Peter Hacker has rather convincingly argued that the most fruitful line of inquiry regarding your second question is to pay attention, in Wittgenstein...
The rational soul is the form of the human body, according to Aristotle. I likewise prefer to conceive of the mind as a set of powers exhibited by an ...
I haven't kept up with Chalmers's recent views. He's recently endorsed a sort of a functionalist view of the mind that accommodates externalist and "e...
You can try David Wiggins's Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality, HUP, 2009, for a historical survey from which emerges Wiggins's own...
Yes, I broadly agree. The interplay of worldly dynamic constraints and freedom to imagine (and, centrally, to plan actions) is explained in relation w...
I quite agree. Its usefulness rests in helping clearing up some issues regarding inter-level material-realization v.s. functional-level causal relatio...
My comment was directed at Querius who resolved to stop reading my post further than the first sentence lest I would issue a retraction. The rest of t...
In a sense they do (metaphorically) and in another sense (literally) they don't. Which is why I took the pain to disambiguate the two senses, charitab...
The neurons don't need to act in accord with the intention since the intention isn't directed at the neurons. If my intention is to grasp a glass of w...
Our thoughts are not instructions for neurons at all. The intentional contents of our beliefs and intentions aren't directed at neurons. They're typic...
The intention does not get translated into instructions for the neurons and needs not get so translated. The intention is directed outwards to the int...
It's not an explanation of the event of abiogenesis and was not meant to be. It's rather a description of the observable teleological structure of all...
What power does the act of perceiving of a bird have over matter such that the cat is able to jump on the bird and catch it? What power does the hunge...
Bach, cantata BWV 125, Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin, Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki. I'm just cycling through the whole cantata set. It's ...
No, I don't endorse this rather empiricist psychological model. It portrays the rational mind as residing on top -- as a controller/inhibitor -- of an...
The person -- the human being -- is responsible. The "higher level" isn't a higher level of neurological activity. It's a functional level (see functi...
My point was to characterize what it is that natural selection selects for (or against) from the moment of abiogenesis onwards. It selects among proce...
It was Einstein's view that reality is more determinate than the knowledge limitation imposed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle suggest it to be. ...
On my view there are as many life forms as there are individual species. Prions and viruses are akin to parasites, so their life forms aren't quite di...
Low level neurophysiological processes play a dual role in the etiology of intentional human behavior. The first role consists in its causal relevance...
Yes, I'm aware of this feature of his view, and it was indeed to accommodate this point that I used the qualifier "autonomous teleology" before the pa...
I think this is missing Apokrisis's point. I may try to put it differently. There was a sharp qualitative break when abiogenesis occurred a few billio...
The question about the odds that "you" could have been born some other animal rather than a human being only makes sense on the assumption that "you" ...
This is a gross mischaracterization of the position of the nonreductivist/emergentist/pluralist. What is denied is a unique "fundamental" material exp...
No, of course not, and neither do explanations in terms of material constitution explain the laws and features of the constituted entities, except in ...
There need not be any such implication. One can argue for a notion a strong emergence in a context of explanatory pluralism without endorsing a strati...
There are many examples in physics. George Ellis (responding to Sean Carroll) provides an example in the comment section of this post on emergence by ...
You initial query in the first post of this thread was about "laws of nature", quite generally, and the source of their universality. What makes you t...
For sure. It's Jaegwon Kim's argument that Bitbol is rehearsing here. Kim's argument also is sketched in the section Argument against non-reductive ph...
If laws that govern phenomena from a variety of empirical domains (e.g. chemical reactions, natural evolution, the actions of human beings, etc.) don'...
Sean Carroll objects to the notion of downward causation because he doesn't understand it. He wrongly believes the possibility of downward causation t...
Scott Sehon, Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account, OUP, 2016 George Ellis, How Can Physics Underlie the Mind: Top-Dow...
Also, in many cases (i.e. many ontological domains, including the objects of quantum physics) the very nature and existence of the material parts caus...
Yes. I think there is much truth to this. According to Cartesian epistemology, the world can never be known directly through perception. There is a di...
A philosopher could be overrated (i.e. generally being ranked too high relative to her peers) and still be underappreciated. I can't think of any phil...
If the language of thought hypothesis (LOT for short) were right, then the content of a thought would just be the content of the mentalese sentence us...
Elizabeth Anscombe has rightfully been mentioned as a "significant original" philosophical thinker. If we take care to distinguish significance from i...
Yes, he is saying this... often. And when he is saying this, he is effectively endorsing compatibilist conceptions of control and of free choice. The ...
I don't view them to be completely separate either. General preferences (which I've previously identified as preferences-1) are general and abstract -...
Practical reason is an ability to arbitrate between potentially conflicting goals. Some specific goal may be judged to take precedence over another go...
Of course, that was exactly my point. The two concepts, however, are frequently run together, and Darthbarracuda seems to be relying on running them t...
Your view that every practical choice that we make is governed by "preference" isn't false but it needs to be qualified. There is a liability to run t...
If Harris were right about our not having free will, our not being responsible for out decisions, and our actions being entirely determined by past ci...
This question involves a category error. Reasons are categorically distinct from preferences (or desires, concerns, etc.). If you need milk and believ...
This may only seem true from the standpoint of a metaphysics of Humean events that are individuated independently of their relational and causal relat...
I don't think it is quite true that we have no control over our preferences or desires. Many preferences result from habits that we can modify. We can...
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