Arbitrary Marks

Something I’ve noticed while again working through William James, Andrew Newberg and some Christian mystics, now concurrently, is how frequently pain comes up in the narrative of the mystics in contrast to the analysts like James and Newberg. This isn’t including the self-inflicted pain, like self-flagellation, or talk about evil and suffering. Rather, the desire [...]

Can we resolve contentious issues in philosophy by recourse to analysis of the structure of our language and surveys about how ordinary people think? Based on the increasing interest in “X-phil”, or experimental philosophy and the popularity of writers like Stephen Pinker (author of The Stuff of Thought) some think the answer is, “Yes.”

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Okay, so this post isn’t about the cerebellums of Chinese people, but rather an article about cerebellums and John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. I wrote about it in my last post, here. The gist of the article, as I understand it, is that if we assume the cerebellum has cognitive function, then functionalism [...]

In philosophy of mind, a relatively popular view about the relationship between “mind” and “brain” is termed functionalism. This view claims that the brain is like a computer processor, and the mental states we experience are like the programs run by the computer. A recent paper focuses upon the potential support for this family of theories which could emerge from new analysis of the cerebellum:

Frings, M., Maschke, M. and Timmann, D. (2007) ‘Cerebellum and cognition - viewed from philosophy of mind’, The Cerebellum, 1 - 7.

Salon.com has a great article on Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who are partnered and influence one another’s academic work (philosophy and cognitive psychology, respectively). Below is a short excerpt where they discuss David Chalmers and Sam Harris on science and the brain–a topic which they think is central to the question of “science versus religion”:

The most recent New England Journal of Medicine had an interesting article in the “brief report” section, called “Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in the Brain.” After stimulating the temporoparietal junction of a patient who had tinnitus, neurologists were able to induce the sensation of being disembodied.

This lecture sounds interesting and is pertinent to my current paper topic.  While philosophical thought experiments are sometimes far outside of the realm of human experience, let’s not forget that reality presents us with difficult “thought experiments”, too–ones with dramatic implications.
Dr. Christine Overall
Queen’s University
“Conjoined Twins, Embodied Personhood, and Surgical Separation”
Thursday, November 1st 2007
3:30-5:30 p.m.
Galvin Auditorium, [...]

I’m curious what your intuitions are about the following scenarios. Where would you be, if these stories happened? (And by “you”, I mean whatever you tend to mean when you say “I”–nothing more or less).

Half of the fun in philosophy is coming up with catchy names for your views. My zombie paper reviewer, Alex Arnold of Notre Dame, helped me out in that regard, calling my thesis the “Pious Zombie” view. I dig that. He had a few criticisms of my main argument, which I anticipated, [...]

This is the kind of response I get a lot of (in offline conversations) with scientists. And I respect them, their years of training and expertise, and heck, I may even, ultimately, agree with a materialist (i.e. physicalist) metaphysics. But–and this is what I was trying to get at in my earlier post–the [...]