By: John Priest,
on 9/10/2016
The traditional view puts forward the idea that the vast majority of what there is in the universe is mindless. Panpsychism however claims that mental features are ubiquitous in the cosmos.
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By: John Priest,
on 3/28/2016
The Oxford Philosophy team is excited to see you in San Francisco for the upcoming 2016 American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting. We have some suggestions on sights to see during your time in California as well as our favorite sessions for the conference. We recommend visiting the following sights and attractions while in San Francisco.
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By: Joy Mizan,
on 12/5/2015
The Oxford Philosophy Team will be starting off the New Year in Washington D.C.! We’re excited to see you at the upcoming 2016 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting. We have some suggestions on sights to see during your time in Washington as well as our favorite sessions for the conference.
The post APA Eastern 2016: a conference guide appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Helena Palmer,
on 8/1/2015
Influenced by the discoveries of cognitive science, many of us will now accept that much of our mental life is unconscious. There are subliminal perceptions, implicit attitudes and beliefs, inferences that take place tacitly outside of our awareness, and much more.
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By: Alex Guyver,
on 6/21/2015
At one point in the recent film The Imitation Game the detective assigned to his case asks Alan Turing whether machines could think. The dialogue that follows is perhaps not very illuminating philosophically, but it does remind us of an important point: the computer revolution that Turing helped to pioneer gave a huge impetus to interest in what we now call the mind-body problem. In other words, how is the mind related to the body? How could a soggy grey mass such as the brain give rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness?
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By: [email protected],
on 1/26/2015
I read this after listening the fabulous Bookrageous Podcast which read and discussed the book for their book club and then interviewed the author. It is a fascinating look at what is happening inside our minds when we read. The author, Peter Mendelsund, is a book designer for Knopf in the US but also has […]
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By: Sara Pinotti,
on 7/20/2014
The philosopher Descartes set out to escape doubt and to find certainties. From the premise that he was thinking, even if falsely, he argued to what he took to be the certain conclusion that he existed. Cogito ergo sum. He is as well known for concluding that consciousness is not physical. Your being conscious right now is not an objective physical fact. It has a nature quite unlike that of the chair you are sitting on. Your consciousness is different in kind from objectively physical neural states and events in your head.
This mind-body dualism persists. It is not only a belief or attitude in religion or spirituality. It is concealed in standard cognitive science or computerism. The fundamental attraction of dualism is that we are convinced, since we have a hold on it, that consciousness is different. There really is a difference in kind between you and the chair you are sitting on, not a factitious difference.
But there is an awful difficulty. Consciousness has physical effects. Arms move because of desires, bullets come out of guns because of intentions. How could such indubitably physical events have causes that are not physical at all, for a start not in space?
Some philosophers used to accomodate the fact that movements have physical causes by saying conscious desires and intentions aren’t themselves causal but they go along with brain events. Epiphenomenalism is true. Conscious beliefs themselves do not explain your stepping out of the way of joggers. But epiphenomenalism is now believed only in remote parts of Australia, where the sun is very hot. I know only one epiphenomenalist in London, sometimes seen among the good atheists in Conway Hall.
A decent theory or analysis of consciousness will also have the recommendation of answering a clear question. It will proceed from an adequate initial clarification of a subject. The present great divergence in theories of consciousness is mainly owed to people talking about different things. Some include what others call the unconscious mind.
Crystal mind By Nevit Dilmen (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There’s a lot to the new theory of Actualism, starting with a clarification of ordinary consciousness in the primary or core sense as something called actual consciousness. Think along with me just of one good piece of the theory. Think of one part or side or group of elements of ordinary consciousness. Think of consciousness in ordinary perception — say seeing — as against consciousness in just thinking and wanting. Call it perceptual consciousness. What is it for you to perceptually conscious now, as we say, of the room you’re in? Being aware of it, not thinking about it or something in it? Well, the fact is not some internal thing about you. It’s for a room to exist.
It’s for a piece of a subjective physical world to exist out there in space — yours. That is something dependent both on the objective physical world out there and also on you neurally. A subjective physical world’s being dependent on something in you, of course, doesn’t take it out of space out there or deprive it of other counterparts of the characteristics you can assemble of the objective physical world. What is actual with perceptual consciousness is not a representation of a world — stuff called sense data or qualia or mental paint — whatever is the case with cognitive and affective consciousness.
That’s just a good start on Actualism. It makes consciousness different. It doesn’t reduce consciousness to something that has no effects. It also involves a large fact of subjectivity, indeed of what you can call individuality or personal identity, even living a life. One more criterion of a good theory is naturalism — being true to science. It is also philosophy, which is greater concentration on the logic of ordinary intelligence, thinking about facts rather than getting them. Actualism also helps a little with human standing, that motive of believers in free will as against determinism.
Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. He edited The Oxford Companion to Philosophy and has written about determinism and freedom, social ends and political means, and even himself in Philosopher: A Kind of Life. He recently published Actual Consciousness.
The post What is consciousness? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: AlanaP,
on 4/27/2014
In the trailer of Transcendence, an authoritative professor embodied by Johnny Depp says that “the path to building superintelligence requires us to unlock the most fundamental secrets of the universe.” It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the possibility of artificial intelligence and how it will affect society. Nick Bostrom, a scientist and philosopher and the author of the forthcoming Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, discusses the science and reality behind the future of machine intelligence in the following video series.
Could you upload Johnny Depp’s brain?
Click here to view the embedded video.
How imminent is machine intelligence?
Click here to view the embedded video.
Would you have a warning before artificial intelligence?
Click here to view the embedded video.
How could you get a machine intelligence?
Click here to view the embedded video.
Nick Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, and Human Enhancement. His next book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, will be published this summer in the UK and this fall in the US. He previously taught at Yale, and he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy. Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy.
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The post The viability of Transcendence: the science behind the film appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 4/4/2014
The problem of consciousness is real, deep and confronts us any time we care to look. Ask yourself this question ‘Am I conscious now?’ and you will reply ‘Yes’. Then, I suggest, you are lured into delusion – the delusion that you are conscious all the time, even when you are not asking about it.
Now ask another question, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ This may seem like a very odd question indeed but lots of my students have grappled with it and I have spent years playing with it, both in daily life and in meditation. My conclusion? Most of the time I do not know what I was conscious of just before I asked.
Try it. Were you aware of that faint humming in the background? Were you conscious of the birdsong? Had you even noticed the loud drill in the distance that something in your brain was trying to block out? And that’s just sounds. What about the feel of your bottom on the chair? My experience is that whenever I look I find lots of what I call parallel backwards threads – sounds, touch, sights, that in some way I seem to have been listening to for some time – yet when I asked the question I had the odd sensation that I’ve only just become conscious of it.
Back in 1890 William James (one of my great heroes of consciousness studies) remarked on the sounds of a chiming clock. You notice the chiming after several strikes. At that moment you can look back and count one, two, three, four and know that now it has reached five. But it was only at four that you suddenly became conscious of the sound.
William James
What’s going on?
This, I suggest, is just one of the many curious features of our minds that lead us astray. Whenever we ask ‘Am I conscious now? we always are, so we leap to the conclusion that there must always be something ‘in my consciousness’, as though consciousness were a container. I reject this idea. Instead, I think that most of the time our brains are getting on with their amazing job of processing countless streams of information in multiple parallel threads, and none of those threads is actually ‘conscious’. Consciousness is an attribution we make after the fact. We look back and say ‘This is what I was conscious of’ and there is nothing more to consciousness than that.
Are we really so deluded? If so there are two important consequences: One spiritual and one scientific.
Many contemplative and mystical traditions claim we are living in illusion; that we need to throw off the dark glasses of the false self who seems to be in control, who seems to have consciousness and free will; that if we train our minds through meditation and mindfulness we can see through the illusion and live in clearly awareness right here and now. I am most familiar with Zen and I love such sayings as, ‘Actions exist and also their consequences but the person that acts does not’. Wow! Letting go of the person who sees, thinks, and decides is not a trivial matter and many people find it outrageous that one would even want to try. Yet it is quite possible to live without assuming that you are consciously making the decisions – that you are a persisting entity that has consciousness and free will.
From the scientific point of view, throwing off these illusions would totally transform the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. This is, as Dave Chalmers, the Australian philosopher, describes it, the question of ‘how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience’. This is a modern version of the mind-body problem. Almost everyone who works on consciousness agrees that dualism does not work. There cannot be a separate spirit or soul or persisting inner self that is something other than ordinary matter. The world cannot be divided, as Descartes famously thought, into mind and matter – subjective and objective, physical material and mental thoughts. Somehow the two must ultimately be one – But how? This ‘nonduality’ is what mystical traditions have long described, but it is also the hope that science is grappling with.
And something strange is happening in the science of consciousness. The last few decades have seen fantastic progress in neuroscience. Yet paradoxically this makes the problem of consciousness worse, not better. We now know that decisions are initiated in part of the frontal lobe, actions are controlled by areas as far apart as the motor cortex, premotor cortex and cerebellum, visual information is processed in multiple parallel pathways at different speeds without ever constructing a picture-like representation that could correspond to ‘the picture I see in front of my eyes’. The brain manages all these amazing tasks in multiple parallel processes. So what need is there for ‘me’? And what need is there for subjective experience? So what is it and why do we have it?
Perhaps inventing an inner conscious self is a convenient way to live; perhaps it simplifies the brain’s complex task of keeping us alive; perhaps it has some evolutionary purpose. Whatever the answer, I am convinced that all our usual ideas about mind and consciousness are false. We can throw them off in the way we live our lives, and we must throw them off if our science of consciousness is ever to make progress.
Susan Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She is the author of Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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The post A question of consciousness appeared first on OUPblog.
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By: Cindy Jefferies,
on 11/5/2011
thin my own continent, and making forays into a couple of others. I've travelled into a new decade too. Psst! Don't tell anyone but I'm now in my sixth.
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What do you want to get off your mind today?
By: Rebecca,
on 4/12/2010
Integrative Body-Mind-Spirit Social Work: An Empirically Based Approach to Assessment and Treatment, is the first book to strongly connect Western therapy with Eastern philosophy and practices, while also providing a comprehensive practice agenda for social work and mental health professionals. The authors argue that integrative body-mind-spirit social work is indeed a practical therapeutic approach in bringing about tangible changes in clients. In the excerpt below we look at just one technique and one patient, Rebecca.The authors are highly regarded researchers from both Asia and America. Mo Yee Lee is a Professor in the College of Social Work at The Ohio State University. Siu-man Ng is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration and the Associate Director of the Centre on Behavioral Health at the University of Hong Kong. Pamela Pui Yu Leung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Cecilia Lai Wan Chan is a Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, the Director of the Centre on Behavioral Health, the Associate Director of the HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong.
Rebecca was a lady in her thirties. When she first came to the therapist’s office, she talked with a soft and weak voice and seemed afraid of looking directly at the therapist. She did not clearly express what she wanted. She gave the therapist the impression that she was a timid, little girl instead of a woman in her late thirties. After building rapport, she shared with the therapist that she was thinking about changing careers but was not certain about what she could do. She hoped the therapist could help her develop self-confidence so that she could take charge of her life.
In the first few sessions, the therapist helped Rebecca to explore and clarify what she wanted. She wanted to make some changes in her life, but she was afraid of the uncertainty that would go with the change. She realized that she was stuck because she was used to staying with the familiar and not taking risks. Rebecca also discovered that she had made herself psychologically dependent on others, her father in particular. This dependence had developed into a pattern so that she always relied on others to make decisions for her. Though there was an inner voice calling her to meet a new challenge and attempt a new job, she dared not, as her father did not support the idea.
During the fifth session, the therapist revisited the treatment goal with Rebecca and tried to help her to make a choice for herself regarding her pattern of being dependent on others. The therapist said, “You told me that your goal is to take charge of your life. Now you realize that you have developed a pattern of being dependent on others. What are you going to do with this pattern? Do you want to keep it, or change it?” Rebeca promptly responded that she did not want to keep the old pattern, but having been used to relying on others for so many years, she felt uncertain of what sh
Mouthwash. Bleach.
What is the hidden link that allows us to associate the three above products together?
Not only do we use these in our everyday strive for hygiene, but they all supposedly kill 99.9% of germs.
Let’s look at that again:
“xxx peppermint mouthwash: Kills germs 99.9%! Buy two now for ….$$$ Yadda Yadda.”
And again:
“Kills Germs 99.9%…”
However, they don’t actually make it clear whether it is the bacteria in our mouth or not.
So therefore, this can be taken several ways:
I might be that one in a thousand :3
What do you think? (: Who knows? It’s a possibility.
The #1 clue is:
* May come in arrangements.
The #2 clue is:
* Scents with bright colors.
The #3 clue is:
* special occasions.
The #4 clue is:
* Pretty, lovely, gorgeous.
The #5 clue is:
Sometimes a gift.
You can see this answer at the neighbors, while taking a drive, or in a store. I love you is a response after this answer is given.
All these clues talk about the same thing. Try and guess. It’s fun and it does the mind good to think and figure out what this #28 mystery clues answer might be.
If you don’t know the answer still try. Write something down. Remember it does the mind good.
The #1 clue is:
* May come in arrangements.
The #2 clue is:
* Scents with bright colors.
The #3 clue is:
* special occasions.
The #4 clue is:
* Pretty, lovely, gorgeous.
The #5 clue is:
Sometimes a gift.
You can see this answer at the neighbors, while taking a drive, or in a store. I love you is a response after this answer is given.
All these clues talk about the same thing. Try and guess. It’s fun and it does the mind good to think and figure out what this #28 mystery clues answer might be.
If you don’t know the answer still try. Write something down. Remember it does the mind good.
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Happy ideas to dream on for a gloomy day - and how lovely it must be (at times?)to have a sister.
How lovely that you wrote something about ME! (The sister). Thank you Cindy, I love you to bits and always will xxx
Penny, you can be an honorary sister any time you like, along with my other two. I often rather think of you as one anyway.
And Rachael...you're welcome! And the feeling is mutual.
What a lovely, reflective post!And what an interesting year you've had. Thanks, Cindy.