Gary and Jerry

I have been working on my paper ‘Consciousness, Higher-Order Thoughts, and What It’s Like’ which I will be presenting in a couple of weeks, parts of which have appeared here and over at Brains. I was reading through it today and something interesting occurred to me. It has been a project of mine for a [...]

HOT Fun in the Summertime 2

Given that higher-order theories of consciousness are committed to the claim that there are unconscious sensory states (like pains, and seeings of red, etc) and that such unconscious states are not like anything for the creature that has them, they need a way to identify the sensory qualitative properties independently of our access to those properties (i.e. [...]

HOT Fun in the Summertime 1

I have been working on my paper ‘Consciousness, Higher-Order Thoughts, and What It’s Like’ which I will present as a poster at the SPP and as a talk at the ASSC in June. This paper is basically the first half of a longer paper of mine Consciousness on my Mind: Implementing the Higher-Order Strategy for Explaining What It’s [...]

Truth, Justification, and the Quasi-realist Way

In an earlier post (The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’) I argued that when discussing minimalism about truth we need to distinguish between redundancy theories (claims about the meaning is ‘is true’) and deflationism (claims about the nature of the property that the predicate is supposed to pick out). Once we see that redundancy [...]

NC/DC Returns!

After a brief hiatus, NC/DC is back! There will be Rock in all possible worlds tonight!

Do Thoughts Make Us Conscious of Things?

The Transitivity principle says that a conscious state is a mental state that we are conscious of ourselves as being in, thus an account of transitive consciousness is key for implementing a higher-order theory. Rosenthal is clear that he thinks that thoughts can sometimes make us conscious of things. Here is what he says in [...]

Swimming Vegetables? Fish, Pain, and Consciousness

There has been for some time now a debate between fishing enthusiasts and animal rights activists over whether or not fish feel pain. A recent study by scientists in Scotland has reopened this debate by claiming to have demonstrated that fish in fact do feel pain. They claim that fish have nociceptors and a part of [...]

Brain Reading, Brain States, and Higher-order Thoughts

Recently there has been a lot of progress in brain reading; for instance Here is a nice piece done by CNN, here is a nice article on brain reading video games, and here is a link to Frank Tong’s lab, who may be familiar to those who regularly attend the ASSCor the Tuscon conferences. This stuff is important to [...]

Applying Frigidity

As commonly understood Kripke’s notion of rigidity is a property that some terms have and that others lack. I argue that there is no such property that is had by some terms and lacked by others; hence there is no rigidity as commonly construed . Recent discussions of rigidity have, I claim, forgotten the importance [...]

The Truth About Santa

For those of you who are interested, there has been some really interesting discussion of my post There is no Santa Claus over at Philosophy, et cetera in the response Is Santa a Lie?