Abstract There are reasons to look at two existing kinds of theories of consciousness, including the need to elicit criteria by which to judge any theory of consciousness. One kind is dualism, still persisting, and the other is functionalism, dominant in the sciences of mind and consciousness. They are treated differently, wrongly. Dualisms are taken to be to the effect that consciousness is...
It is the business of philosophy to deal without presupposition with the question of the general nature of the world and with the question of how or indeed whether we can know that nature. These are questions to which answers are given in the realism of ordinary belief, as it can be called, the phenomenalism of Berkeley, the pragmatism and the scientism of Quine, and the varieties of...
AbstractAmong the living cells of the human body, and of the central and the peripheral nervous systems, it is neurons or nerve cells which are most immediately bound up with consciousness — with the antecedents of mental events, mental events themselves, and their consequents, the latter being other mental events and also actions. Neurons vary from very short indeed to a considerable length,...
AbstractThis book considers the exact nature of the relation between mental and neural events, how both sorts of events come about, and their relation to actions. The answers that the book provides constitute a new determinist philosophy of mind.