You Must be Joking

A few years ago I had the terrible idea of taking classic jokes and “translating” them into philosophical lingo. Some work has been done in this area on lightbulb jokes but there are so many other kinds of jokes. Some are pretty obvious…like Yo mama is so fat, when she sits around the house she [...]

The Unintelligibility of Substance Dualism

Over at Siris Brandon offers some interesting criticism of my argument against substance dualism. He distinguishes two senses in which we may say that a theory is viable. In one sense we simply mean to be asking what reasons someone might have for believing in that kind of thing. In that sense a viable theory [...]

More HOTter, More Better

In an earlier post I outlined the case for qualia realism from the higher-order perspective as I see it. Dave Chalmers worried that one of the moves was too quick. The move in question is the move from concepts making a difference to phenomenal experience to their determining phenomenal experience. Basically the line I was [...]

Summa Contra Plantinga

I recently reread Alvin Plantinga’s paper Against Materialism and needless to say I am less than impressed. Plantinga presents two “arguments” against materialism each of which is utterly ridiculous. The first is what he calls the replacement argument (sic). It is possible, Plantinga tells us, that one could have one’s body replaced while one continues [...]

Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness

In celebration of my three years in the Blogosphere I will be reposting some of my earlier posts that I am particularly fond of. This piece was originally published May 10th, 2007. ——————————- In his youthful exuberance Rosenthal argued that for a first-order state to count as a conscious state the first-order state had to cause [...]

Containing Phenomenological Overflow

I am going to the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Toronto to do a poster presentation of the higher-order response to Block’s phenomenological overflow argument. This is important since it is a crucial step in the argument for the naturalization of qualia. The core argument is in this video. This shows [...]

HOT Block

In celebration of my three years in the Blogosphere I will be reposting some of my earlier posts that I am particularly fond of. This piece was originally published July 11th, 2007. ——————————- I was recently reading Block’s forthcomming BBS paper Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience. It is an interesting paper and [...]

108th Philosophers’ Carnival

Welcome to the 108th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival! I don’t know what is going on with the Carnival but  the last few editions have not had very many interesting submissions and I did not get a lot of acceptable submissions for this issue…but I know that there are interesting posts out there  so I scoured [...]

3rd Birthday

Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of my starting Philosophy Sucks! I started my blogging career over at Brains and had my first post on April 12, 2007. I had several posts there before I was compelled to start my own blog and as people may know I continue to contribute to Brains and am very [...]

Pain Asymbolia and A Priori Defeasibility

I listened to the first lecture in David Chalmers’ Locke Lectures currently taking place at Oxford and I was intrigued by the argument he gave in defense of the claim that we can have a priori knowledge and do conceptual analysis even if we cannot give definitions of the concepts that we are analyzing. The [...]