Zombies, Epiphenomenalism, and Physicalist Theories of Consciousness

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Computer Programs ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
The Mind

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a more reductive kind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.

Is the Theatre a Zombie? On the Successful Failures of Émile Zola

2018 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Rebellato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Emile Zola ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Room ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Zombie Argument ◽  
The Mind

AbstractNaturalist theatre, in its late-nineteenth-century incarnation, and particularly in the work of Émile Zola, is often seen as advancing a physicalist view of the mind, where all mind states can be reduced to brain states. The novels and the plays do not uniformly or unambiguously support this analysis, so is the theory or the practice wrong? Physicalism is an idea that has had a recent renaissance, helped by the discoveries of neuroscience. Nevertheless I express some caution about the claims made for the eradication of free will. A range of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind have cast doubt on physicalism, culminating in David Chalmers’s much-debated zombie argument. I argue that zombies and their analogues represented deep social anxieties in the late nineteenth century, and make repeated appearances in Naturalism. The essay goes on to suggest that Naturalism should be considered to have conducted thought experiments, rather than just to have attempted to embody the theory on stage. Turning to John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, I suggest that theatre-making itself may be a kind of thought experiment model of the mind.

Zombies and Dolls

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Massimini ◽  
Giulio Tononi
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter uses thought experiments and practical examples to introduce, in a very accessible way, the hard problem of consciousness. Soon, machines may behave like us to pass the Turing test and scientists may succeed in copying and simulating the inner workings of the brain. Will all this take us any closer to solving the mysteries of consciousness? The reader is taken to meet different kind of zombies, the philosophical, the digital, and the inner ones, to understand why many, scientists and philosophers alike, doubt that the mind–body problem will ever be solved.

Narrow Content

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
Tyler Burge ◽  
Narrow Content

Narrow mental content, if there is such a thing, is content that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker. A central topic in the philosophy of mind since the mid-1970s has been whether there is a kind of mental content that is narrow in this sense. It is widely conceded, thanks to famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, that there is a kind of mental content that is not narrow. But it is often maintained that there is also a kind of mental content that is narrow, and that such content can play various key explanatory roles relating, inter alia, to epistemology and the explanation of action. This book argues that this is a forlorn hope. It carefully distinguishes a variety of conceptions of narrow content and a variety of explanatory roles that might be assigned to narrow content. It then argues that, once we pay sufficient attention to the details, there is no promising theory of narrow content in the offing.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 15

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Moral Explanation ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Selection Of

This series is devoted to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The chapters included in the series provide a basis for understanding recent developments in the field. Chapters in this volume explore topics including the nature of reasons, the tenability of moral realism, moral explanation and grounding, and a variety of epistemological challenges.

Psycho-Physical Union: The Problem of the Person in Descartes

Dialogue ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Murray Lewis Miles
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
The Mind

The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that mind, whose essence is thinking, is clearly and distinctly conceivable apart from matter, the essence of which is extension. From this, by an illicit inference which need not concern us further, Descartes concludes that the mind is “really distinct” from matter, that is, a substance capable of existing apart from body in its own right. Where these two lines of thought meet, the problem of the person constitutes itself in the following manner.

scholarly journals Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

Until Death Do Us Part and They Upload Us Into Clones: An Analysis of Film Narratives About Mind Uploading and the Myth of Immortality

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-548
Author(s):  
Anja Zlatović ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Visual Science ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Tv Show

The fear of death and the myth of immortality are themes long present in various narratives, whether literary or visual. Science fiction as a genre offers us many venues for new explorations of this idea. Mind uploading is one of them. This fictional technique, related to cloning, is performed when the mind and consciousness of a person are transferred to another biological body or machine with the help of technology. In this way, a person continues their social life through their brain functions. This paper looks at four separate recent screen narratives – the movies Self/less, Transcendence, and Replicas, and the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show Black Mirror. With the help of Tzvetan Todorov’s structural analysis, we find clauses that are present in all of the plots and see what ideas and topics they share. The paper also uses the idea of anthropological reading of science fiction and therefore uses scientific research to analyze these themes. By looking at anthropological findings of immortality, mortality, death in modern society, and digital techniques, we see how the analyzed narratives portray a unique mixture of fear of and longing for all the mentioned processes and ideas. Finally, this paper shows how science fiction could possibly reflect reality – both through presenting thoughts of society and inspiring future technological advances and ideas (in this case, the quest for immortality). While humans are still far from achieving eternal life, the mentioned screen narratives portray the growing stream of ideas that deal with mind uploading in the age of the internet and social media.

Еnactivist Criticism of the Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Anastasia O. Shabalina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Science Methods ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
Critical Revision ◽  
Concept Of Information ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Person Experience

The article considers the main arguments against the neurobiological theory of consciousness from the point of view of the enactivist approach within the philosophy of mind. The neurobiological theory of consciousness, which reduces consciousness to neural activity, is currently the dominant approach to the mind-body problem. The neurobiological theory emerged as a result of advances in research on the phenomena of consciousness and through the development of technologies for visualizing the internal processes of mind. However, at the very heart of this theory, there is a number of logical contradictions. The non-reductive enactivist approach to consciousness, introduced in this article, contributes to the existing argumentation against the reduction of consciousness to neural processes with remonstrations that take into account the modern neuroscientific data. The article analyzes the argumentation of the sensorimotor enactivism developed by A. Noe and offers the account of the teleosemantic approach to the concept of information provided by R. Cao. The key problems of the neurobiological theory of consciousness are highlighted, and the objections emerging within the framework of the enactivist approach are analyzed. Since the main concepts on which the neural theory is based are the concepts of neural substrate, cognition as representation, and information as a unit of cognition, the author of the article presents three key enactivist ideas that oppose them. First, the enactivist concept of cognition as action allows us to consider the first-person experience as a mode of action, and not as a state of the brain substrate. Second, the article deals with the “explanatory externalism” argument proposed by Noe, who refutes the image of cognition as a representation in the brain. Finally, in order to critically revise the concept of information as a unit of cognition, the author analyzes Cao’s idea, which represents a teleosemantic approach, but is in line with the general enactivist argumentation. Cao shows that the application of the concept “information” to neural processes is problematic: no naturalized information is found in the brain as a physical substrate. A critical revision of beliefs associated with the neural theory of consciousness leads us to recognize that there are not enough grounds for reducing consciousness to processes that take place in the brain. That is why Noe calls expectations that the visualization of processes taking place in the brain with the help of the modern equipment will be able to depict the experience of consciousness the “new phrenology”, thus indicating the naive character of neural reduction. The article concludes that natural science methods are insufficient for the study of consciousness.

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