnes because consciousness means subjectivity, and those two things are objective. So what the behaviorist and physica...
But why should language require visual or auditory signs? Humans utilize those two senses heavily, but that doesn't mean they're necessary for languag...
More to the point, why suppose that the existence or ability of something depends on it's ability to be visualized? I can't visualize a tree falling i...
That's redefining consciousness to be behavior. It's not at all what most people mean by consciousness. Nor is it traditionally what is meant in philo...
I recall hearing part of this NPR show about a woman who went to live with a tribe that used directional greetings. They were always saying what direc...
Isn't that the same thing as redefining consciousness? Or are behaviorists merely claiming that certain behaviors are indication of consciousness? Tha...
Did you read my Temple Grandin quote where she said that she does not think verbally at all, but only in pictures? She has the opposite condition of a...
The modern trend is to downplay biological differences between men and women in the interest of equality. But that doesn't mean those differences can'...
Men tend to be more autistic, but Grandin is an autstic woman. From her writings, she seems to have trouble understanding other people's feelings. The...
I find that fascinating, because I'm a poor visualizer like Michael. My guess is that if Dennett was like Grandin, his philosophy would go in a differ...
Maybe that's because the machinery of the world is understood as an abstraction. So, materialism has a mind/body problem, because the mind was taken o...
It may guide different philosophers intuitions about the mind. As I stated in an earlier post, I've read that some philosophers were skeptical that pe...
Dennett in his early career defended the notion that dreams are a coming-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. That we don't actually experience dreams ...
I get songs stuck in my head as well. It's not a philosophical confusion either. I literally have a quasi-auditory experience. Anyone who says otherwi...
Do aphantasiacs dream? I thought everyone dreamed with the exception of a rare genetic condition that prevents sleep (which leads to death eventually)...
Makes me wonder if Daniel Dennett has aphantasia. I recall reading where someone was talking about how certain philosophers were skeptical that human ...
The problem here is that GR would seem to support some form of eternalism. Our common sense has often been wrong about the world, particularly when it...
It's a question about the nature of time, and one that interests scientists as well as philosophers. I don't see it as just a word game. It's not like...
That and the cat would know whether it was dead or alive. Never knew why a cat was different from a person in this scenario, as if there's something s...
Does it, though? What if ten people in the crowd had a red shirt? Does the statement fail to refer to them? I've certainly listened to speakers use a ...
That was Wittgenstein's position. The issue has come up in materialist vs. idealist arguments, where the idealist can just say the materialist is movi...
That might be the case. My concern with bruteness is that it can be placed anywhere. Maybe experience itself is brute, as a few posters on here have a...
Maybe. I don't know whether it's possible to arrive at a self-explanatory theory for whatever is most fundamental. If not, then something is fundament...
But if we want to know why this the case, then we're faced with: 1. There is no cause for our reason. 2. Mind is the causative power. 3. Reality is ca...
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