A group of idea papers and random thoughts. Some are leftovers from other work; some are comments developed for online discussions. They are cooking slowly into something. Mush?
 | The first section has essays from online discussions, including |
a lively discussion on perception and epistemology
| There are also unpublished reviews of books and ideas stimulated by magazine and journal articles. |
Comments are always welcome!
ESSAYS FROM ONLINE DISCUSSIONS
Comments to Journal of Consciousness Studies-Online (JCS)
See Digest of Key JCS Debates at http://www.imprint.co.uk/online_index.html
Are Dreams Brain Mistakes? Probably not.
Mirror Neurons: Do We Understand Each Other Via Brain Simulations? A short background on the discovery of "mirror neurons" in the brain, followed by a discussion of what they mean. Is the brain the cause of social understanding, or the effect of it?
Free Will and Levels of Causation. According to philosopher John Searle, the brain causes mental events, but mental events can still be free. How is it possible? I don't think it is.
Free Will and the Club of Science. Is free will just an illusion? Strict scientific materialists insist that it is, but that may be just an ideology. My comments here are not very clear but indicate the direction of my thinking at the time.
Intersubjectivity: Do individuals have to exchange language and behavior to find psychological understanding, or is there a kind of human "telepathic" sharing independent of the transaction? I vote for neither. I think people are already connected before they even engage in transactions.
What's wrong with Bekeley's Idealism? I think there are two central problems.
Problems of Memory. An adequate account of human consciousness would have to deal with memory. I think it is a much tougher issue than most people realize.
Heterophenomenology. Daniel Dennett claims that we should not interpret self-reports in cognitive psychology, but only take them as verbal data. I argue that that would be tantamount to mindless functionalism.
First Person Science. Can there be a science of "first-person," or introspective experience? I don't think so, unless scientific method can be significantly modified.
Comments to The Karl Jaspers Forum
KJF is an online discussion forum whose archives are at www.kjf.ca Herbert Muller began the discussion with his article, "Is the Mind Real?" which I have excerpted below as background. Muller and I agree that the common sense world is not a mind-independent reality (MIR), although I do not think he realizes I agree with him. Where we disagree is on where the mind comes from in the first place.
Is the Mind Real? A background excerpt from Muller's opening article.
How Do You Get Something Out of Nothing? I questioned Muller's idea that all mental structures arise from some prior inchoate, unstructured "encompassing." Since he does not say how that might be possible, it is no explanation at all. Muller replies to my objections but does not really address them, in my opinion.
Where Does Nothing Come From? I try again to show how Muller's concept of the unstructured "encompassing" is not a valid foundation for a theory of epistemology and I even offer an alternative foundation. He answers my objections but misses my point, it seems to me.
Experience Beyond Experience? I try once again to get Muller to explain how knowledge can arise from non-knowledge. In his final reply, he mostly bluffs and blusters, which I take to mean he is unable to answer.
Memory Without Storage and Retrieval. Memory is assumed to be a matter of storage and retrieval of mental contents. I don't think that metaphor is correct and I try to articulate an alternative.
Do we perceive the world directly as it is, or are we limited to the representation of the world that forms in the brain after the senses are stimulated? This is an age-old battle about perception, knowledge, and reality.
Reviews of Books
Click the link above to jump to my unpublished book reviews, essentially just brief synopses of some interesting books I have read. These are less formal than my published book reviews.
Ideas Stimulated by Magazine and Journal Articles
Brain Training
Can you use your mind to control your brain? Apparently, you can. I review a recent article that demonstrates that. But what's interesting about it to me is that it only makes sense if you agree that the mind and the brain are distinct entities. From an article published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Evolution, Learning, and Intelligence
Evolution by natural selection is not intelligent. It is a random confluence of contingencies. People get mixed up when they confuse natural selection with artificial selection ("breeding") and that confusion leads to the erroneous concept of intelligent design in evolution. Spinoff from an article in The Economist.
A Subhuman Language?
A pre-modern tribe of people living in the Brazilian rain forest has a very strange language. It lacks so many features that are considered essential to any human language, that it has been called a "subhuman" language. It raises questions about the relation between thought and language. From an article in Science News.
Why Chimps Can't Talk
A recent article in a biology journal identified several genetic markers linked to intersubjectivity, the mental ability we have that lets us understand each other's minds, and which makes language possible. Humans have lots of this DNA marker, chimps much less. That finding supports my hypothesis that chimps can't talk, and never will, regardless of how much training they are given, because they lack sufficient intersubjectivity. From an article in PLoS-Biology.
Updated 12 Aug 08