Dream a Little Dream

One of the other issues that came up at Miguel’s cogsci talk was that of the empirical testability of the HOT theory. Miguel suggested that we might have the following argument against HOT. Experimental evidence suggests very strongly that the dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex is likely to be the home of HOTs. David has said [...]

The New New Dualism

Yesterday I attended Miguel Angel Sebastian’s cogsci talk entitled “The Subjective Character of Experiencre: Against HOR and SOR Theories” which was very interesting. Miguel was primarily trying to show that higher-order and same-order representationist theories of consciousness cannot account for the subjective character of an experience by which he means the thing that accounts for [...]

Does the Zombie Argument Rest on a Category Mistake?

re-reading Ryle’s “Descartes’ Myth” I was struck by the following passage …the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical process and mental process; that there are mechanical causes of coporeal movement and mental causes of coporeal movement. I shall [...]

Outline of the Case for Agnosticism

Via Leiter’s blog I found out about this Slate article on Agnosticism. I guess I agree with Leiter and a lot of the commenters that the piece is overly polemical and doesn’t address the arguments of either side. Being a card carrying agnostic myself I thought I might chime in. I found myself in general [...]

Natural Metaphysics Blowing Through the Air

In November 2009 the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences at the University of Alabama Birmingham hosted a conference entitled Does Scientific Naturalism Exclude Metaphysics? The speakers were Michael Friedman, Andrew Melnyck, Ron Giere, Mark Wilson, Don Ross, Daniel Dennett, J T Ismael, James Ladyman, and Paul Humphries. The conference was video taped [...]