I’m not an expert and you shouldn’t particularly care what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. Physicalists aka materialists are often presented with the challenge of the so-called hard problem of consciousness. That is, essentially, how and why does subjective experience arise from physical brains? In general, I have the impression that most physicalists…
Tag: philosophy of mind
What it means to say “lobsters are conscious”
The creationist site Evolution News recently posted an article entitled What Does It Mean to Say “Lobsters Are Conscious”? The thrust of this article is to use research about animal sentience to uphold mind-body dualism while simultaneously downplaying the similarities between human and animal minds. In short, the author Denyse O’Leary is trying to have…
What it’s like to be a bat
Bats are a very ancient and diverse group of mammals, evolving over 50 million years ago and making up a fifth of all living mammal species (Simmons et al. 2008). They are notable for multiple distinctive adaptations, including being the only true flying mammals and using echolocation to “see” in the dark. Echolocation requires several…
The imperfect Chinese room (a note on the conditions for AI consciousness)
First, a note about the obvious racism: western philosophy has long used China as the prototypical example of the foreign. In the Chinese room thought experiment, the Chinese language is used because it is not understood by the person. Ultimately, Chinese is being likened to machine code, notoriously unreadable by humans. This is not the…
thoughts on mind 