William Seager

This thesis divides into two main sections. The first is an attempt to show that the Psycho-physical Identity Theory is false, and is so even if we grant that human behaviour is in principle completely explicable in purely physical terms . This section is a sustained criticism of a staight-forward argument in favour of the Identity Theory, namely: Mental items cause behaviour. All behaviour is caused by physical items. So mental items are physical items. ;This section is also divisible into two main parts, both of which present arugments against the Identity Theory. ;The first argument presented is originally from Davidson's paper "Mental Events" . The claim I am interested in is that no systematic correlations can be found between mental and physical events. I explicate and defend this claim which is based, roughly, on the contrast between the conditions of ascription of mental states such as belief and physical states. The former are ascribed so as to form a system within which behaviour appears rational, the latter are not. Since certain forms of the identity theory demand such correlations they are undercut by Davidson's claim. ;The second argument presented is that the Identity Theory fails because of the content of our concepts of the mental. The problem here is that of identifying entities from different theories for I take our common sense mentalistic explanations to be part of a theory. If both theories say a lot about what sort of thing the entities they mention are identification across the theories will be impossible, even if the entities in question are thought to play similar causal roles. For example, the content of "phlogiston theory" and "oxygen theory" is sufficient to preclude identifying phlogiston and oxygen despite the basically similar role they are supposed to play. I bring forth several features of our mentalistic explanations in an attempt to show the extensiveness of the content of our mentalistic theory. ;The failure of the Identity Theory does not imply the failure of Materialism, for one can still espouse an "eliminative" form of Materialism. This doctrine has appeared implausible, though, because of the seemingly direct or immediate awareness we have of at least some mental items. I believe this appearance can be removed only by developing a materialistically acceptable theory of behaviour in which the phenomena of direct awareness can be explained. ;The second half of the thesis is thus devoted to outlining such a theory. The central notion deployed is that of an "internal representation" of the world which guides behaviour. The representational nature of internal states arises solely from their place in the logical structure of these states and their role in the production of behaviour. Beginning with extremely simple behaviour I investigate the additional capabilities which the representational system must have to explain such activities as perception, goal seeking, the representation of causal and/or logical sequences, and the representation of the entity's own abilities to alter the world around it. ;The basic theory of internal representation is then applied to the problem of introspection and direct awareness. I argue that any complex conceptualization of aspects of the world demands a representational medium in which to be carried out. Our so-called direct awareness is in fact the application of a complicated representational schema. As such it is in essence no more priveleged than any other schema which could be applied to these phenomena. Thus our direct awareness cannot be taken as an infallible guide to the nature or existence of the phenomenal qualities of mental states, and this in turn leaves the door open for some sort of eliminative materialism.

Leibniz argumentiert in der Monadologie, daß das Bewußtsein nicht auf rein mechanische und materielle Prozesse reduziert werden kann. Diesem wohlbekannten Argument wird bisweilen ein elementarer Trugschluß der Zusammensetzung vorgeworfen. Meiner Meinung nach hingegen weist dieses Argument eher auf ein grundlegendes Problem in unserem physikalischen Verständnis des menschlichen Geistes hin, einem Verständnis, das auch heute noch akzeptiert wird. Ich zeige jedoch weiterhin, daß Leibniz nicht erkannt hat, daß sein Argument die Möglichkeit offen läßt, daß es unsere begrifflichen Grenzen sind, die uns daran hindern, das Bewußtsein durch materielle Prozesse zu verstehen

Reception of the Bohm-Hiley interpretation of quantum mechanics has a curiously Janus faced quality. On the one hand, it is frequently derided as a conservative throwback to outdated classical patterns of thought. On the other hand, it is equally often taken to task for encouraging a wild quantum mysticism, often regarded as anti-scientific. I will argue that there are reasons for this reception, but that a proper appreciation of the dual scientific and philosophical aspects of the view reveals a powerful and extremely interesting metaphysical view of the world. This view is akin to that of Russellian Monism, in which the empirical world studied by science is restricted to relational features that stand in need of some background intrinsic properties to ground their reality. This allows for a theory that can embrace a world which exhibits a reasonable and plausible sort of emergence (especially of domains that fall under classical concepts) while also making room for distinctive and scientifically intransigent properties such as consciousness

Charles Siewert presents a series of thought experiment based arguments against a wide range of current theories of phenomenal consciousness which I believe achieves a considerable measure of success. One topic which I think gets insufficient attention is the discussion of functionalism and I address this here. Before that I consider the intriguing issue, which is seldom considered but figures prominently at the close of Siewert's book, of the value of consciousness. In particular, I broach the question of whether the value of consciousness has any impact on our theoretical understanding of consciousness

A paradox is a situation in which two seemingly equally rational lines of thought lead to contradictory conclusions. A moral paradox is a situation where the employment of diverse moral principles, each of which is at least intuitively acceptable to roughly the same degree, leads to radically different moral assessments of one and the same action. In his “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence” Gregory Kavka argues that such moral paradoxes lurk in the concept of deterrence and further that the present world situation of mutual nuclear deterrence may well provide a concrete illustration of these paradoxes. That deterrence can involve paradox may well be true, but what I wish to consider here is whether the case of nuclear deterrence is in fact an instance of “paradoxical deterrence”.

There are plenty of books about consciousness, but none of them is like this book. On the first page we discover that ‘a great deal of this book is aimed at increasing rather than decreasing your perplexity’. At this Blackmore certainly succeeds. This is a testimony not only to the subject matter but her own deft and relentless exploration of every facet of consciousness as well as its study. It is her positive aim to lead the reader to the mystery inherent in even the most everyday forms of consciousness and to show conversely that truly exotic forms of consciousness are not that out of the ordinary.

Though there are many analogies between time and space, there appear to be three commonplace yet deeply perplexing features of time that reveal it to be quite unlike space. These can be called ‘orientation’, ‘flow’ and ‘presence’. By orientation I mean that there is a direction to time, a temporal order between events which is not merely a reflection of how they are observed (what McTaggart 1908/1968 labelled the B-series time). Assertions that objects stand in spatial relations, such as to the left of, or above, or to the north of explicitly depend upon the position from which they are asserted or upon arbitrary, conventionally established spatial frameworks. There is nothing intrinsic about them; the objects involved are, so to speak, indifferent to them. Temporal relations are not like that – times are not just arranged along, as it were, a line but are successive along that imaginary line. Whether one event is before or after another is not (altogether) dependent upon how, or from where, they are viewed. Nature appears to respect temporal orientation, as enshrined in the laws of thermodynamics, though it remains a deep mystery exactly how the temporally symmetric basic laws of physics ground strongly asymmetric temporal processes (see Sklar 1993).

The generation problem is to explain how material configurations or processes can produce conscious experience. David Chalmers urges that this is what makes the problem of consciousness really difficult. He proposes to side-step the generation problem by proposing that consciousness is an absolutely fundamental feature of the world. I am inclined to agree that the generation problem is real and believe that taking consciousness to be fundamental is promising. But I take issue with Chalmers about what it is to be a fundamental feature of the world. In fact, I argue that taking the idea seriously ought to lead to some form of panpsychism. Powerful objections have been advanced against panpsychism, but I attempt to outline a form of the doctrine which can evade them. In the end, I suspect that we will face a choice between panpsychism and rethinking the legitimacy of the generation problem itself

Brook and Raymont do not assert that self-representing representations are sufficient to generate consciousness, but they do assert that they are necessary, at least in the sense that self-representation provides the most plausible mechanism for generating conscious mental states. I argue that a first-order approach to consciousness is equally capable of accounting for the putative features of consciousness which are supposed to favor the self-representational account. If nothing is gained the simplicity of the first-order theory counts in its favor. I also advance a speculative proposal that we are never aware of any distinctively mental attributes of our own states of consciousness except via an independent act of reflective conceptualization, although this goes rather farther than the first-order theory strictly requires.

It has been argued that Psychological Externalism is irrelevant to psychology. The grounds for this are that PE fails to individuate intentional states in accord with causal power, and that psychology is primarily interested in the causal roles of psychological states. It is also claimed that one can individuate psychological states via their syntactic structure in some internal "language of thought". This syntactic structure is an internal feature of psychological states and thus provides a key to their causal powers. I argue that in fact any syntactic structure deserving the name will require an external individuation no less than the semantic features of psychological states.

Jerry Fodor has recently proposed a new entry into the list of information based approaches to semantic content aimed at explicating the general notion of representation for both mental states and linguistic tokens. The basic idea is that a token means what causes its production. The burden of the theory is to select the proper cause from the sea of causal influences which aid in generating any token while at the same time avoiding the absurdity of everything's being literally meaningful. I argue that a detailed examination of the theory reveals that neither burden can be successfully shouldered.

Donald Davidson espouses two fundamental theses about the individuation of mental events. The thesis of causal individuation asserts that sameness of cause and effect is sufficient and necessary for event identity. The thesis of content individuation gives only a sufficient condition for difference of mental events: if e and f have different contents then they are different mental events. I argue that given these theses, psychological externalism--the view that mental content is determined by factors external to the subject of the relevant mental events--entails that the token identity theory is false

Our knowledge forms a highly interconnected and dynamically changing body of propositions. One obviously important way that knowledge changes is via rational inference, based either upon new insight into the content of what we already know or upon new knowledge provided by the senses. The most obvious codification of the acceptability of inference driven knowledge growth is the so-called known entailment closure principle, the principle that if S knows that p and knows that p implies q then S knows that q, or, more formally.