1

(Meta-Philosophy) Meta-Cognition and Critique of Doing Philosophizing

ABSTRACT
So far in my books and articles I have dealt with the following (I hope I do not
commit self-plagiarism by referring to my previous work and ideas expressed
therein! Lol):
My own discussions or philosophizing follow right at the end after the
numerous and very lengthy quotes from philosophers. The nature of the subject-
matter of philosophy, the methodology, methods, techniques and tools of doing
philosophy or philosophizing, the nature of the different steps or stages of the
process/es of theorizing, the fact that doing philosophy are some of the stages of
theorizing, the fact that philosophers lack meta-cognition and/or meta-reflection
of these things. If they had awareness of what and how they are doing
philosophy they might not become involved in quibbling over concepts and the
differentiations of these concepts. It is as if philosophers are blind to what they
are doing and have been doing for thousands of years, with the result that they
continue repeating the same thing arguing with words over the use of words
and in the process creating more and more isms. They are seemingly unable to
escape from such isms and their implications. Instead of getting or going
anywhere they way they conceive (of) problems and express their questions
they end up with conceiving of notions that cannot be solved or dissolved. They
enclose themselves in an insular world or bubble of their own making,
compared to sciences investigating humans and the different features and
systems of the human body who find irrelevant the problems that philosophers
have with things such as the brain, cognition, mind, consciousness, perception,
thinking, etc. Sciences deal with these things on many levels and multi-
dimensional while philosophers try to restrict them to a single level in one
dimension by their words and the way they use those words. Consequently they
lose sight of their objects and are unable to question them or express questions
about them in a meaningful manner.
In my articles and books on the subject-matter I dealt with the traditional
branches of philosophy and that with the differentiation of other disciplines and
discourses the discourse of philosophy lost subject-matter. I mentioned newer
areas of philosophy, such as X-Phi, Philosophys interdisciplinary
involvement in for example cognitive sciences, that there exists a philosophy of
every discipline possible (eg philosophy of science, art, music, sport, social
sciences, etc), that discourses such as Logic, Critical Thinking, Argumentation
and argument maps, Reasoning, etc are relevant to and employed by many if not
2

all disciplines and many discourses and are not uniquely subject-matter of the
discourse of philosophy and does not have to form part of or be taught as
subject-matter of philosophy.
I identified and discussed the methodology, methods, techniques and tools of
doing philosophy and some underlying or implicit transcendentals such as pre-
suppositions, suppositions and assumptions. I explore the nature of the different
features, aspects, characteristics, steps and stages of the processes of theorizing.
I showed that doing philosophy or philosophizing employ and/or consist of
some of these features, steps and stages of theorizing.
As I involuntary have (am), seemingly endless (a stream of consciousness like)
philosophically- (question or problem and insight) related intuitions, it is
difficult, painful and frustrating to me for that to be interrupted by social
interaction, talking to people, phones, executing all sorts of mundane activities,
etc. To understand or cope with this mental state is one of the reasons why I
need to explore meta-cognition or thinking about thinking, especially ones own
thinking and related activities.

1
These things, mentioned in the Abstract and following, are explored and
analysed by me in a number of books and articles form the collection of data,
brainstorming or brain dump of my theorizing about the nature, the purpose, the
aims, the subject-matter and the methods of philosophy and philosophizing.
I suggested that philosophizing should occur or is occurring on many levels,
along many continuums, are multi-dimensional and employs and requires
numerous perspectives, points of view, frameworks and frames of reference.
AND, that all these many-levelled, multi-dimensional contexts, perspectives
and frame of reference do occur implicitly and are tacitly assumed during and
by the doing of philosophy, but that they should be made explicit and must be
employed in an explicit manner. In other words philosophizing should not
consist of using concepts to develop a sentence or statements and to express a
proposition, and then another proposition, and another and so on. But that each
concept is and should be treated on many levels, in many dimensions,
perspectives, point of reference, contexts etc. I showed examples of what this
will appear like as diagrams.
Each multi-dimensional, many-levelled, etc concept will be connected in multi-
dimensional, many-levelled, etc ways to all of the other concepts that are used
3

to create a sentence or statement and express a proposition. Such a proposition

when employed say as a premise in philosophical reasoning and thinking will be
connected in a multi-dimensional, many-levelled, etc manner with the next
premise and the many-levelled, multi-dimensional etc conclusion will in turn be
connected to the premises in a many-levelled, multi-dimensional etc manner
with the premises. In this manner the entire reasoning should be constructed in a
many-levelled, multi-dimensional manner. Where words are unable to express
this, illustrations and diagrams, argument/ation maps, etc should be employed
so as to preserve, guarantee, express and depict all the many levels, dimensions,
contexts, perspectives, point and frames of reference etc.
This is the only meaningful manner in which multi-dimensional, many-levelled,
etc concepts and ideas employed by us, for example, consciousness, mind, truth,
a person, society, the world, the embodied person, intersubjectivity, embodied
consciousness, perception, thinking, thought, reasoning, etc can be depicted,
employed and dealt with. And, be interconnected in many-levelled and multi-
dimensional ways with other many-levelled, multi-dimensional, etc concepts.
2

http://ismbook.com/
http://ismbook.com/ismlist.html

It should be clear by now that I do not attempt to devise yet another

philosophical system, be it metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, meta-
metaphysical, meta-ontological, meta-epistemological, new realism, Hegelian,
Kantian, Marxism, etc. It is impossible to construct the final, all-inclusive, all-
explanatory and absolute philosophical system. Such a system would for
example have to include itself and it will always be historically, socially and
culturally relative. What I do is something much more simple and basic: I
explore the nature of philosophy, the philosophical discourse or intersubjective
socio-cultural practice or discipline. I do this by examining the subject-matter,
the methods, techniques and tools (or methodology) of the philosophical
discourse and a number of its assumptions, suppositions and pre-suppositions.
4

Notice in the different articles that I quote about a number of philosophical

problems and issues (for example the world, cognition, consciousness, mind,
intuition, the mind and body and their interrelationships) to what and extent
these things are caused by words and the use of words. It seems as if words and
their usage prevent philosophers from identifying and investigating problems
they wish to deal with? The words, ideas and concepts eventually refer to other
words, ideas and concepts, with the result that the subtle reasoning and sound
arguments and argumentation of philosophers go around in self-enclosed and
self-created circles and dead-ends, of more isms. Why is it that sciences,
poetry, novels visual and other arts can get hold of the subject-matter they wish
to deal with and according to the norms of their particular discourse must, might
and must not deal with? But philosophers, even if they are absolute realists and
hard naturalists cannot get hold, comprehend, perceive, identify and investigate
their subject-matter. Why is this the case? Perhaps the philosophical discourse
does not lend itself to deal with physical objects (including the human body, its
different organs such as the brain and the different systems constituting it) their
features, their nature and interrelationships? Philosophers might commence with
the good intention of describing and investigating physical things, what they
consist of and their interrelations but eventually they end with dealing with
ideas, concepts and words, and ideas, concepts and words about ideas, concepts
and words. If they have and create this problem when they wish to describe the
sense/es of fields of sense of the (more) physical things, how could they expect
to deal with less physical things such as ideas, society, the self, consciousness,
mind, etc. In the end all their investigations turn into dealing with an ism that
they create or adhere to and the implications of that ism and its consequences
for doing philosophy. And this in spite of the sound reasoning, valid arguments,
finely tuned argumentation and sophisticated, subtle logic they are schooled in
an employ.
http://ismbook.com/ismlist.html
Add your own to the never completed list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ism
-ism is a suffix in many English words, originally derived from the Ancient Greek
suffix - (-ismos), reaching English through the Latin -ismus, and the French
-isme.[1] It is often used in philosophy to define specific ideologies, and, as such,
at times it is used as a noun when referring to a broad range of ideologies in a
general sense.[2] The suffix 'ism' qua ism is neutral and therefore bears no
connotations associated with any of the many ideologies it has been appended
to; such determinations can only be informed by public opinion regarding specific
ideologies.
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Manifesto: A Century of Isms Mary Ann Caws

The first anthology of its kind, Manifesto features over two hundred artistic and cultural
manifestos from a wide range of countries. The manifesto, a public statement that sets forth
the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or "ism"?or that plays on the
idea of one?became in various modernisms acrucial and forceful vehicle for artists, writers,
and other intellectuals to express their ideas about the direction of aesthetics and society.

Included in this collection are texts ranging from Kurt Schwitters's Cow Manifesto to those
written in the name of well-known movements?imagism, cubism, surrealism, symbolism,
vorticism, projectivism?and less well-known ones?lettrism, acmeism, concretism, rayonism.
Also covered are expressionist, Dada, and futurist movements from French, Italian, Russian,
Spanish, and Latin American perspectives, as well as local movements, such as Brazilian
hallucinism.

http://phrontistery.info/isms.html
Early 17th century; earliest use found in Thomas Tomkis (b. c1580), playwright.
From post-classical Latin phrontisterium and its etymon ancient Greek
a thinking-shop, a term applied by Aristophanes in ridicule to
the school of Socrates from + -, suffix forming nouns.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/phrontisterion

Here are 234 different isms, each representing a philosophical, political or moral
doctrine or a belief system. In selecting terms for the list, I have deliberately
avoided any word which apply ism to a personal name, so that Marxism
(Platonism, etc ?)doesn't count although it is otherwise an ideal candidate for the
list. I also excluded isms which do not refer to a specific belief system, such as
impressionism (an artistic movement) or alcoholism (a disease). Despite these
omissions, enough remain to leave an ism in every pot, including beliefs about
proper government, God, and the nature of existence itself. Of the terms on the
list that are of a religious nature, most are Christian, which is not unexpected,
but I'm open to adding isms from other world religions.
List of philosophies
Glossary of philosophy
List of political ideologies
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year-2015/-ism
-ism
A suffix is the Word of the Year because a small group of words that share this three-letter
ending triggered both high volume and significant year-over-year increase in lookups at
Merriam-Webster.com. Taken together, these seven words represent millions of individual
dictionary lookups.

Read on to find more about each of these words, and the events that triggered them, as well as
five other words that sent us to the dictionary in 2015.
6

The suffix -ism goes all the way back to Ancient Greek, and was used in
Latin and medieval French on its way to English. Originally, it turned a verb
into a noun: think of baptize and baptism, criticize and criticism, or
plagiarize and plagiarism. It has since

-ism

A suffix is the Word of the Year because a small group of words that share this three-letter
ending triggered both high volume and significant year-over-year increase in lookups at
Merriam-Webster.com. Taken together, these seven words represent millions of individual
dictionary lookups.

Read on to find more about each of these words, and the events that triggered them, as well as
five other words that sent us to the dictionary in 2015.

The suffix -ism goes all the way back to Ancient Greek, and was used in Latin and medieval
French on its way to English. Originally, it turned a verb into a noun: think of baptize and
baptism, criticize and criticism, or plagiarize and plagiarism. It has since acquired many
other uses, including identifying a religion or practice (Calvinism, vegetarianism), a prejudice
based on a specific quality (sexism, ageism), an adherence to a system (stoicism, altruism), a
condition based on excess of something (alcoholism), or a characteristic feature or trait
(colloquialism).

Ism is also sometimes a noun meaning a distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory or an

oppressive and especially discriminatory attitude or belief. Its usually used to emphasize a
group of -ism words, as in cubism, abstract expressionism, and all the other isms.

There are 2733 English words ending in -ism entered in Merriam-Websters Unabridged
dictionary. The top seven isms account for millions of lookups in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies

https://www.amazon.com/Economist-Book-isms-Abolitionism-
Zoroastrianism/dp/1846682983

John Andrews
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"Isms" help to inform us, educate us and sometimes even amuse us. What would
life be like without altrusim or cynicism, dogmatism or optimism? Below are just
some of the "isms" explained in this collection of more than 400.

A few philosophers are aware of the problem of creating, unintentionally or

intentionally, such so-called metaphysical systems. Strawson distinguished
between such (viewed as something unacceptable and negative) speculative,
traditional, metaphysical systems and his own (seen in a positive light) not
speculative but merely descriptive metaphysics. Gabriel (New Realism) is of
the opinion that metaphysics is wrong, meaningless and unacceptable. He see
the major cause of such unacceptable philosophical activity as the belief in
some ground, an absolute ground or grounding principle, assumption or pre-
supposition. In his view it is usually or most of the time the result of believing
that there is something like the world (his definition thereof, something like
and oceanic belief). He rejects as meaningless or rather as non-existing the
nature of such a thing, a being, an entity or absolute, all-inclusive field of
sense (because it would have to include itself and that is meaningless and
logically impossible, inconsistent and contradictory). He sees what he is doing
as perhaps meta-metaphysics or rather (meta) ontology and not metaphysics.
Regardless of the ways in which he attempts to avoid the manufacturing of yet
another metaphysical system (and philosophical ism), we are provided with
that kind of construction. His NR has quickly become popular in many
countries and especially in certain Continental countries and at a number of
universities. We also find his followers present on Facebook where his New
Realism has already been turned into yet another ism, a dogma and an
ideology. We find there the usual disciples of dogmas, rejecting all other
philosophical systems, ideas and isms. This is defended by quoting and setting
out principles and basic ideas and arguments for and with such ideas and the
employment of logic, especially informal logic. We will notice there a claim that
philosophy IS logic or philosophers are logicians. As usual the saviour or
messenger would most likely reject the misinterpretations of his thoughts by his
disciples and he himself expresses quite humble opinions and assessments of his
own ideas and the system they constitute.
But let Gabriel speaks for himself in pointing out the restrictions of traditional
metaphysical thinking and systems and his new (meta)ontology that escapes the
mistaken ideas, principles and assumptions of those systems. We find this in the
Introduction to his Fields of Sense, especially from pages 23 to the end. He
employs Schelling, that he values greatly, especially his Freedom Essay, and
also Leibniz, to assist him in saying that his work are merely approximations,
incomplete, etc (my words) and that each philosophical train of thought is and
8

remains only path through the indefinite jungle of possibilities (If only his
disciples would take of these thoughts of his).The era of world-pictures is
governed by harmful habits of thinking that we need to overcomedogmatism
and blindness.
He has this to say in an interview with Graham Harman. Graham
Harman interviews Markus Gabriel - Edinburgh University ...

https://euppublishingblog.com/2016/09/.../graham-harman-interviews-markus-gabriel...
Sep 23, 2016 - Graham Harman, Speculative Realism series editor, interviews Markus
Gabriel, author of Fields of Sense and Why the World Does Not Exist.

Fields of Sense puts up a scaffolding for reframing many central questions in philosophy. It
denies
the major assumption which has haunted metaphysics since its inception: namely, the
question how
everything there is can be part of a single, overall, unified whole. If I am right that it is
possible to forgo
that assumption, we have very good reasons to take a fresh look at old paradoxes and
apparent riddles.
Right now, I am working on defending some ideas that are associated with the ontology of
Fields of
Sense. In particular, I am working out which metametaphysical/metaontological views are
compatible
with my view and which one might be the view about what exactly we are doing when
engaged in
ontological theory construction. In this context, I am spelling out the consequences of the
ontology for
recent debates about deflationary ontologies and their respective metaontology.
Another project on which I will be working for a while turns on the notion of a fiction. Some
philosophers have objected to my ontology on the ground that they take it to conflict with the
notion
that there is a metaphysical contrast between fiction and reality, or rather between fiction and
existence.
Against this background, I intend to work out how to be a realist in regions of thought and
discourse
that have invited fictionalist treatments (including, of course, fiction in the sense of a mode of
artistic
presentation, but also fiction in the realm of the social and in the philosophy of mind). Given
that I reject
the Nietzschean motivations for the kinds of fictionalism that are prominent today in various
biotopes of
philosophical thinking, I am interested in revisiting the conceptual links between fiction and
imagination
and their connection to the human mind insofar as it is embedded in social contexts.
In a word, after laying the groundwork for ontology/metaontology, the next logical step is to
take a fresh look at subjectivity, one that does not rely on the notion that the subject is an
exception
9

or something that overthrows an otherwise subject-less overall order etc., as these

metaphysical motivations are premised on world-views which I have rejected in Fields of
Sense. This involves
rethinking our concepts of various kinds of failed subjectivities tied to notions such as
ideology,
hallucination, fiction, madness, illusion and so on. Contemporary epistemology
overemphasizes the
role of success concepts (knowledge, justification, intuition) for our understanding of our
subjective
standing with respect to what there is. Against this, there is the age-old suspicion (clearly
articulated
in Plato, the founder of epistemology) that it is much harder to grasp the even more elusive
epistemic subjectivity than to give an account of the conceptual structure of its successes.

Is it really only because of the faulty WORLD views, according to Gabriel, that
(traditional and I suppose the modern and contemporary) metaphysical systems
have been developed, especially THE mistaken notion of THE world? Is this
the only and real reason why metaphysical systems have been manufactured?
Gabriel attempts to escape the doing of metaphysics or the creating of yet
another metaphysical system by rejecting HIS one notion of THE world and
by not doing metaphysics (or metaphysical system fabrication) and by doing
something else, not metaphysics, but meta-metaphysics and (meta)Ontology.
But, if we were to look more closely at the nature of his own system of ideas we
will find all the usual characteristics of doing metaphysics (that he rejects) and
employing the habitual methods, tools, techniques, informal logic, arguments
and argumentation of traditional metaphysics (or the doing of it) that he rejects
and criticizes. I am not particularly interested in Gabriel or his new system or
ism, but merely employs him as just another example of philosophizing or the
doing of philosophy. One word employed by him that I do appreciate as it
shows meta-cognition concerning theorizing, we hope (or perhaps it is not an
indication of meta-cognition? And that he is not fully aware of the implications
of what he was saying), is where he employs the notions of ontological theory
construction. Hopefully he did not merely employ the word theory and
construction of theories, but he is aware that doing philosophy is being involved
in certain aspects and contexts of one or more steps and stages of the process/es
of theorizing?
3
We can place the work of Gabriel in the context of so-called
Continental Philosophy. Here is an article about the TWENTY
TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY by Terence Blake ...
10

https://terenceblake.files.wordpress.com/.../twenty-traits-of-continental-
philosophy.pd...
TWENTY TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY by Terence Blake.
FOREWORD: ZIZEK FOR CHOMSKIES. What are the characteristic
features of ...
1)creation of concepts: one cannot set out from familiar ideas,
concepts must be constructed (fabricated and manufactured artificially? So
Ordinary Language Philosophy is not considered? This is a poetic licence for all
sorts of speculation and doing things with self-fabricated notions.) to give us
new perspectives.
2)conceptual characters: concepts are not just given in
abstract definitions, they are embedded in figures that give
intuitive and imaginative content (and contexts?) to what could otherwise
remain
an empty verbalism.
3)analogical resonance (almost an attempt of the use of metaphors in theory
construction and theorizing, as suggested by Weick) and transversal
application: concepts
are not limited to one domain but are constructed to show up
features occurring in a diversity of domains.
4)reflexivity: the commitment to immanence implies that the
Continental Philosopher is not outside and judging the field of
application of his concepts, he is himself subsumed under them (whatever this is
intended to mean? Hopefully the Continental Philosopher could include self- or
meta-cognition in this immanent, self-inclusion or reflection?).
5)pulsation between concept and image: This imagistic style (?) is
a way of pluralising the applicability of the concept without
giving it universal scope.(Whatever this is meant to mean?)
6)beginning in the middle: positioning oneself (mentally, embodied subject
and/or as intersubject, socially, culturally, etc?) at the outset
inside the conceptual world that one is arguing for, in medias
res. (Yeah, well)
7)incommensurability: Continental philosophy takes the
existence of incommensurable breaks (!) as a banal and ultimately
positive (!) feature of differences (Derridas differenceee?) in understanding.
8)typological thinking: one assembles (how? What does this mean?) a sort of
composite image (is this a new manufactured concept?)
of a particular mode of thinking (not employing the usual informal logical and
arguments of philosopshy? What precisely is the nature of this particular mode
of thinking?) that one wishes to consider.
9)cognitive posture:(?) Continental Philosophy explores, and
proposes, (fabricated) background rules and conditions for the conduct of
11

10)hermeneutic pluralism: (?) Continental Philosophy supposes not

just a plurality of interpretations, but of regimes of truth (? Or meaning?) and
of modes of existence (?).
11)deconstruction: any question or comment comes with a set
background presuppositions which must be made conscious, examined,
and transformed, before responding. (making ones implicit assumptions and
pre-suppositions now becomes DECONSTRUCTION)
12)problematics: deconstructing the question already includes
constructing the subjacent problematic (?) of the view one is
responding too.
13)postmodernism: scepticism (these positions have been criticized heavily
and most philosophers try to distance themselves from them and move beyond
them) at totalising narratives, unified subjects and the regulative ideal of
convergence of the plurality of perspectives (?) towards a monist (so it is
against monism and for dualism, pluralism, etc?) aim.
14)alterity: Continental philosophy has a place for and
embraces an Other (?) that is not on the same model as me, (?) whose basic
principles and postures (?) are different (meaning?)
15)pluralist dialectics: Continental philosophy takes from
dialectics the plurality of figures of consciousness and modes of
being, (?) and also the treatment of concepts as ambiguous, fluid, and
in movement. (meaning?)
16)transformations of the subject: Continental philosophy does
not think in terms of a constituted subject, but of a subject that
is constructed and can be transformed. (by oneself? And how? And what does
this mean?)
17)anti-essentialism: Continental philosophy rejects the
principles of meaning invariance and of stable essences. (?)
18)conceptual ascent and 19)existential descent: a Continental
philosopher will often move from a familiar concrete situation to
new and very abstract concepts, (self-fabricated notions to serve his purpose and
argument or reasoning or hide and cover the lack thereof) and then apply them
in a concrete
way.
20)semiotic turn: French philosophy during the 20th Century
went through a semiotic turn, (another use of the fashionable word TURN,
everything is TURN, a mechanism for making ones own not argued for
position , thinking and reasoning appear valid, by the fabrication of new ways
of thinking, new paradigms and other self-fabrications) ). leading to an
emphasis on the epistemological and ontological import (?) of language and
style.
12

More from the same author

https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/

More on Continental Philosophy

http://dailynous.com/2014/09/06/what-is-continental-philosophy/

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/contanalytic.html
A useful place to begin thinking about the issue is Brian Leiter's statement of the distinction
between "Continental" and "analytic" philosophy. (It is an attempt to be balanced in stating
the distinction and is meant to help prospective graduate students understand where they fit in
the profession.) The first thing to notice is that Leiter characterizes "analytic" philosophy in
terms of its stylistic aspirations.

So, Leiter's analysis implies that the distinction between "Continental" and "analytic"
philosophy is primarily stylistic. What are those stylistic distinctions?

Some Thoughts About "Continental" and "Analytic"

Philosophy
William Blattner
Professor of Philosophy
Georgetown University

A useful place to begin thinking about the issue is Brian Leiter's statement of the distinction
between "Continental" and "analytic" philosophy. (It is an attempt to be balanced in stating
the distinction and is meant to help prospective graduate students understand where they fit in
the profession.) The first thing to notice is that Leiter characterizes "analytic" philosophy in
terms of its stylistic aspirations: "Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for
argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify,
professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with
the humanities." In contrast, he characterizes "Continental philosophy" by its relation to a
series of authors from the philosophical tradition. He concludes, "'Continental philosophy' is
more aptly characterized as a series of partly overlapping traditions in philosophy, some of
whose figures have almost nothing in common with other[s]." Now, this is odd. If the figures
constitutive of "Continental philosophy" have almost nothing in common, then how does it
make sense to lump them together under a single term? (Note, as Leiter himself points out,
the nominal geographical reference of the term is misleading as well.)1 The only rationale
would be, I think, that despite all their differences, what they precisely do not share are the
stylistic ambitions Leiter identifies with "analytic" philosophy.

So, Leiter's analysis implies that the distinction between "Continental" and "analytic"
philosophy is primarily stylistic. What are those stylistic distinctions?

1. Drawing freely on the tools of logic.

There are several problems with this putative distinguishing mark. First, Husserl is, by
the characterization in question, an "analytic" philosopher. Among his primary
13

concerns was the autonomy of logic and mathematics from psychology, and he
certainly did draw freely on the tools of logic.

Second, whether one can be said to draw freely on the tools of logic depends to some
extent on what one means by "logic." As has been oft noted by scholars, what
academic philosophers mean by "logic" today is symbolic mathematical logic. This
sort of logic did not emerge until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with
Frege, Russell, and Whitehead (who, despite being a Briton1a and a co-author with
Russell of the Principia Mathematica, is generally classified as closer to
"Continental" philosophy than "analytic" and is usually only taught in self-identified
"Continental" philosophy departments). Before Frege "logic" referred to the theory of
the grammatical and inferential structure of judgment and its components (terms) and
implications (inference). Although one might doubt the value of his logical
innovations, Hegel certainly did draw freely on the tools of logic in this broader sense.

Third, a great many presumptively "analytic" philosophers who write in ethics,

philosophy in and of literature, social and political philosophy, and many other
subspecialties within the discipline do not draw freely on logic in either sense. It is
primarily in so-called core analytic philosophy that one draws freely on the tools of
logic in either sense. ("Core analytic philosophy" is roughly metaphysics and
epistemology in the style of self-identified "analytic" philosophy.)

2. Cross-disciplinary professional identification.

A great many scholars presumptively designated as "analytic philosophers" identify

more closely with the humanities than with the natural sciences and mathematics, esp.
those writing on moral philosophy. So, this proposed distinction does not get us very
far.

3. Argumentative clarity and precision.

What is it to aim for argumentative clarity and precision? If argumentative clarity and
precision is constituted by "regimenting" arguments into a form that can be analyzed
by standard symbolic logic, for example, then it is true that scholars who write on the
authors Leiter identifies with "Continental philosophy" tend not to do that. A large
number of scholars who might presumptively be called "analytic philosophers" don't
do that either, however.

There are, of course, standards of argumentative clarity and precision other than a
propensity to regiment arguments. It would be a large and difficult topic to try to
specify what counts as argumentative clarity and precision. We can say something
about it, though: defining technical terminology when it's introduced; writing in
language that is more likely to be accessible to an educated outsider; clearly
identifying assumptions; considering challenges to one's argumentative moves. It's
important to note that these are not stylistic conventions of "analytic" philosophy, but
rather of good philosophy (as opposed to bad).2 There are presumptively "analytic"
philosophers who do not satisfy these standards, as Leiter himself laments in his
write-up, and there are presumptively "Continental" philosophers who do satisfy them
14

and not just scholars trained in "analytic" departments but writing on "Continental"
figures. Just to pick two names, consider John Drummond and David Carr.3

4. Historical v systematic.

One presumptively "Continental" scholar whom I admire once said to me, "I find it
difficult to think without my historical topcoat." Does a scholar incline towards
thinking through an issue in the context of an historical text or author, or rather to
attack the problem head-on in the terms in which he or she has been trained without
reference to historical benchmarks? Leiter does not mention it, but it is true that
scholars typically classified as "Continental" philosophers tend to be historical, rather
than systematic, in this sense.4 There are quite a few "analytic" philosophers who are
historical in this sense as well, however. While I was a doctoral student at the
University of Pittsburgh it was strongly historical, partly due to the influence of
Wilfrid Sellars, as are some, but not all, of the leading programs in "analytic"
philosophy today. What's more, one finds systematic thinking whose value is
compromised by ignorance of the history of philosophy in both "Continental" and
"analytic" authors.

None of these distinctions really works to sort "Continental" from "analytic" philosophy. So,
what are we left with? Is there no distinction between "Continental" and "analytic"
philosophy at all? To claim that the distinction is entirely an illusion would be obtuse. The
distinction seems, rather, to be based on historical sociological divisions within the
profession. Let me offer some incomplete, but I hope not uninformative, comments on the
history of the "Continental-analytic" divide in 20th century philosophy. I do not pretend that
these comments convey anything like a complete picture. For one thing, they do not really
explain the relative positions within the discipline of American pragmatism and
Marxism/Critical Theory, neither of which really comfortably fit into a world divided
between "Continental" and "analytic" philosophy.

At least two patterns of division within philosophy converged to create the particularly
hostile brew out of which the "Continental-analytic" divide emerged. First, some of the
seminal figures in "early analytic philosophy" (such as Bertrand Russell) were reacting
against the idealist thinkers regnant in Britain in the late 19th century, such as Bradley and
Green, whose thought was in turn derivative of Hegel's. (Interestingly, in the USA the
reaction against idealism also produced pragmatism, as with James and Dewey.)

Second, in his 1929 Inaugural lecture, "What is Metaphysics?"5 Heidegger urged that we
break "the dominion of logic" in philosophy and turned his philosophical energies in a new
direction, reminiscent more of 19th century romanticism than Husserl or Kant. Heidegger had
reasons and arguments for his thesis about logic; he did not just reject logic in the name of
unbridled irrationalism. (Very roughly, he argued that cognition and the propositional and
theoretical content it can carry are grounded in precognitive practice, which implied, he
argued, that this practice is not subject to logical regulation.)6 All of this set Heidegger at
odds not only with his mentor, Husserl, but also with Cassirer and the neo-Kantians (who
were, among other things rivals for academic supremacy within Germany), the Vienna Circle
and the logical positivists, and early analytic philosophy, all of whom had put logic and
15

mathematics at the center of their thinking. In so far as Heidegger had become the dominant
presence within phenomenology, he pulled Husserl and phenomenology into his orbit, which
was now defined over against neo-Kantianism, positivism, and (implicitly) early analytic
philosophy. Heidegger's influence was very broad within 20th century European thought. It is
difficult to understand either Foucault or Derrida, for example, without some background in
Heidegger. Similarly, even though he consistently denied that he was an existentialist,
Heidegger deeply influenced existentialist thought in the 20th century, for example, Sartre.

When the reaction against Heidegger and those influenced by him and is fused with the
rejection of 19th century idealism and the thought deeply influenced by it (including Critical
Theory), we have the fundamental contours of the mid-century "Continental-analytic divide."

These philosophical divisions interacted with cultural and political battles, which deepened
and hardened the "Continental-analytic divide." Heidegger collaborated with National
Socialism and used the prestige and some of the vocabulary of his philosophical thought to
support Hitler and his murderous regime. This created a deserved antipathy to Heidegger, one
shared not only by neo-Kantians and positivists, but also other refugees from Hitler's
Germany who would otherwise likely have been involved in vigorous debate with him:
Marxists and Critical Theorists (such as Adorno) and liberals (such as Jaspers). Heidegger's
use of his philosophical language to support National Socialism and the difficulty of
disentangling Heidegger from his thought, given its visionary quality after 1929,
superimposed moral and political battles on philosophical debates.7

Further, Roman Catholic universities in the USA were deeply engaged with Heidegger and
other authors identified with "Continental" philosophy, and thus philosophy departments in
those universities were often home to "Continental" philosophy. This was true of Boston
College, Villanova, Fordham, Georgetown, and others. Perhaps this has to do mostly with
Catholicism's intrinsic connection with Rome and Europe. Perhaps David Hollinger's analysis
is correct: that the rhetoric of scientificity and the identification of scholarship with
mathematics and the natural sciences was used as a tool in the mid-20th-century Kulturkampf
waged by a newly empowered middle-class, multi-ethnic, and mutli-religious academic
vanguard against the traditional assumptions of the American academy about the relations
among religion, morality, higher education, and scholarship. After the old-line Protestant
universities (such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) were won over to the new wave, Roman
Catholic universities continued to resist the disengagement between religion, morals, and the
mission of the undergraduate college.8 In so far as "Continental" philosophy was perceived or
represented as being "anti-scientific," it became a natural center of gravity for academics
resisting the emerging new paradigm of the university. Whatever the correct sociological
account of this association between Roman Catholic higher education in the US and
"Continental" philosophy, one may be sure that whenever one mixes religion and politics,
even academic politics, unpredictable and irrational results emerge.8a

The net effect of all this was to create a deep division within academic philosophy. This
manifests itself primarily in terms of which historical authors a scholar reads and refers to.
There is a list of historical authors typically associated with "Continental" philosophy,
including: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, and others. These authors have nothing
16

in common methodologically, sytlistically, or doctrinally. There is no reason to regard them as

belonging to some identifiable philosophical type.

As the sociological and academic-political divide between "Continental" and "analytic"

philosophy hardened, students and scholars attracted to one side or the other of the divide
stopped reading the work of those on the other side. If we ignore the sociological and
political factors discussed above, it is impossible to understand why that should be so. After
all, the so-called Continental-analytic divide is neither doctrinal nor methodological.
Consider the following observations:

The association of phenomenology in general and Husserl in particular

with Heidegger actually requires overlooking the doctrinal content of
Husserl's thought. It is also deeply controversial to what extent, if any,
Heidegger and Husserl share a method, despite Heidegger having
appropriated Husserl's term "phenomenology."

The intellectual disputes among Heideggerians, Hegelians, and Critical

Theorists are ferocious and are waged across significant doctrinal and
methodological gulfs. (One of the more vivid memories from my
undergraduate years at Berkeley was sitting in a large lecture hall, filled
with over one hundred students, listening to Charles Taylor lecture on
Hegel. The room was filled with Marxists and Critical Theorists, whom
Taylor of course baited with repeated explanations of why Hegel's
understanding of community was superior to Marx's. The debates were
lively, shall we say!)

Think of the methodological diversity within "analytic" philosophy between

those who want to naturalize epistemology and those who want to develop
a conceptual analysis of "S knows that p."

Think of the stylistic diversity between Sellars and Quine, or

David Lewis and John McDowell.

Think of the doctrinal diversity across the spectrum of presumpitvely

analytic philosophy, e.g. between those who defend revelation as a basic
epistemic state and those who argue that only natural science can make a
plausible claim on objective knowledge of reality; between (political)
libertarians, liberals, and Marxists; and between "analytic" feminist
epistemologists and those who deny that there can be gendered ways of
knowing.

There are significant commonalities between the phenomenological

conclusions of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty about preconceputal content
and some contemporary presumptively "analytic" authors. 9

Therefore, the so-called Continental-analytic division within philosophy is not a

philosophical distinction; it's a sociological one. It is the product of historical accident.
It is unreasonable to cleave to it, and the insistence on remaining closed to work that is
either presumptively "analytic" or presumptively "Continental" is irrational and
unphilosophical. Further, rejecting or refusing to consider positions one has not studied and
17

consequently does not understand is not a philosophical stance. It is, if anything, the very
antithesis of the philosophical attitude. In light of this conclusion, I prefer to the extent
possible not to use the terms "Continental philosophy" and "analytic philosophy." They
perpetuate the divisions of the past, divisions that it behooves us to overcome.

Over the past thirty years there has been movement towards cross-fertilization. Among the
trends driving this cross-fertilization have been the following. There has been a revival of
interest in Hegel, to a significant degree due to the liberalism-communitarianism debate and
Charles Taylor's influence on it. Hubert Dreyfus has used Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
others to intervene in the philosophical reception of artificial intelligence research. A search
for ways out of the perceived dead-ends in regnant philosophical research programs in
mainstream "analytic" philosophy led some reared in "analytic" philosophy to turn to
"Continental" authors for inspiration and new ideas. Richard Rorty is one of the most
celebrated (and controversial) examples of this, but others have opened themselves to ideas
once thought to be negligible by denizens of mainstream philosophy departments.10 Finally, a
revival of interest in pragmatism (particularly, Peirce, James, Dewey, and the legal and
political applications of pragmatism) has opened mainstream philosophy departments to a
stream of thought that cannot be coherently placed in a world divided between "Continental"
and "analytic" philosophy. This has a tendency to undercut the obviousness of the division
itself.

This cross-fertilization and rapprochement is still only partial and halting. It is my hope that
it will flourish and that in ten or fifteen years, say, we will treat the distinction between so-
called Continental and so-called analytic philosophy as an historical artifact. This hope
is not, I would like to urge, merely a personal preference. It is a hope for the widespread
diffusion of the philosophical attitudes of open-mindedness, the suspension of judgment until
arguments and evidence have been considered, and hospitality towards those bearing
alternative perspectives, ideas, and arguments. Specifically, it is a hope that these
philosophical attitudes will be applied across the received sociological divisions within the
profession, divisions that are no longer either doctrinally or methodologically motivated.*

Notes
1
There were many active Hegelians in Britain (Green and Bradley, for example) and the USA
(the St. Louis Hegelians, to whom Dewey was philosophically close before he "converted" to
pragmatism). There were notable "analytic" or proto-"analytic" philosophers on the European
Continent, such as Frege. Further, there is a large group of self-identified "Continental"
philosophers in the USA and Britain today, and Germany, for one, has seen the emergence of
a large number of academic philosophers who identify more with "analytic" philosophy than
their own autochthonous tradition.

1a
Thanks to Taylor Carman for correcting my erroneous identification of Whitehead as an
American!

2
Of course, we make allowances for the great philosophers of the past who struggled with
clarity while trying to make revolutionary moves and probing deep and complex questions. It
18

would be foolish to refuse to read Spinoza or Kant because they sometimes failed to achieve
such clarity. Such allowances, however, do not obviously carry over to philosophers writing
today or to expositors of Spinoza and Kant. It's hard to know how to balance the murkiness
and unclarity that usually attend thinking about deep and complex issues with the imperative
of clarity. It is true that those trained in self-identified "analytic" graduate programs often (but
not always) err in such situations on the side of clarity, while those trained in presumptively
"Continental" programs often (but not always) err in the other direction. Striking a working
balance is very difficult and only the best scholars among us achieve that.

3
I could have mentioned my colleagues Terry Pinkard and John Brough, but prefer to avoid
the appearance of a party interest (although I may just have given such appearance, albeit by
apophasis).

4
When this penchant for historical thinking meets the murkiness of some of the texts of the
tradition (see footnote 2 above), the allowance for less clarity bleeds from the historical
authors and scholarship directly on them into more systematic philosophizing. This is a
dangerous tendeny that must be controlled vigilantly, while not crushing creativity and the
desire to explore issues and ways of thought inspired by the tradition.

5
Translated in Pathmarks (Cambridge), ed. by William McNeil.

6
Although I don't agree with all of the details of his exposition, esp. of Heidegger, Michael
Friedman offers an insightful examination of the philosophical and historical issues here in A
Parting of the Ways (Open Court, 2000). I have myself devoted considerable attention to this
aspect of Heidegger's thinking. I should note here that it is far from clear that Heidegger's
arguments for "breaking the dominion of logic" are compelling. (Many will view this as an
understatement, to say the least!) Even if we grant Heidegger's thesis that cognitive
understanding is derivative of the practical intelligibility embodied in engaged action, it does
not obviously follow that philosophical reflection is not subject to logical regulation. Further
assumptions are required in order to reach that conclusion, assumptions that concern the
proper topics of philosophical reflection and the proper approaches to them. (Very roughly
again, Heidegger argued that philosophy was solely concerned with ontology, an account of
being, and that this ontology must be developed through a phenomenology of the temporal
form of practical intelligibility.)

7
It is worth noting that Heidegger was not alone in his collaboration with National Socialism.
See Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis (Harvard, 1993). Whether Heidegger's politics are related
to his philosophical thought is deeply controversial. The most plausible approach to this issue
that I have seen is in Iain Thomson's Heidegger on Ontotheology (Cambridge, 2005).

8
See David A. Hollinger, "Science as a Weapon in Kulturkmpfe in the United States during
and after World War II," Isis 86 (1995). Now that the dust has settled on these battles in the
US we can more clearly see an enduring transformation: the problematizing of undergraduate
education's traditional role of leading students to reflection on the purpose of their lives (if
any) and the contours of the good life. The professoriat no longer feels that it has the social
status, intellectual stature, or calling to guide students in such reflection. One might argue that
this is a good thing, if one thinks that such aspirations are inherently arrogant and bound to be
19

burdened by the assumptions of one's class, race, gender, or ethnicity. One might also argue
that we threw the baby out with the bathwater. (For an example of the latter, see Anthony
Kronman, Education's End (Yale, 2008).) Thanks to Joe Rouse for drawing my attention to
Hollinger's fascinating work.

8a
As Nietzsche comments, " the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its
actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart " (Genealogy of
Morals, Second Essay, 12, p. 77 in the Vintage ed., translated by Walter Kaufmann).
"Continental" philosophy was once seen as a bulwark against the secularization and de-
moralizing of the American academy, but has now become a hotbed of multiculturalism.

9
See the work of Sean Kelly for some of these connections.

10
I should make clear that I am not asserting that those research programs did in fact hit
dead-ends, nor am I endorsing communitarianism, Rorty's views, or Dreyfus's critique of
artificial intelligence, at least for the purposes of this discussion. I am merely pointing to the
cross-fertilization that took place.

*
I should thank a number of colleagues and students who provided feedback on earlier
versions of this webpage that led to changes: Joe Rouse, Mark Lance, Terry Pinkard, James
Olsen, Oren Magid, Andy Blitzer, and Taylor Carman. The presence of their names here does
not in any way imply that they endorse this webpage.

In the same vein we find things such as these - Eleven Reasons Why Philosophy is
Important
by James Wallace Gray 2011-2012 note: I have written a newer essay on the importance of
philosophy, which can be found here.
The fact that many people are either unimpressed with philosophy or don't know
about it was discussed in more detail in The Marginalization of Philosophy.
Conclusion
This list pretty much sums up of why I am so interested in continuing to learn
about philosophy and attempt to be a philosophical person. Additionally, it also
describes why I think we should promote the philosophy campaign, strive for a
philosophical community, and make philosophy education a requirement in high
school and college. Eleven Reasons Why Philosophy is Important - Ethical
Realism

https://ethicalrealism.files.wordpress.com/.../11-reasons-philosophy-is-important.pdf
Jan 18, 2011 - I will (1) discuss 11 reasons why I think philosophy is important, (2) provide ...
Perhaps the most obvious reason that philosophy benefits is is ...

http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/
http://www.whystudyphilosophy.com/
20

https://stepbackstepforward.com/category/philosophy/

Empiricism part 2, or: Philosophy as

infrastructure design
Posted on May 13, 2015 | 1 Comment

So far, all the philosophical posts in this blog have had the same goal: to
counteract philosophical ideas that are already in circulation. For example, the
post on compatibilism was a counter to incompatibilists like Sam Harris:

You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is
that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the
human brain.

Harris is a neuroscientist, so I trust what he says about the human brain; but
when he tells us what cannot be reconciled with what, then he is doing
21

philosophy, just as much as we compatibilists are doing philosophy when we

say the opposite.

5
There are at least two ways of how and why a writer refers to other writers the
one perhaps more positive point is to illustrate a point one is trying to make by,
hopefully, giving it greater clarity by referring to the ideas of another writer.
Another, perhaps more negative reason for referring to another writer, an ism,
idea, theory, a discipline, for example logic or mathematics or physics (or ideas
from a discipline), etc, or employing that individual, -isms, ideas, etc is to use it
as an authority (appeal to an alleged authority) to make what one wishes to
express appear valid and/or meaningful.

6
Another distinction I wish to make is between Original and Creative-thinking
philosophers (the tradition of philosophical ideas consists of the names of these
individuals) vs academic, professional thinkers (they will be writing books and
articles in peer reviewed journals, because it is expected of their job description
as academic professionals, according to Gabriel, few people read such articles
and only read them so as to criticize them in other articles, in other words they
are read to provide someone with philosophical subject-matter).
I wish to suggest a few continuums on which many philosophers, philosophical
thoughts and ideas, publications and insights can be situated
Concepts, terms and words being used
One Pole Other pole

More to the middle

Innovative, speculative Mostly ordinary technical terms
concepts and ideas language often from sciences,
logic and mathematics
Terence Blake gave descriptions of
This time of concept innovation and
usage in his article on continental
philosophy.
22

One Pole Other pole

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Styles and subject-matter that are more More Logic, Sciences and
----- maths related
literature, humanities , arts related
and associated with fiction, novellas,
prose and poetry.

More to the middle

Traditional, metaphysical philosophy
Eg Plato, Kant, Descartes

One Pole Methodology (methods, techniques, tools) the other pole

More speculative use arguments, argumentation attempts at greater clarity, using

clear arguments, informal and
formal and symbolic logic.

Human awareness, thinking, perception, memory and other cognitive processes

or functions are selective. In other words we do not think of everything at the
same time, our memory does not simultaneously include everything that could
be remembered, we do not perceive (taste, see, hear, feel..) everything at the
same time.
This awareness employs all sorts of tools to be selective when we think,
remember, perceive, etc. The range of these tools and their quality, quantity,
depth, specialization, etc can and do vary because of a number of factors, age of
the individual, culture, socio-economic class, in/ formal and education,
upbringing, intelligence, interests etc. A botanist, zoologist, biologist, artist,
geologist, physicist, other disciplines will vary in how and what they perceive
and think about when they stand at the same time in the same rural landscape.
These are merely a few of many factors that might play a role in these selective
23

cognition of individuals in that or any other situation. Such factors are not only
positive ones that enable greater quality and quantity in cognition, but also
include negative ones such as cognitive bias of different kinds.
These things, features, characteristics and aspects of cognition operate not only
in everyday, general discourse and common sense thinking, but also in
specialized cognition of disciplines and discourses, for example philosophy.
Differentiated kinds of cognition types, attitudes, beliefs, intellectual
development, more or less open-minded thinking, personality types and other
factors influence and structure the awareness (its range, quality, depth,
quantity, etc) of different philosophers, as could be seen from the history of
Western philosophical ideas.
The result or consequence is that we have the philosophical approaches, subject-
matter and methods employed by the Pre-Socratics, Oriental and Asian thinkers,
Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Leibniz, Descartes, Marx, Frege, Russell, Sartre, et al.
Why do these thinkers and all philosophers select (un/intentionally) certain
philosophical branches, areas, problems and methods to concentrate on almost
as if they have little free will or choice in the matter?
Why do philosophers prefer, select or choose (?) a specific ism father than
another one?
And develop that ism or change it or choose another one during their
development and/or over time? With the choice of a particular ism numerous
other philosophical approaches, positions and isms are excluded and the
philosopher has set himself on a certain path, way and method the details of
these could be worked out, but his way is already set in concrete or tar. With the
choice or subscription to an ism and a particular metaphysical, ontological,
epistemological and methodological direction, many other possible directions
(that appear equally meaningful, relevant, and true to others, are excluded
and that often occurs not by the application of reliable methods or
intentionally). With this determination of the direction or path of the
philosopher numerous other more specific minor ways and areas, contexts and
fields of exploration are included and many others are excluded.
Some of the more specific things that are included or excluded are the nature
and the kind of ideas, the concepts, the connections between concepts, the terms
and the ways of handling, extending, transforming them as if those are the only
meaningful and truthful ideas, concepts and handling of them that are possible,
relevant, valid or worthwhile. Subsequently thinkers could fabricate and express
all kinds of reasons why excluded isms, their pre-suppositions, assumptions,
terminology and methodology are invalid, meaningless, incorrect, not truth
24

and why their own approach, -ism and its components (and other things an ism
commits one to) are the only valid, meaningful, true, legitimate one. So if all
philosophical approaches and isms are excluded and rejected by someone,
does that imply that all of them are wrong and unacceptable and that no
philosophical approach and ism is meaningful, valid, relevant and true?
Are there standards, norms, methods, principles or rules being employed to
make such valid, meaningful, true, reliable and relevant philosophical
decisions? Are these norms universal, absolute and infinite? Or are they
interpreted and applied in accordance with the cognitive biases of the
philosopher (his approach, -ism, etc)? So must we conclude like the sceptic and
relativist that there do not exist (universal, timeless, socio-cultural, historical,
impersonal and intersubjective) philosophical standards, principles, norms and
rules? And consequently we have nothing but the relative rules, values,
attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, presuppositions and other cognitive biased
notions of the different philosophical isms and approaches?
Is it then that we must make the best of a bad (relativist, sceptical) situation
and rationally and intentionally select or develop some particular ism? For,
even if we do not explicitly choose and select one, whatever philosophical
position (with its metaphysical, ontological, and methodological pre-
suppositions, attitudes, values, norms, assumptions, ideas, terms, etc) we
employ (even implicitly and unintentionally), as humans with selective
cognition and related cognitive biases, can only be conscious or aware in terms
of one perspective, one point of view and a particular frame( of reference) work,
with the automatic exclusion of many others? It might be objected that not all
philosophical isms and their related methods, approaches and assumptions are
similar and that it is possible to reject on rational, reasoned grounds and by
means of sound reasoning and valid, coherent arguments many, if not all,
philosophical positions, ideas, approaches and assumptions as false, unsound,
meaningless, irrelevant, incoherent, inconsistent, relative, unacceptable, fake,
mistaken, etc ( be it because they subscribe to the allegedly mistaken or non-
existent notion of the world, pure and ideal forms, idealism, rationalism,
empiricism, scientism and other dogmas)?
8
No matter how or how much we object to the individual, the individual
philosopher in his ivory tower, that he is merely one subject, not representing or
employing all but merely a selected intersubjectivity, that he does not constitute
a community (like scientists do and proceed as a community and in the name
of a community), -isms, philosophical systems and ideas are conceived and
25

developed by individuals and they might or probably will employ some form
of intersubjective tools, ideas, concepts, values, attitudes, beliefs, norms etc
otherwise no one else would be able to make sense of what they express and
think with them through their narratives.
Perhaps one could interject into ones explorations and narrative, quotations of
philosophers from all traditions (for example both so-called analytic and
continental schools or movements, both realism and idealism, empiricism,
rationalism, etc, etc), with the purpose to indicate how eclectic and all-inclusive
one, is as well as attempting to rest ones case on the authority of those icons
and giants of the history of philosophical ideas?
Whatever ways we try to bracket and overcome the fact that the discourse or
socio-cultural practice of philosophy is, and always will be, populated by
creative- and original-thinking individuals. Schools and movements, disciples,
secondary, derivative thinkers, professional, academic philosophers living off
the discipline are of secondary, if any, importance to the philosophical, they
were and always be merely cannon fodder, the troops, slaves (of their own lack
of original and creative thinking, personalities and intellect) populating the
planet of philosophy quibbling over irrelevant, minute details in terms of and by
means of the isms of the masters. It seems as if Hegels dialectic was faulty on
these ideas at least and if Marxs hope to liberate the socio-economic working
classes (or is it academic and intellectual?) and followers, was not fulfilled and
never will be realized. The Philosophical Discourse, socio-cultural practice and
philosophizing always were and always will be the work and possession of the
handful (compared to the vast number of students and professionals of the
philosophical world or community) of original- and creative-thinking
individuals, or not? So if someone does not form part of this elite group, but of
the academic and/or philosophy for all party, they better accept the ism of
some philosopher as a follower and/or become an apostle and missionary
preaching their own or someone elses interpretation of that dogma and
ideology. Again, just have a look at the disciples of New Realism (or NR) on
Facebook and at university faculties, or the apostles and missionaries of
Foucault, Husserl, Marx, Derrida, Habermas (already in their Fourth?
Generation), Logic, Mathematics, Experimental Philosophy, Philosophy of
Science (art, religion, sport, psychology, history, social sciences, etc),
Cognitive Sciences (and the so-called Cognitive Order and Cartography), and
other inter-disciplinary studies, etc to see what I mean.
26

9
This infinite diversity of contradictory metaphysical systems, opposing
ontologies and seemingly endless types of epistemologies is enough to drive
any reasonable thinking person to some form of scepticism, relativism and
methodical doubt wondering as if there is and could be one meaningful
philosophical approach, one all-explanatory ontology and one exclusive
epistemology? How is it possible that the same sound reasoning, valid
arguments and standards of argumentative clarity and precision, employing of
tools of logic (formal, informal or symbolic mathematical logic, or pre-Fregen
"logic" referring to the theory of the grammatical and inferential structure of
judgment and its components (terms) and implications (inference).) could
produce such an endless, bewildering, opposing, diversity of philosophical
positions?
Must one accept or reject entire metaphysical systems as a whole or is it
possible to identify and select certain meaningful, more valid features, sound
arguments and acceptable ideas from a number of different systems?
10
Why is it that certain dogmas, belief systems, world views and isms such as
Marxism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity (all of these in a number of
different varieties), etc become international, more or less universal, cross-
cultural, present and many different areas, societies, countries and
communities? What are the causes of this, what are the factors that are involved
in this popular, mass appeal? Is it because of the truth of these systems, because
of their consistency, coherency, sound reasoning, valid arguments and
argumentation, their truthful and not merely approximate theories? Or are other
variables at play for example social, cultural, economical, communal, historical,
personal, psychological, anthropological, etc.?
11
file:///C:/Users/ulrich/Desktop/brainpick/What%20is%20Philosophy
%20%20An%20Omnibus%20of%20Definitions%20from%20Prominent
%20Philosophers%20%E2%80%93%20Brain%20Pickings.htm
Brain Pickings site presents us with an omnibus of definitions of philosophy by
prominent philosophers, that is according to the site.
From Philosophy Bites, the book based on the wonderful podcast of the same
name, comes an omnibus of definitions, bound by a most fascinating disclaimer
27

for, as Nigel Warburton keenly observes in the books introduction,

philosophy is an unusual subject in that its practitioners dont agree what its
about.

Philosophy is thinking really hard about the most important questions and trying to bring
analytic clarity both to the questions and the answers. ~ Marilyn Adams

[P]hilosophy is the study of the costs and benefits that accrue when you take up a certain
position. For example, if youre arguing about free will and youre trying to decide whether
to be a compatibilist or incompatibilist is free will compatible with causal determinism?
what youre discovering is what problems and what benefits you get from saying that it is
compatible, and what problems and benefits you get from saying its incompatible. ~ Peter
Adamson

Philosophy is the successful love of thinking. ~ John Armstrong

Its a little bit like what Augustine famously said about the concept of time. When nobody
asks me about it, I know. But whenever somebody asks me about what the concept of time is,
I realize I dont know. ~ Catalin Avramescu

(Cue in Richard Feynmans similarly-spirited answer to what science is.)A few common
themes begin to emerge, most notably the idea of critical thinking:

Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in. ~
Richard Bradley

I dont think its any one thing, but I think generally it involves being critical and reflective
about things that most people take for granted. ~ Allen Buchanan

Philosophy is critical thinking: trying to become aware of how ones own thinking works, of
all the things one takes for granted, of the way in which ones own thinking shapes the things
ones thinking about. ~ Don Cupitt

Another running theme sensemaking:

Most simply put its about making sense of all this We find ourselves in a world that we
havent chosen. There are all sorts of possible ways of interpreting it and finding meaning in
the world and in the lives that we live. So philosophy is about making sense of that situation
that we find ourselves in. ~ Clare Carlisle

I think its thinking fundamentally clearly and well about the nature of reality and our place in
it, so as to understand better what goes on around us, and what our contribution is to that
reality, and its effect on us. ~ Barry Smith

[Philosophy is] a process of reflection on the deepest concepts, that is structures of thought,
that make up the way in which we think about the world. So its concepts like reason,
causation, matter, space, time, mind, consciousness, free will, all those big abstract words and
they make up topics, and people have been thinking about them for two and a half thousand
28

years and I expect theyll think about them for another two and a half thousand years if there
are any of us left. ~ Simon Blackburn

Also recurring is the notion of presuppositions:

Philosophy has always been something of a science of presuppositions; but it shouldnt just
expose them and say there they are. It should say something further about them that can
help people. ~ Tony Coady

Philosophy is the name we give to a collection of questions which are of deep interest to us
and for which there isnt any specialist way of answering. The categories in terms of which
they are posed are ones which prevent experiments being carried out to answer them, so
were thrown back to trying to answer them on the basis of evidence we can accumulate. ~
Paul Snowdon

Philosophy is what I was told as an undergraduate women couldnt do* by an eminent

philosopher who had best remain nameless. But for me its the gadfly image, the Socratic
gadfly: refusing to accept any platitudes or accepted wisdom without examining it. ~ Donna
Dickenson

I think it used to be an enquiry into whats true and how people should live; its distantly
related to that still, but Id say the distance is growing rather than narrowing. ~ John Dunn

Philosophy is conceptual engineering. That means dealing with questions that are open to
informed reasonable disagreement by providing new concepts that can be superseded in the
future if more economic solutions can be found but its a matter of rational agreement. ~
Luciano Floridi

Im afraid I have a very unhelpful answer to that, because its only a negative answer. Its the
answer that Friedrich Schlegel gave in his Athenaeum Fragments: philosophy is a way of
trying to be a systematic spirit without having a system. ~ Raymond Geuss

Philosophy is thinking as clearly as possible about the most fundamental concepts that reach
through all the disciplines. ~ Anthony Kenny

[A philosopher] is a moral entrepreneur. Its a nice image. Its somebody who creates new
ways of evaluating things whats important, whats worthwhile that changes how an
entire culture or an entire people understand those things. ~ Brian Leiter

(A good editor, then, is also a philosopher he or she, too, frames for an audience what
matters in the world and why.)

I think that philosophy in the classical sense is the love of wisdom. So the question then is
What is wisdom? And I think wisdom is understanding what really matters in the world. ~
Thomas Pogge
29

Im hard pressed to say, but one thing that is certainly true is that What is Philosophy? is
itself a strikingly philosophical question. ~ A. W. Moore

I cant answer that directly. I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a
philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with
knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to
be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and
complexity are very, very important to me. ~ Alexander A number of philosophers are
particularly concerned with teasing out the difference between science and philosophy:

Philosophy is thinking hard about the most difficult problems that there are. And you might
think scientists do that too, but theres a certain kind of question whose difficulty cant be
resolved by getting more empirical evidence. It requires an untangling of presuppositions:
figuring out that our thinking is being driven by ideas we didnt even realize that we had. And
thats what philosophy is. ~ David Papineau

I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of subjects. I regard it as
involving the kind of questions where youre not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to
the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about
how your ideas hang together. This means that philosophical questions will arise in a lot of
subjects. ~ Janet Radcliffe Richards

(Though, one might argue, some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Albert
Einstein and Stephen Hawking to name but just two, were only able to develop their theories
because they blended the empirical with the deeply conceptual.)

Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting critically on
social and political and economic arrangements. It always intimates the possibility that things
could be other than they are. And better.. ~ Michael Sandel

Well, I can tell you how philosophical problems arise in my view, which is where two
common-sense notions push in different directions, and then philosophy gets started. And I
suppose I also think that anything that claims to be philosophy which cant be related back to
a problem that arises in that way probably is empty. ~ Jonathan Wolff

I think the Greek term has it exactly right; its a way of loving knowledge. ~ Robert
Rowland Smith

Philosophy Bites is excellent in its entirety, examining such diverse facets of philosophy as
ethics, politics, metaphysics and the mind, aesthetics, religion and atheism, and the meaning
of life.

* The complete selection of answers in Philosophy Bites features 44 male philosophers and 8
female ones it seems, sadly, many women took, and perhaps continue to take, the words of
that token old-order eminent philosopher at face value. What might Einstein say?

12
30

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/06/01/the-art-of-scientific-investigation-beveridge-2/

By Maria Popova

Last week, we took in some timeless vintage wisdom on the role of serendipity and chance-
opportunism in creativity and scientific discovery, culled from the 1957 gem The Art of
Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) by Cambridge University animal
pathology professor W. I. B. Beveridge a brilliant treatise on creativity in science and, by
extension, in all endeavors of the mind. Beveridge constructs whats essentially a florilegium
of quotes by famous scientists and case studies of watershed discoveries to synthesize
insights on what makes successful science and successful creative thinking in general,
exploring subjects like serendipity, intuition, and imagination to reveal the habits of mind that
produce good ideas.

Today, as promised, we revisit Beveridges hefty tome to examine his ideas on the role of
intuition and the imagination.

Beveridge cites philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Deweys seminal
1933 book, How We Think, outlining Deweys model for conscious thinking: First we become
aware of the difficulty or problem, which provides the stimulus; then, a suggested solution
pops into the conscious mind; finally, a reason evaluates the idea to reject or accept it if
the idea is rejected, the mind goes back to the previous step and repeats. Beveridge offers a
brilliant articulation of the combinatorial creativity that underlies what we often call intuition:

The important thing to realize is that the conjuring up of the idea is not a deliberate, voluntary
act. It is something that happens to us rather than something we do.

In ordinary thinking ideas continually occur to us in this fashion to bridge over the steps in
reasoning and we are so accustomed to the process that we are hardly aware of it. Usually the
new ideas and combinations result from the immediately preceding thought calling up
associations that have been developed in the mind by past experience and education.

In allowing for these magic moments to occur, Beveridge stresses the importance of
embracing uncertainty and doubt:

Many people will not tolerate a state of doubt, either because they will not endure the mental
discomfort of it or because they regard it as evidence of inferiority.

He once again quotes Dewey, who advocated what he called reflective thinking:

To be genuinely thoughtful, we must be willing to sustain and protract that state of doubt
which is the stimulus to thorough enquiry, so as not to accept an idea or make a positive
assertion of a belief, until justifying reasons have been found.
31

Further synthesizing Dewey, Beveridge captures the heart of how I, too, believe creativity
works:

It is not possible deliberately to create ideas or to control their creation. When a difficulty
stimulates the mind, suggested solutions just automatically spring into the consciousness. The
variety and quality of the suggestions are functions of how well prepared our mind is by past
experience and education pertinent to the particular problem. What we can do deliberately is
to prepare our minds in this way, voluntarily direct our thoughts to a certain problem, hold
attention on that problem and appraise the various suggestions thrown up by the subconscious
mind. The intellectual element in thinking is, Dewey says, what we do with the
suggestions after they arise.

Other things being equal, the greater our store of knowledge, the more likely it is that
significant combinations will be thrown up. Furthermore, original combinations are more
likely to come into being if there is available a breadth of knowledge extending into related or
even distant branches of knowledge.

I frequently use LEGO as a metaphor for combinatorial creativity if we only have bricks
of one shape, size, and color, what we build with them remains limited; but if we build with
pieces of various shapes, sizes, and colors, our creations will be infinitely more interesting.
Beveridge corroborates this by citing Dr. E. L. Taylor:

New associations and fresh ideas are more likely to come out of a varied store of memories
and experience than out of a collection that is all of one kind.

Further confirming what Einstein, Anne Lamott, and Steve Jobs have said about rationality
and intuition, Beveridge cites iconic physicist Max Planck, father of quantum physics:

Again and again the imaginary plan on which one attempts to build up order breaks down and
then we must try another. This imaginative vision and faith in the ultimate success are
indispensable. The pure rationalist has no place here.

Indeed, Einstein himself put it thusly:

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of
intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Beveridge goes on to argue that intuition is really a pattern of ideas that forms as we
accumulate experiences and education, and even relates this to our well-documented fear of
being wrong:

The instinctive sense of irritation we feel when someone disagrees with us or when some fact
arises which is contrary to our beliefs may be due to the break in the pattern we have formed.
32

Writing about the importance of imagination in science, the prominent 19th-century physicist
John Tyndall insisted:

Newtons passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was an act of the prepared
imagination. Out of the facts of chemistry the constructive imagination of Dalton formed the
atomic theory. Davy was richly endowed with the imaginative faculty, while with Faraday its
exercise was incessant, preceding, accompanying and guiding all his experiments. His
strength and fertility as a discoverer are to be referred in great part to the stimulus of the
imagination.

Beveridge sums it up beautifully:

Facts and ideas are dead in themselves and it is the imagination that gives life to them. But
dreams and speculations are idle fantasies unless reason turns them to useful purpose. Vague
ideas captured on flights of fancy have to be reduced to specific propositions and hypotheses.

Echoing Carl Sagans wisdom on the balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, he
continues:

While imagination is the source of inspiration in seeking new knowledge, it can also be
dangerous if not subjected to discipline; a fertile imagination needs to be balanced by
criticism and judgment. This is, of course, quite different from saying it should be repressed
or crushed. The imagination merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown
where, by the dim light of the knowledge that we carry, we may glimpse something that
seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to
be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Things not clearly seen often take on
grotesque forms. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration but also of
frustration. To forget this is to court despair.

Returning once again to the pivotal role of embracing failure, Beveridge writes:

The scientist who is excessively cautious is not likely to make either errors or discoveries
Humphry Davy said: The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by
my failures. The trained thinker shows to great advantage over the untrained person in his
reaction to finding his idea to be wrong. The former profits from his mistakes as much as
from his successes.

Dewey says: What merely annoys and discourages a person not accustomed to thinking is
a stimulus and guide to the trained enquirer It either brings to light a new problem or helps
to define and clarify the problem.

To that effect, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in physics, Max Planck remarked:

Looking back over the long and labyrinthine path which finally led to the discovery [of the
quantum theory], I am vividly reminded of Goethes saying that men will always be making
mistakes as long as they are striving after something.
33

Beveridge cautions that the most important element in harnessing the power of the
imagination is avoiding the trap of conditioned thinking:

Psychologists have observed that once we have made an error, as for example in adding up a
column of figures, we have a tendency to repeat it again and again. This phenomenon is
known as the persistent error. The same thing happens when we ponder over a problem; each
time our thoughts take a certain course, the more likely is that course to be followed the next
time. Associations form between the ideas in the chain of thoughts and become firmer each
time they are used, until finally the connections are so well established that the chain is very
difficult to break. Thinking becomes conditioned just as conditioned reflexes are formed. We
may have enough data to arrive at a solution to the problem, but, once we have adopted an
unprofitable line of thought, the oftener we pursue it, the harder it is for us to adopt the
profitable line.

After offering several first-hand accounts of discovery by prominent scientists, Berveridge

summarizes the gist of intuition:

The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the
problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with
attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and
often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the
idea had not been thought of previously.

The psychology of the phenomenon is not thoroughly understood. There is a fairly general,
though not universal, agreement that intuitions arise from the subconscious activities of the
mind which has continued to turn over the problem even though perhaps consciously the
mind is no longer giving it attention.

(Of course, though the exact mechanisms of ideation remain, and possibly always will, not
fully understood, in the half-century since Beveridges work psychology and neuroscience
have done a great deal to shed some light on how creativity works and what happens
backstage in the brain.)

Beveridge outlines the process thusly:

Ideas spring straight into the conscious mind without our having deliberately formed them.
Evidently they originate from the subconscious activities of the mind which, when directed at
a problem, immediately brings together various ideas which have been associated with that
particular subject before. When a possibly significant combination is found it is presented to
the conscious mind for appraisal. Intuitions coming when we are consciously thinking about a
problem are merely ideas that are more startling than usual. But some further explanation is
needed to account for intuitions coming when our conscious mind is no longer dwelling on
that subject. The subconscious mind has probably continued to be occupied with the problem
and has suddenly found a significant combination. Now, a new idea arriving during conscious
thinking often produces a certain emotional reaction we feel pleased about it and perhaps
somewhat excited. Perhaps the subconscious mind is also capable of reacting in this way and
this has the effect of bringing the idea into the conscious mind.
34

Because such intuitive ideas often vanish quickly after their appearance, Beveridge
recommends a valuable device for capturing them: the habit of carrying pencil and paper to
note down original ideas. (Or, fifty years later, Evernote, my preferred alternative.) He
advises:

Ideas often make their appearance in the fringe of consciousness when one is reading, writing
or otherwise engaged mentally on a theme which it is not desirable to interrupt. These ideas
should be roughly jotted down as quickly as possible; this not only preserves them but also
serves the useful purpose of getting them off your mind with the minimum interruption to
the main interest. Concentration requires that the mind should not be distracted by retaining
ideas on the fringe of consciousness.

To underline the role of the intuition, Beveridge quotes German-British philosopher F. C. S.

Schiller:

It is not too much to say that the more deference men of science have paid to logic, the worse
it has been for the scientific value of their reasoning Fortunately for the world, however,
the great men of science have usually been kept in salutary ignorance of the logical tradition.

Beveridge circles back to the importance of developing a comfort level with the unknown,
citing the celebrated French physiologist Claude Bernard:

Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery.

The Art of Scientific Investigation is available as a free download in multiple formats from
The Internet Archive, but be aware the text was digitized poorly using optical character
recognition and is plagued with legibility errors.

https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve

https://archive.org/details/texts

The power and fruitfulness of intuition has had innumerable and celebrated champions
from Einstein, Anne Lamott, and Steve Jobs to some of historys greatest scientists and
philosophers. But what, exactly, lies behind this amorphous phenomenon we call intuition?
Thats precisely what CUNY philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci explores in a chapter
of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful
Life (public library).

First, Pigliucci offers a primer on what intuition is and isnt, compared and contrasted with
the history of understanding consciousness:

The word intuition comes from the Latin intuir, which appropriately means knowledge from
within. Until recently, intuition, like consciousness, was the sort of thing that self-respecting
35

scientists stayed clear of, on penalty of being accused of engaging in New Age woo-woo
rather than serious science. Heck, even most philosophers who historically had been very
happy to talk about consciousness, far ahead of the rise of neurobiology found themselves
with not much to say about intuition. However, these days cognitive scientists think of
intuition as a set of nonconscious cognitive and affective processes; the outcome of these
processes is often difficult to articulate and is not based on deliberate thinking, but its real
and (sometimes) effective nonetheless. It was William James, the father of modern
psychology, who first proposed the idea that cognition takes place in two different modes,
and his insight anticipated modern so-called dual theories of cognition. Intuition works in an
associative manner: it feels effortless (even though it does use a significant amount of brain
power), and its fast. Rational thinking, on the contrary, is analytical, requires effort, and is
slow. Why, then, would we ever want to use a system that makes us work hard and doesnt
deliver rapid results? Think of it this way: intuitions, contrary to much popular lore, are not
infallible. Cognitive scientists treat them as quick first assessments of a given situation, as
provisional hypotheses in need of further checking.

Citing recent research, Pigliucci presents an important debunking of the grab-bag term
intuition:

One of the first things that modern research on intuition has clearly shown is that there is no
such thing as an intuitive person tout court. Intuition is a domain-specific ability, so that
people can be very intuitive about one thing (say, medical practice, or chess playing) and just
as clueless as the average person about pretty much everything else. Moreover, intuitions get
better with practice especially with a lot of practice because at bottom intuition is about
the brains ability to pick up on certain recurring patterns; the more we are exposed to a
particular domain of activity the more familiar we become with the relevant patterns (medical
charts, positions of chess pieces), and the more and faster our brains generate heuristic
solutions to the problem we happen to be facing within that domain.

Indeed, this notion of additive progress in developing intuition is the same concept known as
deliberate practice in the development of any skill or talent. Pigliucci writes:

There is another aspect to the question of intuition versus conscious thinking that affects our
quality of life, and that has to do with research showing how people get better at what they do
or get stuck in it.

An expert is someone who performs at a very high level in a given field, be it medicine, law,
science, chess, tennis, or soccer. As it turns out, people become experts (or simply, much
much better) at what they do when they use their intuition and conscious thinking in
particular ways. Research on acquiring skills shows that, roughly speaking, and pretty much
independently of whether we are talking about a physical activity or an intellectual one,
people tend to go through three phases while they improve their performance. During the first
phase, the beginner focuses her attention simply on understanding what it is that the task
requires and on not making mistakes. In phase two, such conscious attention to the basics of
the task is no longer needed, and the individual performs quasi-automatically and with
reasonable proficiency. Then comes the difficult part. Most people get stuck in phase two:
they can do whatever it is they set out to do decently, but stop short of the level of
36

accomplishment that provides the self-gratification that makes ones outlook significantly
more positive or purchases the external validation that results in raises and promotions. Phase
three often remains elusive because while the initial improvement was aided by switching
control from conscious thought to intuitionas the task became automatic and faster
further improvement requires mindful attention to the areas where mistakes are still being
made and intense focus to correct them. Referred to as deliberate practice, this phase is quite
distinct from mindless or playful practice.

Given the importance of networked knowledge and associative indexing in making sense of
information, it is unsurprising that structured knowledge is what sets the expert apart from
the amateur:

There are a variety of reasons, but two are especially important: one needs to develop the
ability to anticipate problems, and this in turn is often the result not just of knowledge of a
given field but of structured knowledge. Not only is there a difference between naive and
expert knowledge, but there is more than one way to acquire expert knowledge, guided not
just by the intrinsic properties of the system but also by the particular kinds of interest that
different individuals have in that system.

The rest of Answers for Aristotle explores diverse yet uniformly fascinating and essential
subjects weve previously explored and will continue to explore for the foreseeable lifetime
love, morality, what it means to be human, the meaning of life, the limits of science, and
much more. Complement this particular excerpt with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman on
how our intuition misleads us.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/06/01/david-eagleman-incognito/

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by neuroscientist David Eagleman is one of my favorite
books of the past few years. So, as a proper neuro-nut, its no surprise I was thrilled for this
weeks release of his latest gem, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain a fascinating,
dynamic, faceted look under the hood of the conscious mind to reveal the complex machinery
of our subconscious.

Bringing a storytellers articulate and fluid narrative to a scientists quest, Eagleman dances
across an incredible spectrum of issues brain damage, dating, drugs, beauty, synesthesia,
criminal justice, artificial intelligence, optical illusions and much more to reveal that
things we take as passive givens, from our capacity for seeing a rainbow to our ability to
overhear our name in a conversation we werent paying attention to, are the function of
remarkable neural circuitry, biological wiring and cognitive conditioning.

The three-pound organ in your skull with its pink consistency of Jell-o is an alien kind
of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly
outstrips anything weve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart:
youre the busiest, brightest thing on the planet. ~ David Eagleman

Sample some of Eaglemans fascinating areas of study with this excellent talk from
TEDxAlamo:
37

Equal parts entertaining and illuminating, the case studies, examples and insights in
Incognito are more than mere talking points to impressed at the next dinner party, poised
instead to radically shift your understanding of the world, other people, and your own mind.

And if Incognito tickles your fancy, you might also enjoy V. S. Ramachandrans The Tell-Tale
Brain: A Neuroscientists Quest for What Makes Us Human, Mark Changizis The Vision
Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About
Human Vision and Joshua Foers Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of
Remembering Everything, as well as these 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the
brain.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/20/jonah-lehrer-imagine-how-creativity-works/

In his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Nietzsche observed:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called
inspiration shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the
good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment,
trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects All great artists and thinkers
are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting,
transforming, ordering.

Some 131 years later, Elizabeth Gilbert echoed that observation in her now-legendary TED
talk.

The origin, pursuit, and secret of creativity are a central fixation of the Idea Age. But what,
exactly, does creativity that infinitely nebulous term really mean, and how does it
work? This inquiry is at the heart of Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
who, in my opinion, has done more for the popular understanding of psychology and
neuroscience than any other writer working today, and who has previously examined such
fascinating subjects as how we decide and why we need a fourth culture of knowledge.

Lehrer writes in the introduction, echoing Nietzsches lament:

The sheer secrecy of creativity the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when
it happens to us means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In
fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers:
being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration,
after all, literally means breathed upon.) Because people couldnt understand creativity, they
assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.

He notes how the mysteriousness and hazy nature of creativity have historically confounded
scientists, and how its study has become a meta-metaphor for creativity itself:

How does one measure the imagination? The daunting nature of the subject led researchers to
mostly neglect it; a recent survey of psychology papers published between 1950 and 2000
revealed that less than 1 percent of them investigated aspects of the creative process. Even the
38

evolution of this human talent was confounding. Most cognitive skills have elaborate
biological histories, so their evolution can be traced over time. But not creativitythe human
imagination has no clear precursors. There is no ingenuity module that got enlarged in the
human cortex, or even a proto-creative impulse evident in other primates. Monkeys dont
paint; chimps dont write poems; and its the rare animal (like the New Caledonian crow) that
exhibits rudimentary signs of problem solving. The birth of creativity, in other words, arrived
like any insight: out of nowhere.

Reflecting David Eaglemans insistence upon understanding the unconscious operations of

the brain as a key to understanding ourselves, Lehrer counters the idea that imagination cant
be rigorously studied:

Until we understand the set of mental events that give rise to new thoughts, we will never
understand what makes us so special. Thats why this book begins by returning us to the
material source of the imagination: the three pounds of flesh inside the skull. William James
described the creative process as a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling
and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity. For the first time, we can see the
cauldron itself, that massive network of electrical cells that allow individuals to form new
connections between old ideas. We can take snapshots of thoughts in brain scanners and
measure the excitement of neurons as they get closer to a solution. The imagination can seem
like a magic trick of matter new ideas emerging from thin airbut we are beginning to
understand how the trick works.

Lehrer nods to the combinatorial nature of creativity:

Creativity shouldnt be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldnt be thought of as a

process reserved for artists and inventors and other creative types. The human mind, after
all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential
programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new
associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.

At the heart of Imagine is an important redefinition of creativity:

[T]he standard definition of creativity is completely wrong. Ever since the ancient Greeks,
people have assumed that the imagination is separate from other kinds of cognition. But the
latest science suggests that this assumption is false. Instead, creativity is a catchall term for a
variety of distinct thought processes. (The brain is the ultimate category buster.)

For most of human history, people have believed that the imagination is inherently
inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we cling to a series of false myths
about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths dont just mislead they also
interfere with the imagination.

The opening of the books wonderful trailer winks at Steve Jobss famous quote that
creativity is just connecting things:
39

Lehrer goes on to explore the workings of creativity through subjects as diverse as Bob
Dylans writing methods, the birth of Swiffer, an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing
move, the drug habits of poets, Pixars secret sauce, the emergence of collaborative culture,
and a wealth more.

But what makes Imagine outstanding is that the book itself is an epitome of an increasingly
important form of creativity the ability to pull together perspectives, insights, and bits
of information into a mashup narrative framework that illuminates a subject in an entirely
new way.

This practice, of course, is centuries old, dating at least as far back as medieval florilegia. But
Lehrers gift or, rather, grit-honed skill for connecting dots across disciplines and
directions of thought, and gleaning from these connections original insight, is a true testament
to the role of the author as a curator of empirical evidence, theory, and opinion. In the
excellent Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner called this the synthesizing mind
and Lehrers is positively a paragon:

The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources, understands and
evaluates that information objectively, and puts it together in ways that make sense to the
synthesizer and also to other persons. Valuable in the past, the capacity to synthesize
becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-
other-tools-for-thinking.html

BOSTON On a recent sunny afternoon, Daniel Dennett showed up at the community

boathouse on the Charles River ready for philosophical and nautical action.

Mr. Dennett, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and
perhaps Americas most widely read (and debated) living philosopher, recently sold the
Xanthippe, his 42-foot cruiser, named for Socrates reputedly shrewish wife. But he still had
his boat shoes, his Darwin-esque beard, and an eagerness to demonstrate his sail-handling
skills while discussing his 16th book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, which
W. W. Norton is publishing next week.

Never mind that the boathouses fleet was unexpectedly confined to shore, thanks to a
temporary shutdown of river traffic. And never mind that the boats lacked a boom crutch, the
piece of nautical equipment that Mr. Dennett uses in the book as a punning name for the kind
of faulty thinking tool that blows up in (mostly other) philosophers faces.

Sailing was still an apt illustration of the kind of empirically minded problem-solving that
Mr. Dennett has long preferred to the abstractions of more traditional philosophy, to the great
irritation of some colleagues.

Philosophers can seldom put their knowledge to practical use, Mr. Dennett said, squinting
under the brim of a baseball hat reading Freedom Evolves, a play on the title of his 2003
book on free will. But if youre a sailor, you can. I just get a kick out of that.
40

These days, Mr. Dennett, 71, is most famous for his blunt-talking atheist activism. Theres
simply no polite way to tell people theyve dedicated their lives to an illusion, he said flatly.

But for decades, he has presented himself among his fellow philosophers as a ruthless slayer
of metaphysical fancy.

Its always good fun to argue with him, said David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at
New York University and Australian National University, who has long crossed swords with
him over the nature of consciousness. In person, hes very charming, teasing and joking,
though sometimes hes less good-tempered in print.

That blunderbuss style is amply on view in Intuition Pumps, which provides a dictionary of
dozens of Mr. Dennetts own jokily named thinking tools the Sorta Operator, the Curse of
the Cauliflower along with demolitions of the rigged thought experiments and intellectual
tics of rivals, who get called out for everything from willful ignorance of science to overuse
of the word surely.

Philosophers are infamous for being navel-gazers, but a lot of them are remarkably
unreflective about their own methods. He added, If you do get a little self-conscious, it
opens up so many weak spots and helps you think.

The new book, largely adapted from previous writings, is also a lively primer on the radical
answers Mr. Dennett has elaborated to the big questions in his nearly five decades in
philosophy, delivered to a popular audience in books like Consciousness Explained (1991),
Darwins Dangerous Idea (1995) and Freedom Evolves.

The mind? A collection of computerlike information processes, which happen to take

place in carbon-based rather than silicon-based hardware.

The self? Simply a center of narrative gravity, a convenient fiction that allows us to
integrate various neuronal data streams.

Mr. Dennett just published his 16th book. Credit Bryce Vickmark for The New York
Times

The elusive subjective conscious experience the redness of red, the painfulness of pain
that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are moist
robots.

Im a robot, and youre a robot, but that doesnt make us any less dignified or wonderful or
lovable or responsible for our actions, he said. Why does our dignity depend on our being
scientifically inexplicable?
41

If he hadnt grown up in an academic family, Mr. Dennett likes to say, he probably wouldve
been an engineer. From his beginnings in the philosophical hothouses of early 1960s Harvard
and Oxford, he had a feeling of being out of step joined by a precocious self-confidence.

As an undergraduate, he transferred from Wesleyan University to Harvard so he could study

with the great logician W. V. O. Quine and explain to him why he was wrong. Sheer
sophomoric overconfidence, Mr. Dennett recalled.

As a doctoral student at Oxford, then the center of the philosophical universe, he studied with
the eminent natural-language philosopher Gilbert Ryle but increasingly found himself drawn
to a more scientific view of the mind.

I vividly recall sitting with my landlords son, a medical student, and asking him, What is
the brain made of? Mr. Dennett said. He drew me a simple picture of a neuron, and pretty
soon I was off to the races.

In 1969, Mr. Dennett began keeping his Philosophical Lexicon, a dictionary of cheeky
pseudo-terms playing on the names of mostly 20th-century philosophers, including himself.
(dennett: an artificial enzyme used to curdle the milk of human intentionality.) Today, his
impatience with the imaginary games philosophers play chmess instead of chess, he
calls it and his preference for the company of scientists lead some to question if hes still a
philosopher at all.

Im still proud to call myself a philosopher, but Im not their kind of philosopher, thats for
sure, he said. The new book reflects Mr. Dennetts unflagging love of the fight, including
some harsh whacks at longtime nemeses like the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould
accused of practicing a genus of dirty intellectual tricks Mr. Dennett calls goulding that
some early reviewers have already called out as unsporting. (Mr. Gould died in 2002.)

Mr. Dennett also devotes a long section to a rebuttal of the famous Chinese Room thought
experiment, developed by 30 years ago by the philosopher John Searle, another old
antagonist, as a riposte to Mr. Dennetts claim that computers could fully mimic
consciousness.

Clinging to the idea that the mind is more than just the brain, Mr. Dennett said, is profoundly
nave and anti-scientific.

Both free will and consciousness, he insists sunnily, are empirically solvable problems. But if
he had to do it all over again, he said, hed still rather tackle them as a philosopher than as a
scientist. That way, he says, he can think about all the cool theories and lab experiments
without ever having to do the dishes.

When the dock master finally gave the all-clear, Mr. Dennett jumped up to see if he could
help with the rigging, clearly impatient to shift from philosophy to sailing.

Out on the water, his passengers neuronal activity resolved into a pleasing if possibly
illusory tableau of blue sky, gentle breeze and cawing sea gulls. Mr. Dennett talked about his
42

current research on members of the clergy who have secretly lost their faith, but mainly
focused on the satisfyingly technical problem of not embarrassing himself by getting the boat
becalmed.

As a sailor, he said, he had been in lots of waters where, if he hadnt known what he was
doing, he and his family wouldve been dead.

But I do know what Im doing! he exclaimed, before finding the wind and turning toward
shore.

Correction: May 2, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose new book, Intuition
Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, comes out next week, misstated a word in Mr.
Dennetts Philosophical Lexicon that is defined as an artificial enzyme used to curdle the
milk of human intentionality. It is dennett, not Dennettation.

A version of this article appears in print on April 30, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Philosophy That Stirs The Waters. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|
Subscribe

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/29/intuition-pumps-daniel-dennett-on-making-
mistakes/

By Maria Popova

If you are not making mistakes, youre not taking enough risks, Debbie Millman
counseled. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobodys
ever made before, Neil Gaiman advised young creators. In Intuition Pumps And Other
Tools for Thinking (public library), the inimitable Daniel Dennett, one of our greatest living
philosophers, offers a set of thinking tools handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and
focus holders that allow us to think reliably and even gracefully about really hard
questions to enhance your cognitive toolkit. He calls these tools intuition pumps
thought experiments designed to stir a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition (which we know
is a pillar of even the most rational of science) about the question at hand, a kind of
persuasion tool the reverse-engineering of which enables us to think better about thinking
itself. Intuition, of course, is a domain-specific ability that relies on honed critical thinking
rather than a mystical quality bestowed by the gods but thats precisely Dennetts point,
and his task is to help us hone it.

Though most of his 77 intuition pumps address concrete questions, a dozen are general-
purpose tools that apply deeply and widely, across just about any domain of thinking. The
first of them is also arguably the most useful yet most uncomfortable: making mistakes.

Echoing Dorion Sagans case for why science and philosophy need each other, Dennett
begins with an astute contribution to the best definitions of philosophy, wrapped in a
necessary admonition about the value of history:
43

The history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very
tempting mistakes, and if you dont know the history, you are doomed to making the same
darn mistakes all over again. There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just
science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical
assumptions.

He speaks for the generative potential of mistakes and their usefulness as an empirical tool:

Sometimes you dont just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them
if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Therein lies the power of mistakes as a vehicle for, as Rilke famously put it, living the
questions and thus advancing knowledge in a way that certainty cannot for, as Richard
Feynman memorably noted, the scientists job is to remain unsure, and so seems the
philosophers. Dennett writes:

We philosophers are mistake specialists. While other disciplines specialize in getting the
right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are
of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is even sure what the right
questions are, let alone the answers. Asking the wrong questions risks setting any inquiry
off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers! Philosophy
in every field of inquiry is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you
should have been asking in the first place.

Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only
opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there
must be learners. There are only two non-miraculous ways for learners to come into
existence: they must either evolve or be designed and built by learners that evolved.
Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error and without
the errors the trials wouldnt accomplish anything.

Dennett offers a caveat that at once highlights the importance of acquiring knowledge and
reminds us of the power of chance-opportunism:

Trials can be either blind or foresighted. You, who know a lot, but not the answer to the
question at hand, can take leaps foresighted leaps. You can look before you leap, and
hence be somewhat guided from the outset by what you already know. You need not be
guessing at random, but dont look down your nose at random guesses; among its wonderful
products is you!

And since evolution is the highest epitome of how the process of trial and error drives
progress, Dennett makes a case for understanding evolution as a key to understanding
everything else we humans value:
44

Evolution is the central, enabling process not only of life but also of knowledge and
learning and understanding. If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings,
free will and morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite
detailed knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back. For evolution,
which knows nothing, the steps into novelty are blindly taken by mutations, which are
random copying errors in DNA.

Dennett echoes Dostoyevsky (Above all, dont lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself
and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or
around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.) and offers the key to
making productive mistakes:

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them especially not from yourself.
Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a
connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of
art, which in a way they are. The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the
mess youve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind
stab in the dark.

We have all heard the forlorn refrain Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time! This
phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we
should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, Well, it
seemed like a good idea at the time! is standing on the threshold of brilliance.

In fact, Dennett argues in considering what makes us human, one of the hallmarks of our
intelligence is our ability to remember our previous thinking and reflect on, learn from it, use
it to construct future thinking. Reminding us to beware our cultures deep-seated fear of
being wrong, he advocates for celebrating the ignorance that produced the mistake in the
first place:

So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then
examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can
manage. Its not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and
anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves), and you have to work hard
to overcome these emotional reactions. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your
mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have
sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them
behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively
seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.

Dennett turns to card magicians for an analogy: Many of their tricks actually rely on
chance to work, but theyve devised numerous strategies of varying complexity to smoothly
mask for the failed tricks in which chance isnt in their favor. Their mistakes thus become
invisible but their successes, those instances in which chance appears magical, become
gloriously visible to the audiences awe and delight. Dennett compares this to science:
45

Evolution works the same way: all the dumb mistakes tend to be invisible, so all we see is a
stupendous string of triumphs. For instance, the vast majority way over 90 percent of
all the creatures that have ever lived died childless, but not a single one of your ancestors
suffered that fate. Talk about a line of charmed lives!

One big difference between the discipline of science and the discipline of stage magic is that
while magicians conceal their false starts from the audience as best they can, in science you
make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them.
It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack
of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains
have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

Returning to Gaimans point about brilliantly original mistakes, Dennett ends with a
wonderful and necessary addition to historys finest thinking on criticism, reminding us that
critics simply tell us our thinking is original and notable enough to be worthy of dissent:

Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love
pointing out mistakes. Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity
to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy
showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.

Of course, in general, people do not enjoy correcting the stupid mistakes of others. You have
to have something worth correcting, something original to be right or wrong about. . . .

Complement Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking with This Will Make You
Smarter, one of the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012, in which 151 of our
times biggest thinkers including Dennett each select a single scientific concept that
will improve everyones cognitive toolkit.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/28/daniel-dennett-wisdom/

By Maria Popova

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is one of our eras most important and
influential thinkers on philosophy of mind. His insights on purpose and consciousness get to
the heart of what it means to be human. To celebrate, here a few quotes from his writings that
have stayed with me over the years:

A reminder of how fortunate we are, you and I, from Freedom Evolves:

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most,
90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable
offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth,
suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back
millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the
46

lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some
occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

A meditation on memes from Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life:

[I]f it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes,
then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be memes
versus us, because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in
determining who or what we are. The independent mind struggling to protect itself from
alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological
imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the
other, but we would be foolish to side with our genes; that would be to commit the most
egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us
special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes thanks
to the lifting cranes of our memes.

The ultimate testament to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, from Sweet
Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness:

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

On the significance of chance, which weve just explored earlier today, also from Freedom
Evolves:

Isnt it true that whatever isnt determined by our genes must be determined by our
environment? What else is there? Theres Nature and theres Nurture. Is there also some X,
some further contributor to what we are? Theres Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is
important but doesnt have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some
distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically
filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in
our environment.

Lastly, some proper philosophers self-deprecation from Consciousness Explained:

Philosophers Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

For more of Dennetts singular brand of insight, be sure to watch his mind-bending TED talk
on consciousness.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_dennett

Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical
processes

One of our most important living philosophers, Dan Dennett is best known for his
provocative and controversial arguments that human consciousness and free will are the
47

result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry
fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness
isn't. His 2003 book "Freedom Evolves" explores how our brains evolved to give us -- and
only us -- the kind of freedom that matters, while 2006's "Breaking the Spell" examines belief
through the lens of biology.

This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a
philosopher and cognitive scientist. And while the philosophy community has never quite
known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself
with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has
made him, as Edge's John Brockman writes, the philosopher of choice of the AI
community.

It's tempting to say that Dennett has never met a robot he didn't like, and that what he likes
most about them is that they are philosophical experiments, Harry Blume wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1998. To the question of whether machines can attain high-order
intelligence, Dennett makes this provocative answer: The best reason for believing that
robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are
a sort of robot ourselves.'"

In recent years, Dennett has become outspoken in his atheism, and his 2006 book Breaking
the Spell calls for religion to be studied through the scientific lens of evolutionary biology.
Dennett regards religion as a natural -- rather than supernatural -- phenomenon, and urges
schools to break the taboo against empirical examination of religion. He argues that religion's
influence over human behavior is precisely what makes gaining a rational understanding of it
so necessary: If we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the
world in the 21st century.

Dennett's landmark books include The Mind's I, co-edited with Douglas

Hofstaedter, Consciousness Explained, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Read an excerpt from
his 2013 book, Intuition Pumps, in the Guardian >>

What others say

Dan Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike
traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence,
computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the
philosopher. Marvin Minsky

http://blog.ted.com/where_does_cons/

New Scientist is running a fascinating article on new brain research happening at INSERM
that appears to show that consciousness arises from activity distributed across the brain
rather than any single locus or seat.(AS I wrote: consciousness is an umbrella word for
many things and their functions)

Gaillards team flashed words in front of volunteers for just 29 milliseconds. The words were
either threatening (kill, anger) or emotionally neutral (cousin, see).
48

The words were preceded and followed by visual masks, which block the words from being
consciously processed, or the masks following the words werent used, meaning the words
could be consciously processed. The volunteers had to press a button to indicate the nature of
the word, allowing the researchers to confirm whether the volunteer was conscious of it or
not.

Read the full article.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16775-consciousness-signature-discovered-spanning-
the-brain/?46

Electrodes implanted in the brains of people with epilepsy might have resolved an ancient
question about consciousness.

Signals from the electrodes seem to show that consciousness arises from the coordinated
activity of the entire brain. The signals also take us closer to finding an objective
consciousness signature that could be used to probe the process in animals and people with
brain damage without inserting electrodes.

Previously it wasnt clear whether a dedicated brain area, or seat of consciousness, was
responsible for guiding our subjective view of the world, or whether consciousness was the
result of concerted activity across the whole brain.

Probing the process has been a challenge, as non-invasive techniques such as magnetic
resonance imaging and EEG give either spatial or temporal information but not both. The
best way to get both simultaneously is to implant electrodes deep inside the skull, but it is
difficult to justify this in healthy people for ethical reasons.

Brainy opportunity
Now neuroscientist Raphal Gaillard of INSERM in Gif sur Yvette, France, and colleagues
have taken advantage of a unique opportunity. They have probed consciousness in 10 people
who had intercranial electrodes implanted for treating drug-resistant epilepsy.

While monitoring signals from these electrodes, Gaillards team flashed words in front of the
volunteers for just 29 milliseconds. The words were either threatening (kill, anger) or
emotionally neutral (cousin, see).

The words were preceded and followed by visual masks, which block the words from being
consciously processed, or the masks following the words werent used, meaning the words
could be consciously processed. The volunteers had to press a button to indicate the nature of
the word, allowing the researchers to confirm whether the volunteer was conscious of it or
not.

Between the 10 volunteers, the researchers received information from a total of 176
electrodes, which covered almost the whole brain. During the first 300 milliseconds of the
49

experiment, brain activity during both the non-conscious and conscious tasks was very
similar, indicating that the process of consciousness had not kicked in. But after that, there
were several types of brain activity that only occurred in the individuals who were aware of
the words.

Lost seat
First, there was an increase in the voltage levels of the signals in their brains. Second, the
frequency and phase of neurons firing in different parts of the brain seemed to synchronise.
Then some of these synchronised signals appeared to be triggering others. For example,
activity in the occipital lobe seemed to cause activity in the frontal lobe.

Because this activity only occurred in volunteers when they were aware of the words,
Gaillards team argue that it constitutes a consciousness signature. As much of this activity
was spread across the brain, they say that consciousness has no single seat. Consciousness
is more a question of dynamics, than of a local activity, says Gaillard.

Bernard Baars of the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California, who proposed a global
access theory of consciousness in 1983 agrees: Im thrilled by these results.

He says they provide the first really solid, direct evidence for his own theory. He also says
that having such a signature will make it easier to look for signs of consciousness in people
with brain damage, infants and animals with the help of non-invasive techniques such as
EEG.

Journal reference: PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061

Free will

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They
Say They Want"Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms,[18] Dennett articulated the case
for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced
with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree
undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be
immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those
considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the
decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those
considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.[19]

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models,(it should be obvious that the 2
stage model, compatibility, is meaningful. Two different aspects are concerned and should not
be confused or conflated nothing mode need to be said to defend this position, what more is
said is merely to explain it to those who do not grasp what one said and its implications. This
is similar to many other philosophical problems they have simple dissolvements, but one
needs to explain these to those who do not understand it, not to defend ones own meaningful
position or insight!) including William James, Henri Poincar, Arthur Holly Compton, and
Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:
50

1. First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the

considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence
making the difference.

2. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the

libertarian, if there is a right place at all.

3. Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more
efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in
this way.

4. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral

education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.

5. Fifthand I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in

favor of this modelit provides some account of our important intuition
that we are the authors of our moral decisions.

6. Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that

encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate
decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a
contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our
deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any
further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of
inquiry.

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as
responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision
to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've
considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could
have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided
in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.[20]

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model,
specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they
believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and
desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be
liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us
everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete
control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his
deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the
chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is
determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control
in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well.
Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.[21]
51

Philosophy of mind

Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his
overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is
primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical
research. In his original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of
explaining the mind (meaningless umbrella word, identify many more meaningful terms that
are covered by this notion and explore them) into the need for a theory of content and for a
theory of consciousness. (another umbrella word that must be explored in terms of the many
ideas and notions covered by it) His approach to this project has also stayed true to this
distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided
Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The
Intentional Stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in
Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development
of his views.[22]

In chapter 5 of Consciousness Explained Dennett describes his multiple drafts model of

consciousness. (umbrella word!! Break it up into meaningful terms and analyse them)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_mode

Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of

consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information
processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published
in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness
which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.

Dennett describes the theory as first-person operationalism. As he states it:

The Multiple Drafts model makes [the procedure of] "writing it down" in memory criterial
for consciousness: that is what it is for the "given" to be "taken" ... There is no reality of
conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent
action (and hence, of course, on memory).[1]

The thesis of multiple drafts

Dennett's thesis is that our modern understanding of consciousness is unduly influenced by
the ideas of Ren Descartes. To show why, he starts with a description of the phi illusion. In
this experiment, two different coloured lights, with an angular separation of a few degrees at
the eye, are flashed in succession. If the interval between the flashes is less than a second or
so, the first light that is flashed appears to move across to the position of the second light.
Furthermore, the light seems to change colour as it moves across the visual field. A green
light will appear to turn red as it seems to move across to the position of a red light. Dennett
asks how we could see the light change colour before the second light is observed.

Dennett claims that conventional explanations of the colour change boil down to either
Orwellian or Stalinesque hypotheses, which he says are the result of Descartes' continued
52

influence on our vision of the mind. In an Orwellian hypothesis, the subject comes to one
conclusion, then goes back and changes that memory in light of subsequent events. This is
akin to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where records of the past are routinely
altered. In a Stalinesque hypothesis, the two events would be reconciled prior to entering the
subject's consciousness, with the final result presented as fully resolved. This is akin to
Joseph Stalin's show trials, where the verdict has been decided in advance and the trial is just
a rote presentation.

[W]e can suppose, both theorists have exactly the same theory of what happens in your brain;
they agree about just where and when in the brain the mistaken content enters the causal
pathways; they just disagree about whether that location is to be deemed pre-experiential or
post-experiential. [...] [T]hey even agree about how it ought to "feel" to subjects: Subjects
should be unable to tell the difference between misbegotten experiences and immediately
misremembered experiences. [p. 125, original emphasis.]

Dennett argues that there is no principled basis for picking one of these theories over the
other, because they share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place
where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett
calls the "Cartesian theatre". Both theories require us to cleanly divide a sequence of
perceptions and reactions into before and after the instant that they reach the seat of
consciousness, but he denies that there is any such moment, as it would lead to infinite
regress. Instead, he asserts that there is no privileged place in the brain where
consciousness happens. Dennett states that, "[t]here does not exist [...] a process such as
'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is
recognized (by whom?)."[1]

The origin of this operationalist approach can be found in Dennett's immediately preceding
work. Dennett (1988) explains consciousness in terms of access consciousness alone,
denying the independent existence of what Ned Block has labeled phenomenal
consciousness.[2] He argues that "Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the
reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties". Having
related all consciousness to properties, he concludes that they cannot be meaningfully
distinguished from our judgements about them. He writes:

The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in
principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal
infallibility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of
subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject
judges his experience to have quale F. We can then treat such judgings as constitutive acts, in
effect, bringing the quale into existence by the same sort of license as novelists have to
determine the hair color of their characters by fiat. We do not ask how Dostoevski knows that
Raskolnikov's hair is light brown.[3]

In other words, once we've explained a perception fully in terms of how it affects us, there is
nothing left to explain. In particular, there is no such thing as a perception which may be
considered in and of itself (a quale). Instead, the subject's honest reports of how things
53

seem to them are inherently authoritative on how things seem to them, but not on the
matter of how things actually are.

Critical responses to multiple drafts

Some of the criticism of Dennett's theory is due to the perceived tone of his presentation. As
one grudging supporter admits, "there is much in this book that is disputable. And Dennett is
at times aggravatingly smug and confident about the merits of his arguments [...] All in all
Dennett's book is annoying, frustrating, insightful, provocative and above all annoying."
(Korb 1993)

Bogen (1992) points out that the brain is bilaterally symmetrical. That being the case, if
Cartesian materialism is true, there might be two Cartesian theatres, so arguments against
only one are flawed.[4] Velmans (1992) argues that the phi effect and the cutaneous rabbit
illusion demonstrate that there is a delay whilst modelling occurs and that this delay was
discovered by Libet.[5]

It has also been claimed that the argument in the multiple drafts model does not support
its conclusion.[6]

"Straw man"

Much of the criticism asserts that Dennett's theory attacks the wrong target, failing to explain
what it claims to. Chalmers (1996) maintains that Dennett has produced no more than a
theory of how subjects report events.[7] Some even parody the title of the book as
"Consciousness Explained Away", accusing him of greedy reductionism.[8] Another line of
criticism disputes the accuracy of Dennett's characterisations of existing theories:

The now standard response to Dennett's project is that he has picked a fight with a straw man.
Cartesian materialism, it is alleged, is an impossibly naive account of phenomenal
consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of
mind. Consequently, whatever the effectiveness of Dennett's demolition job, it is
fundamentally misdirected (see, e.g., Block, 1993, 1995; Shoemaker, 1993; and Tye, 1993).[9]

Unoriginality

Multiple drafts is also attacked for making a claim to novelty. It may be the case, however,
that such attacks mistake which features Dennett is claiming as novel. Korb states that, "I
believe that the central thesis will be relatively uncontentious for most cognitive scientists,
but that its use as a cleaning solvent for messy puzzles will be viewed less happily in most
quarters." (Korb 1993) In this way, Dennett uses uncontroversial ideas towards more
controversial ends, (but that is how thinking often proceeds) leaving him open to claims of
unoriginality when uncontroversial parts are focused upon.

Even the notion of consciousness as drafts is not unique to Dennett. According to Hankins,
Dieter Teichert suggests that Paul Ricoeur's theories agree with Dennett's on the notion that
"the self is basically a narrative entity, and that any attempt to give it a free-floating
independent status is misguided." [Hankins] Others see Derrida's (1982) representationalism
54

as consistent with the notion of a mind that has perceptually changing content without a
definitive present instant.[10]

To those who believe that consciousness entails something more than behaving in all ways
conscious, Dennett's view is seen as eliminativist, since it denies the existence of qualia and
the possibility of philosophical zombies. However, Dennett is not denying the existence of
the mind or of consciousness, only what he considers a naive view of them. (the problem is
with these umbrella words they cannot refer to one thing, but must be broken up by
analysis and then those components can be explored and identified) The point of
contention is whether Dennett's own definitions are indeed more accurate, whether what we
think of when we speak of perceptions and consciousness can be understood in terms of
nothing more than their effect on behaviour. (umbrella words, meaningless as they stand
now, analyses and break them up into more meaningful ideas)

Information processing and consciousness

The role of information processing in consciousness has been criticised by John Searle who,
in his Chinese room argument,[11] states that he cannot find anything that could be recognised
as conscious experience in a system that relies solely on motions of things from place to
place. Dennett sees this argument as misleading, arguing that consciousness is not to be
found in a specific part of the system, but in the actions of the whole. In essence, he
denies that consciousness requires something in addition to capacity for behaviour, saying
that philosophers such as Searle, "just can't imagine how understanding could be a property
that emerges from lots of distributed quasi-understanding in a large system" (p. 439)

He states that, "all varieties of perceptionindeed all varieties of thought or mental activity
are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and
elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous
'editorial revision.'" (p. 111). Later he asserts, "These yield, over the course of time,
something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to
continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain, ..." (p. 135, emphasis in the
original).

In this work, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-
producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an
integral part of his program. He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He
also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it
cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not
constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. His strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach
of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms, (Ryles behaviourism) and
denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms: "[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard
philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me;
philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My
refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard
philosophical terminology as worse than uselessa major obstacle to progress since it
consists of so many errors."[23]
55

In Consciousness Explained, he affirms "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps

the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as
some sort of verificationist"

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/assets/searle.jpg
56

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/recent.html

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/links.html

Videos
From the Darwin Year:
TED Conference, March 16 2009: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny

British Humanist Association, March 19th, 2009

Sakip Sabanci Museum, organized by Sabanc University, Istanbul, April 10, 2009

Human Nature and Belief, Darwin Fest, Cambridge University, UK, July 8th 2009

Darwin's Legacy - Stanford University, October 13th, 2009

Darwin Conference at Chicago, October 29th through 31st

La Ciudad de las Ideas - Debate - Hitchens, Harris, Dennett vs Boteach, D';Souza, Taleb -
November, 2009

La Ciudad de las Ideas lecture November, 2009

CUNY Panel discussion - Intelligent Design an Immoral Argument? - Daniel Dennett and
John Haught, November 17th, 2009

BIG THINK videos

Other Videos:
NEW IDEAS Symposium: 5 of Dan Dennett's Favorite Thinkers, March 4th, 2016, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 1st presenter: David Haig

NEW IDEAS Symposium: 5 of Dan Dennett's Favorite Thinkers, March 4th, 2016, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 2nd presenter: Nancy Kanwisher

NEW IDEAS Symposium: 5 of Dan Dennett's Favorite Thinkers, March 4th, 2016, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 3rd presenter: Dan Lloyd

NEW IDEAS Symposium: 5 of Dan Dennett's Favorite Thinkers, March 4th, 2016, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 4th presenter: Ruth Millikan

NEW IDEAS Symposium: 5 of Dan Dennett's Favorite Thinkers, March 4th, 2016, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 5th presenter: Steven Pinker

Conversatorio Consciente: Captulo 1: Daniel Dennett x Andrs Rieznik

57

Mystical Brain

"De-Darwinizing Culture," University of Edinburgh Philosophy Society, March 19th, 2015.

Daniel Dennett over het denken, October 23rd, 2013

CARTA: Is the Human Mind Unique? UCSD, Humor, Feb 2013

Google lecture, May 15th, 2013

How Darwinian is Cultural Evolution? Ecole Normale Suprieure, Paris, Dec, 2013

Interviewed by Marieke Drost for Dutch Public Television, November 2012

Interviewed by Hemant Mehta for his Friendly Atheist Blog

Interview at Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies, June 21, 2012

How to tell youre an atheist, Melbourne Atheist Conference, April, 2012

University of Melbourne, April 12th, 2012

Taste of Tufts lecture April 20, 2012

Dan Dennett speaks at Creative Innovation 2011

@ UCLA February 4th, 2011

October 2, 2010 at the Humanist Canada Convention, Montreal

Words of the Prophets #37, interviewed by Rev. Phil, April 2010

YouTube - Daniel Dennett lecture on "Free Will" (Edinburgh University)

Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior - 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series (click here for reference
list)

Breaking the Spell booktalk at Reed Secular Alliance, March, 2009

Debating Dinesh D'Souza at Tufts University, November 30th, 2007

Being interviewed on CCTV International, January 2nd, 2008

Check out this video version of the dramatization of "Where am I?" made in Holland

Evolutionary Perspectives (Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, Diamond, Adams)

A Glorious Accident, 1993

58

New Featured Links

Closer to Truth: Cosmos. Consciousness. God.

Free Will Revisited: A conversation with Daniel Dennett (Sam Harris podcast, June 2016).

Hear What It Sounds Like When Philosopher Daniel Dennetts Brain Activity Gets Turned
into Music.

The Ling Space interview, January 2016.

"The future of artificial intelligence," 2015 VPRO (Dutch television) interview, London, New
College for the Humanities.

"What is consciousness?" The Economist Youtube channel.

A hard problem for soft brains: is there a Hard Problem?

In a funk about the "New Atheism"

Interviewed in JotDown Cultural Magazine, June 2015, Barcelona.

Here's a take on the Modern State of Religion, posted by Hayli Harding.

Review of Intuition Pumps by Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki, 2015.

The sessions of the Greenland Conference: Andy Clark and Daniel Dennett, June 2014.

Cultural Evolution at the Santa Fe Institute, May 2014

Dan Dennett voted 5th in a list of 100 Gl http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/assets/searle.jpgobal

Thought Leaders of 2013!

Simulando Dennett: Ferramentas e construes de um naturalista (Simulating Dennett),

Diego Caleiro, Sao Paulo 2013

Naturalism.org

Sam Harris

Errata for Daniel Dennett's new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Closer to Truth appearances

Zurich Minds,December 11th, 2013

Berlin Minds, December 10th, 2013

59

"What can science tell us about free will?" Harvey Preisler Memorial Symposium, November
23rd, 2013

Filipino Freethinkers interview, December 1, 2013

Interviewed by Muath Aldabbagh, 2014.

Recommended Links
ERASMUS PRIZE videos and info

Christopher Hitchens memorial video

Donate to A Better Life book project

New book! Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, by Matthew Hurley,
Daniel Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr., MIT Press, 2011

Tufts Now review of Inside Jokes

OPEN MIND

2012 Global Atheist Convention

The Philosophical Lexicon

Edge.org

The Brights

Butterflies and Wheels

Richard Dawkins

Life 32

Conway's Game of Life

The Mac version of Life

Polish translations of many of my articles (Click on this link and insert my name in the search
engine)

RodRego, the programmable register machine

Emily Rooney interviewed Daniel Dennett on NPR, 11/17/10

Point of Inquiry: CFI Interview 12/12/11

60

In Conversation with Dan Dennett guest post by Kaustubh Adhikari

On the Human Forum

Killjoys Challenge Claims Of Clever Animals

Interview in Macleans.ca

Miscellaneous
Lets Start With A Respect For Truth, Dennett on Wieseltier, Edge.org

Big Think Blog, August 4th, 2013

Big Think Mentor Blog, July 13th, 2013

Theos Think Tank Interview, July 4th, 2013

Interviewed by Rationalist Association, June 28th, 2013

Bloomberg Interview June 24th, 2013

Philosophy Bites Interview June 2013

Science Weekly podcast interview, June 2nd, 2013

Radio Boston interview, May 7th, 2013

BBC HARDTALK interview, April 1st, 2013

Katia Kanban discusses the debate about memetics between Dennett and Sperber

Philosophy Bites podcast interview

Interviewed by Patt Morrison on KPCC Radio 89.3

Reflections on the Personal/Subpersonal, May 11-12, UCL London

Dan Dennett wins the 2012 Erasmus Prize!

The winners of the 2009 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy

Read a tribute read by Richard Dawkins while giving Dan Dennett an award

Is religion a threat to rationality and science? in eG Weekly, The London Guardian, April
22nd, 2008.

Listen to a podcast of Dan Dennett at Agora's Science, Religion and Reason Debate in
London, April 22nd, 2008
61

He also can be heard here, on the BBC - Radio 4 - Start the Week program, recorded April
21, 2008

Interview by IHU Online (Brazilian magazine)

An animation of my DARWIN acronym in Latin, by Deniz Cem nduygu

A Greek version of the DARWIN acronym by Gerol Petruzella

Excellent Tree of Life Diagram

Belorussian translation of "The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?" provided by

FatCow

Detengan a ese cuervo! (Entrevista a Daniel C. Dennett) | Desde el Exilio

Desde el Exilio (front page)

La nueva Ilustracin Evolucionista / The new Evolutionary Enlightenment: Detengan a ese

cuervo! (Entrevista a Daniel C. Dennett)

Entrevista Daniel Dennett -- Desconstruindo o "eu" (Flavio Paranhos)

Interviewed in El Pais Digital, 3/26/2010, "El Heredero de Bertrand Russell"

Polish translation of The Unbelievable Truth: Why America(NYDailyNews.com,

10/3/10) provided by Magorzata Koraszewska

Serbian translation, by Mihailo Antovic, of "From Typo to Thinko: When Evolution

Graduated to Semantic Norms"

Hindi translation of The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

Russian translation of The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

Polish translation of A lesson from Hitch: When rudeness is called for

Polish translation of The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

Another Polish translation of The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

Czech translation of The Case for Rorts

Polish translation of "Seven Tools for Thinking"

Polish translation of Dennett on Wieseltier V. Pinker in the New Republic

62

Portugese translation of Turings strange inversion of reasoning. For information about

the journal in which the translation appears, click here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris

On spirituality, mysticism, and the paranormal

Despite his anti-religion sentiments, Sam Harris also claims that there is "nothing irrational
about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe,
devotion and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person
can have."[21]

In January 2007, Harris received criticism from John Gorenfeld, writing for AlterNet.[56]
Gorenfeld took Harris to task for defending some of the findings of paranormal investigations
into areas such as reincarnation and xenoglossy. He also strongly criticized Harris for his
defense of judicial torture. Harris has stated that he believes torture should be illegal, but that
it in certain extreme circumstances it may be ethical to break the law.[34] Gorenfeld's critique
was subsequently reflected by Robert Todd Carroll, writing in The Skeptic's Dictionary.[57] On
his website Harris disputed that he had defended these views to the extent that Gorenfeld
suggested.[34]

Free will

Harris says the idea of free will is incoherent and "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable
reality." He maintains that humans have no free will and no sense can be given to the concept
that we might have free will.[71][72] According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a
biochemical puppet."[73] People's thoughts and intentions, Harris says, "emerge from
background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control."

Neuroscience
Building on his interests in belief and religion, Harris completed a PhD in cognitive
neuroscience at UCLA.[22][27] He used fMRI to explore whether the brain responses differ
between sentences that subjects judged as true, false, or undecidable, across a wide range of
categories including autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical,
semantic, and factual statements.[82]

In another study, Harris and colleagues examined the neural basis of religious and non-
religious belief using fMRI.[83] Fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers were
scanned as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For
both groups, statements of belief (sentences judged as either true or false) were associated
with increased activation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in
emotional judgment, processing uncertainty, assessing rewards and thinking about oneself.[27]
A "comparison of all religious trials to all nonreligious trials produced a wide range of signal
differences throughout the brain," and the processing of religious belief and empirical belief
differed in significant ways. The regions associated with increased activation in response to
63

religious stimuli included the anterior insula, the ventral striatum, the anterior cingulate
cortex, and the posterior medial cortex.[83]

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/waking-up-with-sam-harris/id733163012?mt=2

Description
Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important
and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events. Sam Harris is
the author of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will,
Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of
Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in more than
20 languages. Mr. Harris and his work have been discussed in The New York Times, Time,
Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing
has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Newsweek,
The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and
elsewhere. Mr. Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D.
in neuroscience from UCLA.

his long-range goal is "to understand how neural signals processed by different brain
regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world".[44]

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is an unusual perceptual condition in which stimulation to one sense triggers an

involuntary sensation in other senses. Eagleman is the developer of The Synesthesia Battery,
a free online test by which people can determine whether they are synesthetic.[45] By this
technique he has tested and analyzed thousands of synesthetes,[46] and has written a book on
synesthesia with Richard Cytowic, entitled Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain
of Synesthesia.[7] Eagleman has proposed that sensory processing disorder, a common
characteristic of autism,[citation needed] may be a form of synesthesia[47]

Neuroscience and the law

Neurolaw is an emerging field that determines how modern brain science should affect the
way we make laws, punish criminals, and invent new methods for rehabilitation.[8][48][49]
Eagleman is the founder and director of the Center for Science and Law.[50][51]

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

The book explores the brain as being a "team of rivals", with parts of the brain
constantly "fighting it out" among each other. [73]
http://www.eaglemanlab.net/people

I am a neuroscientist with deep interests in sensory substitution, time perception, vision,

synesthesia, social neuroscience, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. I
64

serve as an adjunct professor in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at

Stanford University School of Medicine. Separately, I serve as director of the Center for
Science and Law, a national non-profit. I am the founder of two
companies: BrainCheck (which uses interactive testing on portable tablets to measure brain
function) and NeoSensory (which expands human senses).

I am the author and presenter of The Brain, an international 6-hour PBS television series. In
this series, I pose a deceptively simple question from a neuroscientist's point of view: what
does it mean to be human?

I have written several books, including the New York Times bestseller Incognito: The Secret
Lives of the Brain, which was named a Book of the Year by Amazon, Goodreads, the Boston
Globe, and others. My other books include Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, Why
the Net Matters, and Brain & Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach (Oxford University Press). My book of
fiction, Sum, is an international bestseller translated into over 30 languages. It was named a Best Book of the Year
by Barnes and Noble, New Scientist, and the Chicago Tribune. British musician Brian Eno and I performed a musical
reading of Sum at the Sydney Opera House, and German composer Max Richter translated Sum into a full opera at the
Royal Opera House in London.

Public understanding of science is a passion of mine, and to that end I have written for
the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Atlantic, The Week, Slate, Wired, New Scientist, and
others. I speak often on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss what's new and important
in science. I have founded a prize in mathematics and physics.

I am fortunate enough to be a Guggenheim Fellow. Within the scientific community, I serve

as an editor for the Journal of Science and Law, the Journal of Vision, PLoS One, and
Seminars in Brain and Consciousness. I was awarded the Society for Neuroscience Educator
of the Year award. I serve on the board of directors for several organizations, including The
Long Now Foundation.

http://www.eaglemanlab.net/
The long range goal of our research is to understand how the brain constructs
perception, how different brains do so differently, and how this matters for
society. To that end, our four main prongs involve time perception, sensory
substitution, synesthesia, and neurolaw. Please explore the menus for more
information, and see publications for our latest research results.

Projects

Sensory Substitution

Time

Synesthesia

Neurolaw

Other
65

Other projects in our lab include illusory motion reversal, the flash lag effect, a
theory of cerebellar glomeruli, extracellular calcium as a neurotransmitter, and
dopamine and human decision-making.
http://www.mylifememory.info/
Hyperthymesia is a phenomenon in which some people maintain an exceptional
memory for events in their personal pasts. People who experience
hyperthymesia have a superior ability to recall specific details of
autobiographical events, and also tend to spend a large amount of time thinking
about their personal pasts.
For someone with hyperthymesia, memories are sometimes described as
involuntary mental associations happen instantaneously without the person
consciously trying to recall them. For example, when hyperthymestic individuals
encounter a date on which a significant event occurred, they will typically "see" a
detailed, vivid image of the day in their minds and will often recall other
tangential details surrounding it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possibilianism

Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the diverse claims of traditional theism and
the positions of certainty in strong atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.[1][2][3][4][5]
The term was invented by Robbie Parrish,[6] a friend of neuroscientist David Eagleman who
defined the term in relation to his book of fiction Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.[7]
Asked whether he was an atheist or a religious person on a National Public Radio interview
in February 2009, he replied "I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't
have any way of testing right now."[7] In a subsequent interview with the New York Times,
Eagleman expanded on the definition:

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to
commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance
in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a
beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new
position one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities.
Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in
committing to any particular story." [3]

In a New Yorker profile of Eaglemanentitled "The Possibilian"Burkhard Bilger wrote:[8]

Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, [Eagleman] told me. From the
unfathomed complexity of brain tissue"essentially an alien computational material"to
the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around
us to insist on strict atheism, he said. "And we know far too much to commit to a particular
religious story." Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in
Sum, as bits of networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial
organism, or any of a thousand other possibilities, and then test those ideas against the
available evidence? "Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple
66

hypotheses in mind at the same time," he said. "As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an
uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one."

An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian.[9][10][11] The possibilian perspective is

distinguished from agnosticism in its active exploration of novel possibilities and its
emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to
privilege one over the others.[5][12] Eagleman has emphasized that possibilianism reflects the
scientific temperament of creativity and intellectual humility in the face of "the known
unknowns."[13][14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolaw
Neurolaw is an emerging field of interdisciplinary study that explores the effects
of discoveries in neuroscience on legal rules and standards. Drawing from
neuroscience, philosophy, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and
criminology, neurolaw practitioners seek to address not only the descriptive and
predictive issues of how neuroscience is and will be used in the legal system, but
also the normative issues of how neuroscience should and should not be used.
The most prominent questions that have emerged from this exploration are as
follows: To what extent can a tumor or brain injury alleviate criminal punishment?
Can sentencing or rehabilitation regulations be influenced by neuroscience? Who
is permitted access to images of a person's brain? Neuroscience is beginning to
address these questions in its effort to understand human behavior, and will
potentially shape future aspects of legal processes. [1][2] New insights into the
psychology and cognition of the brain have been made available by functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These new technologies were a break from
the conventional and primitive views of the brain that have been prevalent in the
legal system for centuries. Brain imaging has provided a much deeper insight
into thought processes, and will have an effect on the law because it contests
customary beliefs about mental development. Because the science is still
developing and because there is substantial opportunity for misuse, the legal
realm recognizes the need to proceed cautiously. Neurolaw proponents are
quickly finding means to apply neuroscience to a variety of different contexts.
For example, intellectual property could be better evaluated through
neuroscience. Major areas of current research include applications in the
courtroom, how neuroscience can and should be used legally, and how the law is
created and applied.[3][4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum:_Forty_Tales_from_the_Afterlives
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, also simply called Sum, is a work of
speculative fiction by the neuroscientist David Eagleman. It is in press in 28
languages as of 2016. The Los Angeles Times described it as "teeming, writhing
with imagination."[2] Barnes and Noble named it one of the Best Books of 2009. [

Philosophy
Eagleman refers to himself as a possibilian[16] and to Sum as a reflection of that position.[17][18]
According to his definition, possibilianism rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional
theism and the certainty of atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.[19] The
possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active
exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on holding multiple hypotheses at once
67

when no data is available to privilege one position over the others.[17] Possibilianism is
understood to be consonant with the "scientific temperament" of creativity and tolerance for
multiple ideas when there is a lack of data.[4] Speaking with the New York Times, Eagleman
stated that he was working on a book entitled "Why I am a Possibilian".[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incognito:_The_Secret_Lives_of_the_Brain

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is a New York Times bestselling[1] non-fiction book
by American neuroscientist David Eagleman, who directs the Laboratory for Perception and
Action at Baylor College of Medicine.[2]

"If the conscious mind-the part you consider to be you-is just the tip of the iceberg,
what is the rest doing?" This is the main question throughout the entirety of the book.

In Incognito, Eagleman contends that most of the operations of the brain are inaccessible to
awareness, such that the conscious mind "is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steam ship,
taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot."

Incognito appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list intermittently in 2011 and 2012. It
was named a Best Book of 2011 by Amazon,[3] the Boston Globe,[4] and the Houston
Chronicle.[5]

The book was reviewed as "appealing and persuasive" by the Wall Street Journal[6] and "a
shining example of lucid and easy-to-grasp science writing" by The Independent.[7] A starred
review from Kirkus described it as "a book that will leave you looking at yourself--and the
world--differently."[8]

In July 2011, Eagleman discussed Incognito with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report.[9

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/InsideList-t.html

TIME TRAVELER: David Eagleman, who hits the hardcover nonfiction list this week at
No. 14 with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, is the kind of guy who really does
make being a neuroscientist look like fun. His experiments tend to involve things like
dropping people off amusement park thrill rides (to measure the way time seems to slow
down during near-death experiences) and hanging out in the studio with Brian Eno and the
drummer from Coldplay (to see how professional timekeepers stay precisely on the beat). He
wears hip ankle boots and designer jeans while dashing between TED talks and his lab at
Baylor. In his spare time, Eagleman has even written an acclaimed collection of speculative
short stories, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, that will be staged as a full opera in
London next year. Hes also getting some traction with his efforts to start a new quasi-
religious movement called Possibilianism, which aims to move beyond the dueling certitudes
of traditional religion and atheism to explore radical what-ifs about the universe and human
consciousness. One story in Sum, for example, considers the possibility that life on earth
may be just a brief, pleasurable vacation from our true existence as gigantic beings doing the
heavy lifting of holding up the cosmos. (If you are thinking of dying, Alexander McCall
68

Smith wrote in the Book Review in 2009, this book may not exactly increase your peace of
mind.)

Photo

In Incognito, Eagleman engagingly sums up recent discoveries about the unconscious

processes that dominate our mental life, including his own pioneering work in time
perception. His contention that we are always living a little bit in the past, thanks to the time
it takes the conscious mind to coordinate different sensory signals, may give comfort to
deadline-challenged journalists. His claim that smaller body size correlates with living more
closely in the moment (the benefit of a shorter spinal cord) has already cheered up another
beleaguered demographic. I once mentioned this in an NPR interview, and I got flooded by
e-mails from short people, Eagleman told the New Yorker in April. They were so pleased.
For about a day, I was the hero of short people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304474804576371522374025268

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/incognito-the-secret-lives-
of-the-brain-by-david-eagleman-2268847.html

When Galileo observed that we are not, in fact, at the centre of our solar system, man's initial
shock at the dethronement gave way to an exponential increase in his awe at the vastness and
complexity of the universe.

In Incognito, the neuroscientist David Eagleman argues that something analogous happened
in the 20th century. What Freud intuited and neuroscience has confirmed is that the vast
majority of your neural activity occurs at levels for which the conscious you, "the 'I' that
flickers to life when you wake up in the morning", just doesn't have security clearance. "The
conscious mind is not at the centre of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant
edge, hearing but whispers of the activity .... A mere 400 years after our fall from the centre
of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the centre of ourselves."

Things which seem to come naturally to you, such as instincts, appetites, perceptions, desires
and motor functions, seem so, not because they don't require much brain activity, but because
they're the product of neural sub-routines that run more efficiently when the conscious mind
isn't invited to get involved. A large part of Incognito is dedicated to the ingenious
experiments, fascinating behavioural quirks, and bizarre case studies from which we can
nevertheless infer what's going on in there. For example, why can't you tickle yourself unless
you're schizophrenic; how do Parkinson's medications cause compulsive gambling; and
what's going on when a patient has Anton's syndrome (the failure to recognise one's own
blindness), synaesthesia (the condition in which sensory perceptions are blended, such that
one might hear a colour), or alien hand syndrome (which is much as it sounds, and
disturbingly like a scene in The Evil Dead)?

There's another category of tasks which you used to have to perform consciously, but that
you're now better at when you don't. Tying shoelaces, say, or catching a ball. According to
some models, burning in the necessary neural circuitry is about all that the conscious part of
the human mind was evolved for. In Eagleman's model, however, consciousness was needed
69

in order to manage an increasing number of complex and competing neural sub-populations.

This explains our impulse for coherent narratives, and why we're able to argue with
ourselves, or talk ourselves into something.

If Eagleman's name is already familiar it will be for his bestselling 2009 book Sum, a wildly
imaginative collection of short stories which purported to be about the afterlife but were
actually profoundly sensitive to what it means to be human in the here and now. Incognito is
a different kind of book, intended to explain his day job to a general reader and as such, it is
a shining example of lucid and easy-to-grasp science writing. Which isn't to say that it is
reductionist ("By itself, the biology only gives partial insight"), nor that there's no space for
poetic phrasing (information is carried by "flotilla of drifting molecules"). Nor does
Eagleman feel bound by his field. Neuroscience is at a stage, he argues, where it can weigh in
on age-old philosophical debates. So, Incognito asks where exactly when our heads are so
full of unconscious thoughts and hard-wired behaviours free will is supposed to reside and,
if it is missing, what does this mean for our legal system? It's a book about the things it is
impossible to think about, and others that it is no longer possible not to.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-eagleman/incognito-brains-behind-
mind/

KIRKUS REVIEW
An up-to-date examination of what used to be called the mind-body problem.

Eagleman (Neuroscience/Baylor Coll. of Medicine; Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives,
2009) makes the point that our sense of ourselves as coherent, free-standing personalities is at
odds with the most basic findings about the workings of the human brain, an organ so
complex that an objective description of it sounds hyperbolic. Instinct, unconscious impulses,
automatic systems, emotion and a dozen other forces, most of which we arent even aware of,
affect every thought and action. The book is full of startling examples; split-brain research,
for example, shows how the two halves of a mind can be completely at odds, with neither
being aware of what the other experiences. Nor are those of us with whole brains and a
complete set of senses necessarily experiencing the world as it really is. For example, other
animals experience a different part of the visual spectrum, or can detect sounds and odors we
have no awareness of. A significant segment of the populationabout 15 percent of women
sees colors the rest of us cant. Our brains work differently when learning a skill and after
its become second nature its one thing to drive to a new place, another to drive a familiar
route, and our brains work much harder doing the former than the latter, when we can go on
automatic pilot. There are lessons to be learned from various mental disorders, as well.
Victims of strokes affecting certain parts of the brain may claim that they are operating at full
capacity when they are clearly not; one former Supreme Court justice was forced to retire
after displaying these symptoms. Eagleman has a wealth of such observations, backed up
with case studies, bits of pop culture, literary references and historic examples.

A book that will leave you looking at yourselfand the worlddifferently.

http://www.pbs.org/show/brain-david-eagleman/
70

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explores the human brain in an epic series that reveals the
ultimate story of us, why we feel and think the things we do. This ambitious project blends
science with innovative visual effects and compelling personal stories, and addresses some
big questions. By understanding the human brain, we can come close to understanding
humanity.

http://www.pbs.org/the-brain-with-david-eagleman/home/

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of

Medicine, in Houston. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. He did a belly flop on the
bricks, he says, and his nose took most of the impact. He made a one-point landing, as his
father puts it. The cartilage was so badly smashed that an emergency-room surgeon had to
remove it all, leaving Eagleman with a rubbery proboscis that he could bend in any direction.
But it stiffened up eventually, and its hard to tell that it was ever injured. Eagleman has
puckish, neatly carved features, with a lantern jaw and modish sideburns. In Baylors lab-
coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a
bounce in his step thats suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure
Island.

If Eaglemans body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply
imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time. As the head of a lab at Baylor, Eagleman has
spent the past decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brains biological
clocks. He has had the good fortune to arrive in his field at the same time as fMRI scanners,
which allow neuroscientists to observe the brain at work, in the act of thinking. But his best
results have often come through more inventive means: video games, optical illusions,
physical challenges. Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly
sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness. There
are an infinite number of boring things to do in science, he told me. But we live these short
life spans. Why not do the thing thats the coolest thing in the world to do?

The Eagleman lab, on the ground floor of Baylors Ben Taub General Hospital, could be the
lair of a precocious but highly distractible teen-ager. The doors are pinned with cartoons, the
counters strewn with joysticks and other gizmos. The conference table is flanked by a large
red rubber ball, for use as a chair or a Hippity Hop. When Eagleman first moved in, he had
the walls painted baby blue, with a shiny finish designed to be erasable. By now, theyve
been covered from floor to ceiling with equations, graphs, time lines, to-do lists, aphorisms,
and sketches of brain wavesa Pollocky palimpsest of red, green, purple, and black
scribblings. The old stuff is really hard to erase, Eagleman told me. Its like memory that
way.

Although Eagleman and his students study timing in the brain, their own sense of time tends
to be somewhat unreliable. Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work every morning,
though its been broken for months. The other day, I was in the lab, he told me, and I said
to Daisy, who sits in the corner, Hey, what time is it? And she said, I dont know. My watch
is broken. It turns out that were all wearing broken watches. Scientists are often drawn to
71

things that bedevil them, he said. I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the
scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and theyre all
overweight. But Eaglemans ambivalence goes deeper. Clocks offer at best a convenient
fiction, he says. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience
shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles
back.

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds,
minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and
anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our
senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart,
and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If youre hiking through a jungle and a tiger
growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when
it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be
as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Yet brain time, as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. Try this exercise, he
suggests in a recent essay. Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes
back and forth, so that youre looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left
eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and
land on the other location. But heres the kicker: you never see your eyes move. Theres no
evidence of any gaps in your perceptionno darkened stretches like bits of blank filmyet
much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes
darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did
the missing moments go? (information redundancy of too much irrelevant dat, and sometimes
relevant ones?)

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive
exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any
other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to
quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the
mirror, known as saccades, arent the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake
of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised.
What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking
into a sheriffs office. Ive just been attacked by three snails! he shouts. Tell me what
happened, the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: I dont know, it all happened so
fast.

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed
an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does
the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is
some other mechanism at work? The only way to know for sure was to re-create the situation
in a controlled setting. Eagleman and one of his graduate students, Chess Stetson, who is now
at Caltech, began by designing and programming a perceptual chronometer. About the size
of a pack of cards, it had an L.E.D. display connected to a circuit board and powered by a
nine-volt battery. The unit could be strapped to a subjects wrist, where it would flash a
72

number at a rate just beyond the threshold of perception. If time slowed down, Eagleman
reasoned, the number would become visible. Now he just needed a good, life-threatening
situation.

Late one afternoon in October, Eagleman and I pulled into a gravel parking lot northwest of
Dallas. A dingy cinder-block ticket office stood to one side, with a sign above the door that
said Zero Gravity. Inside, past a low chain-link fence, a collection of giant steel structures
rose several stories into the sky. To the left was a rickety-looking platform with a rubber rope
dangling from it; to the right, a monstrous orange windmill with seats attached to the tips of
its blades. We had to shut down the Scraper, one of the park attendants told me, pointing at
it. Its waitin for a part from Germany.

Zero Gravity was billed as a thrill park, but it looked more like an abandoned construction
siteor an arena for death matches in a post-apocalyptic film. When Eagleman first went
there, five years ago, he knew it was the place for him. He had tried to test the chronometer
on his grad students, on a field trip to Six Flags AstroWorld, in Houston, but even the largest
roller coasters proved insufficiently terrifying. He needed something completely safe yet
plausibly deadly. I really chewed on this for a while, he told me. I couldnt put people in a
car accident. Then he heard about the SCAD.

The ride stood in the middle of the lot at Zero Gravity, like a half-built oil derrick. A steel
gondola hung between its four legs and could be lifted to the top by thick cables. SCAD was
short for suspended catch air devicea phrase more confusing than its acronym. But the idea
was simple: when the rider reached the top of the tower, hed be hooked to a cable and
lowered through a hole in the floor of the gondola. His back would be to the ground, his eyes
looking straight up. When the cable was released, he would plummet a hundred and ten feet,
in pure free fall, until a net caught him near the bottom. Ive been up this thing three times,
and its gotten scarier every time, Eagleman said. The second you drop, every part of you
locks up. Your abs are rock solid, and you cant breathe. Youre falling backward, going fifty
miles an hour when you hit the net.

We scanned the lot for potential volunteers, but the park was deserted. There are only two
SCADs in the country, both of which, until recently, had pristine safety records. Then, in July,
a SCAD operator in the Wisconsin Dells triggered a drop before the net had been lifted fully
into place. When the ridera twelve-year-old girl named Teagan Martilanded in the net,
her momentum stretched it to the ground. The impact fractured her skull and broke her spine
in ten places. Afterward, the SCAD operator was put on leave for reasons of mental health. It
was just human error, the attendant in Dallas assured us. Nothing like that had happened
here.

Just then, a young couple wandered into the park. They were both in their early twenties,
moonfaced and a little fidgety. April had small round glasses and a long ponytail; T.J. had a
baggy black T-shirt with a purple sword on it, and a modest mullet combed back on top.
Theyd met at the Walmart in Weatherford, an hour away, they told us. April had found this
place online but already seemed to regret it: she clutched T.J.s hand and peered at the SCAD,
her shoulders hunched up around her ears. He followed her gaze. Ive jumped off cliffs into
lakes before, he said. But thats about it.
73

When Eagleman showed them the perceptual chronometer, they looked a little dubious.
Eaglemans excitement about his research is usually infectious. Hes a good talker, with a gift
for distillation and off-the-cuff analogy, and he tends to gather steam as he goes, leaping from
idea to idea until his voice is hoarse and his mind is catapulting off to distant dimensions.
(What if we were to land on a planet with aliens who live at a different time scale from us?
he asked me at one point. Would we seem like statues to them the way trees do to us?) In
this setting, though, it was a little hard to take him seriously. The more sober and scientific he
tried to sound, the more April and T.J. seemed to take him for some unhinged Trekkie
babbling on about his time machine.

Still, they agreed to give it a try. The attendant fitted them with harnesses, latched them into
the gondola, and sent them lurching into the Texas sky. I could see Aprils ponytail whipping
around above her head like a wind sock. What is it, Tuesday? Eagleman said. How does
someone, on a Tuesday, wake up and decide, This is the day that Im going to scare myself
to death? Then he pulled a stopwatch from his pocket and waited for the bodies to drop.

Eagleman traces his research back to psychophysicists in Germany in the late eighteen-
hundreds, but his true forefather may be the American physiologist Hudson Hoagland. In the
early nineteen-thirties, Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps
time, based partly on his wifes behavior when she had the flu. She complained that hed been
away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when hed been gone only a short while. So
Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with
his watch. Its not hard to imagine her annoyance at this suggestion, or his smugness
afterward: when her minute was up, his clock showed thirty-seven seconds. Hoagland went
on to repeat the experiment again and again, presumably over his wifes delirious objections
(her fever rose above a hundred and three). The result was one of the classic graphs of time-
perception literature: the higher his wifes temperature, Hoagland found, the shorter her time
estimate. Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got.

Psychologists spent the next few decades trying to identify this mechanism. They worked
with mice, rats, fish, turtles, cats, and pigeons, then moved on to monkeys, children, and
brain-damaged adults. They shocked their subjects with electrodes, strapped them into heated
helmets, dunked them in water baths, and irritated them with insistent clicks, hoping to speed
up or slow down their internal clocks. Hoagland believed that timing was a unitary chemical
process tied to metabolism. But later studies suggested a hodgepodge of systems, each
devoted to a different time scalethe cerebral equivalent of a sundial, an hourglass, and an
atomic clock. Mother Natures a tinkerer instead of an engineer, Eagleman says. She
doesnt just invent something and check it off the list. Everything is layers on layers built on
top of each other, and that provides tremendous robustness. Parkinsons disease can impair
our ability to time intervals of a few seconds, for instance, but leave split-second timing
intact.

Just how many clocks we contain still isnt clear. The most recent neuroscience papers make
the brain sound like a Victorian attic, full of odd, vaguely labelled objects ticking away in
every corner. The circadian clock, which tracks the cycle of day and night, lurks in the
suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the hypothalamus. The cerebellum, which governs muscle
74

movements, may control timing on the order of a few seconds or minutes. The basal ganglia
and various parts of the cortex have all been nominated as timekeepers, though theres some
disagreement on the details. The standard model, proposed by the late Columbia psychologist
John Gibbon in the nineteen-seventies, holds that the brain has pacemaker neurons that
release steady pulses of neurotransmitters. More recently, at Duke, the neuroscientist Warren
Meck has suggested that timing is governed by groups of neurons that oscillate at different
frequencies. At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano believes that areas throughout the brain function
as clocks, their tissue ticking with neural networks that change in predictable patterns.
Imagine a skyscraper at night, he told me. Some people on the top floor work till
midnight, while some on the lower floors may go to bed early. If you studied the patterns
long enough, you could tell the time just by looking at which lights are on.

Time isnt like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are
relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: its
hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of
course, you have synesthesiaanother of Eaglemans obsessions.) But a sense of time is
threaded through everything we perceive. Its there in the length of a song, the persistence of
a scent, the flash of a light bulb. Theres always an impulse toward phrenology (the detailed
study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental
abilities.) in neurosciencetoward saying, Here is the spot where its happening,
Eagleman told me. But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. Its a
distributed property. Its metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.

The real mystery is how all this is cordinated. When you watch a ballgame or bite into a hot
dog, your senses are in perfect synch: they see and hear, touch and taste the same thing at the
same moment. Yet they operate at fundamentally different speeds, with different inputs.
Sound travels more slowly than light, and aromas and tastes more slowly still. Even if the
signals reached your brain at the same time, they would get processed at different rates. The
reason that a hundred-metre dash starts with a pistol shot rather than a burst of light,
Eagleman pointed out, is that the body reacts much more quickly to sound. Our ears and
auditory cortex can process a signal forty milliseconds faster than our eyes and visual cortex
more than making up for the speed of light. Its another vestige, perhaps, of our days in the
jungle, when wed hear the tiger long before wed see it.

In Eaglemans essay Brain Time, published in the 2009 collection Whats Next?
Dispatches on the Future of Science, he borrows a conceit from Italo Calvinos Invisible
Cities. The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth
century. It sits enthroned in its skull, encased in darkness and silence, at a lofty remove
from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing
word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long
out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference
is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present
processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous
now. How does it manage it?

The mind-body problem has been vexing Eagleman longer than most. Even as a boy, his
mother told me, he had a tendency to dissociate himselfto assess his own inner workings
75

from a cool, analytical distance. My brain can do this, hed say. His mother was a biology
teacher, his father a psychiatrist often called upon to evaluate insanity pleas, but their son was
a creature outside their usual experience. There were things about Dave that were a little bit
funny, his mother says. He wrote his first words at the age of two, on an Underwood
typewriter. At twelve, he was explaining relativity to them. One of his favorite tricks was to
ask for a list of random objects, then repeat it back from memoryin reverse order, if people
wished. His record was four hundred items.

As an undergraduate at Rice, Eagleman wanted to be a writer, but his parents persuaded him
to major in electrical engineering instead. It was like chewing on autumn leaves, he says.
An extended sabbatical ensued. After his sophomore year, Eagleman joined the Israeli Army
as a volunteer, then spent a semester at Oxford studying political science and literature, and
finally moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter and a standup comic. Nothing took.
I knew I had some intellectual horsepower, he says. But I didnt know where my tires
would catch purchase. Back at Rice, he began to read books about the brain in his spare time
and decided to take a course in neurolinguistics. I was immediately enchanted just by the
idea of it, Eagleman says. Here was this three-pound organ that was the seat of everything
we areour hopes and desires and our loves. They had me at page one.

Mathematicians, like rock musicians, tend to do their best work in their twenties and thirties.
Not so neuroscientists. The Nobel Prizes in the field are usually earned in mid-career, after a
few false starts and fruitless sidetracks. Biology is special that way, Eagleman says. It
takes years for people to get a feeling for the organismfor how nature actually works.
Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, What if its
like this computational model, this physical problem? Theyre terrific ideas, but theyre
wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.

Eagleman was speaking from experience. As a grad student at Baylor, he leaned especially
hard on his math skills at first, having had so little training in biology. (I would ask the
professors what they were doing, and they would say, Yes, yes . . . Greek, Greek, Latin,
Latin, he says of his admissions interview.) For his doctoral work, he programmed a piece of
virtual neural tissue so complex that it tied up the Texas Medical Centers new supercomputer
for days, prompting complaints from all over the university. I remember, when he was
writing it, he had a sack of raw potatoes under his desk, his dissertation adviser, Read
Montague, told me. He would cook a potato in the microwave, put it in a cup, and lean over
and bite it while he was typing. It kind of set the tone for my lab for the succeeding decade. It
chased away the faint of heart.

Eaglemans program was a theoretical as well as a technical feat: it showed that brain cells
can exchange information not just through neurotransmitters but through the ebb and flow of
calcium atoms. He went on to earn a postdoc at the prestigious Salk Institute, near San Diego.
Once there, though, he fell under the spell of Francis Crick, a biologist interested in more
than clever simulations. Crick was eighty-three when Eagleman met him, in 1999. He had
won the Nobel Prize with James Watson almost forty years earlier, for deciphering the
structure of DNA, but his research had taken a hard left turn since then, from genetics to the
study of consciousness. Wed have these seminars and hed sit there and his head would
nod, and Id think, Oh, poor guy, the tolls of senescence, Eagleman recalls. Then hed get
76

this smile on his face and raise his handand just disembowel the speaker. Id never seen
anything like that.

For decades, brain researchers had taken their lead from behaviorists like B. F. Skinner. They
treated their subject as a machine like any other, with inputs, outputs, and a shadowy
mechanism in between. But Crick and a handful of other researchers believed that it was time
to pry open Skinners black boxto at least begin to identify the mechanics of individual
awareness. When I started out, you basically werent allowed to talk about it, Eagleman
says. Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why, when you put together millions of
parts, does something suddenly have a sense of itself? All of this went out the window after
B. F. Skinner. And it took a guy with Cricks gravitas to come in and say, You know what?
This is a scientific problemthe most exciting of our time. Crick called it the scientific
search.

Eagleman had to wait a few weeks to be granted an audience with Crick. (I kind of became
pals with his secretary, he told me.) But they quickly hit it off and met regularly after that.
Like Crick, Eagleman was fascinated by consciousness. He thought of time not just as a
neuronal computationa matter for biological clocksbut as a window on the movements
of the mind. In a paper published in Science in 2000, for instance, Eagleman looked at an
optical illusion known as the flash-lag effect. The illusion could take many forms, but in
Eaglemans version it consisted of a white dot flashing on a screen as a green circle passed
over it. To determine where the dot hit the circle, Eagleman found, his subjects minds had to
travel back and forth in time. They saw the dot flash, then watched the circle move and
calculated its trajectory, then went back and placed the dot on the circle. It wasnt a matter of
prediction, he wrote, but of postdiction.

Something similar happens in language all the time, Dean Buonomano told me. If someone
says, The mouse on the desk is broken, your mind calls forth a different image than if you
hear, The mouse on the desk is eating cheese. Your brain registers the word mouse, waits
for its context, and only then goes back to visualize it. But language leaves time for second
thoughts. The flash-lag effect seems instantaneous. Its as if the word mouse were changed
to track pad before you even heard it.

The explanation for this is both simple and profoundly strange. Eagleman first described it to
me on the way from Houston to the Zero Gravity thrill park in Dallas. Imagine that theres
an accident on the highway up ahead, he began. One of these cars runs into that bridge. If
the crash were to occur a hundred yards away, wed see the car hit the bridge in silence. The
sound, like a peal of thunder, would take a moment to reach us. The closer the impact, the
shorter the delay, but only up to a point: at a hundred and ten feet, sight and sound would
suddenly lock together. Under that threshold, Eagleman explained, the signals reach the brain
within a hundred milliseconds of one another, and any differences in processing are erased. In
the early days of television, Eagleman told me, broadcasters noticed a similar phenomenon.
Their engineers went to a great deal of trouble to synchronize sound and image, but it soon
became clear that perfectionism was pointless. As long as the delay was less than a hundred
milliseconds, no one noticed it.
77

The margin of error is surprisingly wide. If the brain can distinguish sounds as little as five
milliseconds apart, why dont we notice a delay twenty times longer? A possible answer
began to emerge in the late nineteen-fifties, in the work of Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at
the University of California, San Francisco. Libet worked with patients at a local hospital
who had been admitted for neurosurgery and had had a hole drilled into their skull to expose
the cortex. In one experiment, he used an electrode to shock the brain tissue with electrical
pulses. The cortex is wired straight to the skin and various body parts, so the subjects would
feel a tingle in the corresponding area. But not right away: the shock didnt register for up to
half a secondan eternity in brain time. The implications are quite astounding, Libet later
wrote. We are not conscious of the actual moment of the present. We are always a little late.

Libets findings have been hard to replicate (zapping a patients exposed brain is frowned
upon these days), and they remain controversial. But to Eagleman they make a good deal of
sense. Like Kublai Khan, he says, the brain needs time to get its story straight. It gathers up
all the evidence of our senses, and only then reveals it to us. Its a deeply counterintuitive
idea in some ways. Touch your finger to an ember or prick it on a needle and the pain is
immediate. You feel it nownot in half a second. But perception and reality are often a little
out of register, as the saccade experiment showed. If all our senses are slightly delayed, we
have no context by which to measure a given lag. Reality is a tape-delayed broadcast,
carefully censored before it reaches us.

Living in the past may seem like a disadvantage, but its a cost that the brain is willing to
pay, Eagleman said. Its trying to put together the best possible story about whats going on
in the world, and that takes time. Touch is the slowest of the senses, since the signal has to
travel up the spinal cord from as far away as the big toe. That could mean that the over-all
delay is a function of body size: elephants may live a little farther in the past than
hummingbirds, with humans somewhere in between. The smaller you are, the more you live
in the moment. (Eagleman suspects that the speed of an animals mating callfrom the
piping of a chickadee to the plainchant of a humpbackis a proxy for its sense of time.) I
once mentioned this in an NPR interview and I got flooded by e-mails from short people,
Eagleman said. They were so pleased. For about a day, I was the hero of the short people.

A lot can happen in half a second. At fifty miles an hour, for instance, a body can fall almost
forty feet. April, the young woman from Weatherford, Texas, seemed well aware of this when
she rode the SCAD later that afternoon. I could hear her strangled Ayiiiiiiiiii! as she
plummeted from the top of the tower. Eagleman watched her streak past, then punched his
stopwatch. Thats funny, he said. They never scream. April took a moment to extricate
herself from the safety net and walked unsteadily to a nearby bench. When we joined her, she
was blinking and glancing vaguely aroundshed taken off her glasses before the rideher
eyes wide with shock.

Was it worth it? Eagleman asked.

No, she said.

It wasnt thrilling when you landed?

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No. It hurt.

A few minutes later, her boyfriend, T.J., joined her on the bench. Hed jammed a Budweiser
cap backward on his head, and his features had a shiny, blown-back look. When Eagleman
asked him how the ride went, he held his forearms out in front of him: his fingers were
shaking uncontrollably.

Eagleman and Chess Stetson, his grad student, ran the first round of SCAD experiments in
2007, with twenty subjects. They programmed the perceptual chronometer to flash its
numbers just a little too fast to be legible. Then they stationed one observer at the top of the
tower, to make sure the riders looked at the chronometer as they fell, and another on the
ground. Afterward, the riders would report their chronometer readings, then take a stopwatch
and go back over the experience in their minds, timing it from start to finish. Eagleman knew
how long the fall had taken in real time; now he wanted to know how long it felt. April was
too jittery to manage this at first, but then she took a deep breath and tried again. When she
opened her eyes, the stopwatch showed just over three and a half secondsabout thirty per
cent longer than the actual drop.

Aprils timing was typical: on average, Eaglemans subjects overestimate the length of their
fall by thirty-six per cent. To his surprise, though, the speed of their perception doesnt
change as they drop: no matter how hard they stare at the chronometer, they cant read the
numbers. In some sense, thats more interesting than what we thought was going on,
Eagleman told me. It suggests that time and memory are so tightly intertwined that they may
be impossible to tease apart.

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When
something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last
detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.
This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older, Eagleman saidwhy
childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while were dozing. The
more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more
quickly time seems to pass.

Like Eaglemans comments about short people, the SCAD study triggered a flood of
correspondence when it was published, by the Public Library of Science, four years ago. It
was like a propagating shock wave, he told me. I got e-mails from paratroopers and cops
and race-car drivers, people in motorcycle accidents and car accidents. One letter was from a
former curator at a museum who had accidentally knocked over a Ming vase. He said the
thing took fucking forever to fall, Eagleman said. During the next few years, he plans to
study the storiessome two hundred so farby going back to the authors with a
questionnaire. In the meantime, its easy to pick out the common threadsnot just the sense
of time slowing down but the strange calm and the touch of the surreal that he remembers
from his own childhood fall. In one story, a man is thrown off his motorcycle after colliding
with a car. As hes sliding across the road, perhaps to his death, he hears his helmet bouncing
against the asphalt. The sound has a catchy rhythm, he thinks, and he finds himself
composing a little ditty to it in his head.
79

Time is this rubbery thing, Eagleman said. It stretches out when you really turn your brain
resources on, and when you say, Oh, I got this, everything is as expected, it shrinks up. The
best example of this is the so-called oddball effectan optical illusion that Eagleman had
shown me in his lab. It consisted of a series of simple images flashing on a computer screen.
Most of the time, the same picture was repeated again and again: a plain brown shoe. But
every so often a flower would appear instead. To my mind, the change was a matter of timing
as well as of content: the flower would stay onscreen much longer than the shoe. But
Eagleman insisted that all the pictures appeared for the same length of time. The only
difference was the degree of attention that I paid to them. The shoe, by its third or fourth
appearance, barely made an impression. The flower, more rare, lingered and blossomed, like
those childhood summers.

Before Francis Crick died, in 2004, he gave Eagleman some advice. Look, he said. The
dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then hell fight and die for it. The
way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be
wrong.

Eagleman may have taken the words a little too much to heart. When I was in Houston, he
had more than a dozen studies running simultaneously, and spent his time racing from
laboratory to lecture hall to MRI machine to brain-surgery ward and back. Were using the
full armamentarium of modern neuroscience, he told me. One of his nine lab members was
studying the neurological roots of empathy; another was looking at free will. Two were
studying timing disorders in schizophrenics; one had helped create the worlds foremost
database of synesthetes. Eagleman had projects on epilepsy, counterfeiting, decision-making
in courts, and timing deficits among brain-damaged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well
as four books at various stages of completion. In early April, Eagleman was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on synesthesia. In May, Pantheon will publish
Incognito, his popular account of the unconscious.

Did I mention my paper on the asp caterpillar? he asked me one day. He pulled up a picture
on his computer of what looked like a grub in a fancy fur coat. It was a highly venomous
insect, he assured me. He knew this because one of them had crawled up his leg seven years
earlier. It felt like someone had just poured a glass of acid on my shin, he said. In the
hospital that night, an emergency-room doctor called him a wimp. Havent you been bitten
by a bug before? he said. So Eagleman, by way of reply, spent the next few years rounding
up every known case report of asp-caterpillar envenomation. He created the first map of the
caterpillars distribution in North America, as well as graphs of a hundred and eighty-eight
attacks, broken down by month and symptom. Then he published his report, extensively
footnoted, in the journal Clinical Toxicology. It turns out that Im the worlds expert on this
thing, he told me, grinning.

Eaglemans colleagues occasionally grumble that hes overreaching, or seeking publicity. But
he has an impressive record of peer-reviewed publications, and even his wackiest projects
tend to bear up under scrutiny. The data are solid, Dean Buonomano told me. The
interpretations can sometimes be a bit dreamy. Eaglemans bigger problem is time, in a
practical as well as a theoretical sense. He gets seven hours of sleep a night, he says, but only
by working seven days a week, mostly without pause. (His last vacation was three years ago,
80

a weekend wedding in Hawaii.) For years, Eagleman was a confirmed bachelor and serial
dater, as one of his friends put it, with a tidy bungalow that he liked to call the Eagles Nest.
Then, last October, he surprised everyone by marrying Sarah Alwin, a twenty-six-year-old
doctoral candidate who studies the electrophysiology of vision at the University of Texas in
Houston. Were a terrific match, he told me. Shes as much of a workaholic as I am. They
hope to have children soon, before the DNA in his sperm deteriorates too much with age. I
used to be such a cynic about marriage, he said. Now I even want to spawn!

Eagleman has never lost his childhood tendency to observe himself from a distance, treating
his own brain as a research subject. When we were winding our way through Baylors
labyrinthine corridors, he credited his sense of direction to a fine hippocampus. And when we
sat down to a meal at a restaurant he complained that hed much rather ingest a compressed
bar of nutrients. As for his wildly varied research: its just another version of the oddball
effect, he told me. By leaping from topic to topic, he forces his brain to give each problem far
more attention than familiarity would allow. Emerson did the same thing, he said. He had
a lazy Susan with multiple projects on it. When hed get bored, he would just spin it and start
on something else.

Early this winter, I joined Eagleman in London for his most recent project: a study of time
perception in drummers. Timing studies tend to be performed on groups of random subjects
or on patients with brain injuries or disorders. Theyve given us a good sense of average
human abilities, but not the extremes: just how precise can a persons timing be? In
neuroscience, you usually look for animals that are best at something, Eagleman told me,
over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill. If its memory, you study songbirds; if
its olfaction, you look at rats and dogs. If I were studying athletes, Id want to find the guy
who can run a four-minute mile. I wouldnt want a bunch of chubby high-school kids.

The idea of studying drummers had come from Brian Eno, the composer, record producer,
and former member of the band Roxy Music. Over the years, Eno had worked with U2,
David Byrne, David Bowie, and some of the worlds most rhythmically gifted musicians. He
owned a studio a few blocks away, in a converted stable on a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, and
had sent an e-mail inviting a number of players to participate in Eaglemans study. The
question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us? Eno said. Everyone who
has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.

Eno first met Eagleman two years ago, after a publisher he knew sent him a book of
Eaglemans short stories, called Sum. Modelled on the cerebral fiction of Borges and
Calvino, Sum is a natural outgrowth of Eaglemans scientific concernsanother spin of the
lazy Susan that has circled back to the subject of time. Each of its forty chapters is a kind of
thought experiment, describing a different version of the afterlife. Eagleman establishes a set
of initial conditions, then lets the implications unfold logically. In one chapter, the dead are
doomed to spend eternity playing bit parts in the dreams of the living. In another, they share
the hereafter with all possible versions of themselvesfrom the depressing failures to the
irritating successes. Im a minimalist at heart. I like short, big ideas, Eno said. I asked my
friend when he was publishing it, and he said, Next February. We had a big argument. I said,
Just get the bloody thing out!
81

Sum had taken years to find a publisherEagleman began writing it while still in graduate
schoolbut it quickly found an audience. In England, it was praised by publications as
disparate as Nature (rigorous and imaginative) and the Observer, where the author Geoff
Dyer called it stunningly original and saw in it the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of
genius. Eagleman had considered writing under a pseudonym, thinking that hed be vilified
by scientists and religious readers alike. Instead, both groups claimed the book for their own.
Atheists like Philip Pullman wrote enthusiastic blurbs, while the editors of an interfaith Web
site named it one of the best spiritual books of 2009. At a Unitarian church in Massachusetts,
members of the congregation took turns reading chapters from the pulpit.

Eno and Eagleman had struck up an e-mail correspondence by then, and Eno had suggested
that they collaborate on a staged reading of the book. The production premired at the Sydney
Opera House in June, 2009, with an ambient score by Eno. (A full-fledged operatic version,
with music by Max Richter, is scheduled to be produced by the Royal Opera House, in
London, in 2012.) It was while they were there that Eno told Eagleman the story that inspired
the drumming study.

I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums, Eno told me. All That
You Dont Leave Behind, or whatever its called. Mullen was playing drums over a
recording of the band and a click tracka computer-generated beat that was meant to keep
all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track
was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. I said, No, that cant
be so, Larry, Eno recalled. Weve all worked to that track, so it must be right. But he
said, Sorry, I just cant play to it.

Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullens satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It
was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and
realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. The thing is, Eno told
me, when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat,
and he said, No, youve got to come back a bit. Which I think is absolutely staggering.

Eagleman arrived at Enos studio late the next morning, carrying a pair of laptops and a
wireless EEG monitor. This thing is so cool! he said, pulling the latter from its foam-
cushioned case. They did the full T.S.A. search on me at the airport. He clamped the EEG
on his headit looked like a giant tarantula perched therethen watched as sixteen
wavering lines appeared onscreen, in candy-stripe colors. Each line represented the electrical
activity at a different point in his brain. The drummers would wear this while taking a set of
four tests, Eagleman explained. The tests were like simple video games, designed by his lab
to measure different forms of timing: keeping a steady beat, comparing the lengths of two
tones, synchronizing a beat to an image, and comparing visual or audible rhythms to one
another. The EEG can pick up twenty-thousandths of a second, he said. Brain activity
doesnt even go that fast, so were oversampling by a lot. But why not?

While Eagleman set up testing areas in two rooms, Eno bustled around the studio tidying up,
talking to his cats, and brewing tea. The stable had been converted into an airy, skylit space
with a circular staircase that led to the former hayloft, now filled with computer workstations.
82

The back corner was flanked by a pair of enormous monochords: single-stringed electric
instruments of Enos design, made of railroad ties. Eno was clean-shaven and dressed all in
black. He had a round, impish face and rectangular glasses with a pixellated pattern punched
along the temples.

Drummers are very hard to control, he said, stuffing some Christmas cards into their
envelopes. I didnt hear anything for days. Then suddenly everybody decided to come, and
to bring their friends. So we may have a flood of drummers. Or we may have no one at all.
He was a little worried that theyd get hungry or bored. (Theyre probably more likely to
come if theres a sort of scene going on, hed written Eagleman a few weeks earlier.) So he
sent an assistant to buy pastries and mixed nuts, and brought out various entertainments for
the drummers to play with, including a drum synthesizer.

The more competitive they feel about this, the better, Eagleman said. A big part of it is
making sure they pay attention.

That will be hard, Eno replied.

The first subject wandered in at around noona scruffy, swivel-hipped young redhead named
Daniel Maiden-Wood, who played drums for the singer Anna Calvi. By midafternoon, the
place was full. Larry Mullen, Jr., was on tour in Australia, but the makings of a remarkable
rhythm section were sprawled on Enos sofas and chairs. Among them were jazz musicians,
Afro-Cuban percussionists, and the drummer for Razorlight, a British band with a pair of
multi-platinum albums. Will Champion, of Coldplay, came in looking like a lumberjack
whod taken a wrong turn. (When he removed his yarn cap to reveal a large bullet head,
Eagleman said it was perfect for the EEG.) Champion had worked with Eno on Viva la
Vida, the 2008 album that topped both the British and the American charts, solidifying
Coldplays standing as the worlds best-selling rock group. Hes like a human metronome,
Eno said. If you say to him, What is seventy-eight beats per minute?, he will go tap, tap,
tap. And hes dead on.

The friendly rivalry that Eagleman had imagined among players never quite materialized. (He
might have had better luck with a roomful of lead singers.) Instead, they told drummer jokes.
How do you know when theres a drummer at your door? The knocking gets faster and faster.
Had we heard about the drummer who tried to commit suicide? He threw himself behind a
train. Eno had been recording drum parts most of his life, but he claimed to be rhythmically
challenged. I suffer from what my friend Leo Abrahams calls the honky offsetthe
tendency of white players to be early on the beat, he said. Its eleven milliseconds. If you
delay the recording by that much, it sounds much better.

Nevertheless, as pairs of drummers shuffled back and forth from the testing stations, a certain
wounded professional pride was in evidence. The players had no trouble comparing a tone or
keeping a steady beat, but the visual-timing tests were giving them fits. Eagleman had
promised that the results would be kept anonymous, but hed programmed each battery of
tests to end with a cheeky evaluation: Youre a rock star, for those who scored in the top
twenty-five per cent; Ready for the big time, for the second quartile; Ready for open-mike
83

night, for those in the next group; and Go back to band camp, for the bottom quarter. No
one wanted to go to band camp.

A drummers timing is a physical thing, they agreed, like dancing. Tapping a rhythm on a
trackpad robs it of all sense of movement or muscle memory. Yet many of them played to
click tracks even onstage, and their sense of tempo had been conditioned and codified by
years in the studio. Hip-hop was eighty or ninety beats per minute, they said, Afrobeat around
a hundred and ten. Disco stuck so insistently to a hundred and twenty that you could run the
songs one after another without missing a beat. There wasnt a fraction of deviance, Eno
said. In the heat of a performance, drummers sometimes rushed the beat or hung back a little,
to suit the mood. But as click tracks became more common such deviations had to be re-
created artificially. To Champions amusement, Coldplay had lately taken to programming
elaborate tempo maps for its live shows, with click tracks designed to speed up or slow
down during a song. It re-creates the excitement of a track thats not so rigid, Champion
said.

When it was his turn to take Eaglemans test, Champion spent nearly twice as long at the
computer as the othershis competitive spirit roused at last. He neednt have worried.
Eaglemans results later showed a huge statistical difference, as he put it, between the
drummers timing and that of the random control subjects hed tested back in Houston. When
asked to keep a steady beat, for instance, the controls wavered by an average of thirty-five
milliseconds; the best drummer was off by less than ten. Eno was right: drummers do have
different brains from the rest. They kicked ass over the controls, Eagleman said. His next
task would be to use the EEG data to locate the most active areas of the drummers brains,
then target them with bursts of magnetic stimulation to see if he could disrupt their timing.
Now that we know that there is something anatomically different about them, he said, we
want to see if we can mess it up.

Whether theyd want to participate again was another matter. Champion, for one, looked a
little punch-drunk after his test. Its hard not to feel like its a sort of personal evaluation, he
said, as he was putting on his coat. Hopefully, it will be useful for some larger purpose. But
you still want to feel like youre up to snuff. He shrugged. Luckily, it told me that I should
be a rock star. So its nice to know that that wasnt wasted.

It was close to midnight when Eagleman and I finally left Enos studio, the laptops and the
EEG tucked under our arms. The streets felt muffled and close beneath the starless sky; the
sidewalks were slick with snow. Walking back to our hotel, I thought of the countless sensory
signals careering around me: the glimmer of street lamps off pub windows, the rumble of
tube trains underground, the scent of wood smoke and spilled beer, and the curve of
cobblestones beneath my feet. From billions of such fragments my brain had pieced together
this simple storya winters night in Notting Hilland I was happy to have it.

What would it be like to have a drummers timing? I wondered. Would you hear the hidden
rhythms of everyday life, the syncopations of the street? When I asked the players at Enos
studio this, they seemed to find their ability as much an annoyance as a gift. Like perfect
pitch, which dooms the possessor to hear every false note and flat car horn, perfect timing
84

may just make a drummer more sensitive to the worlds arrhythmias and repeated patterns,
Eagleman saidto the flicker of computer screens and fluorescent lights. Reality, stripped of
an extra beat in which the brain orchestrates its signals, isnt necessarily a livelier place. Its
just filled with badly dubbed television shows.

Were stuck in time like fish in water, Eagleman said, oblivious of its currents until a
bubble floats by. Its usually best that way. He had spent the past ten years peering at the
world through such gaps in our perception, he said. But sometimes you get so far down deep
into reality that you want to pull back. Sometimes, in a great while, Ill think, What if I find
out that this is all an illusion? He felt this most keenly with his schizophrenic subjects, who
tended to do poorly on timing tests. The voices in their heads, he suspected, were no different
from anyone elses internal monologues; their brains just processed them a little out of
sequence, so that the thoughts seemed to belong to someone else. All it takes is this tiny
tweak in the brain, this tiny change in perception, he said, and what you see as real isnt
real to anyone else.

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though,
hed taken to calling himself a Possibiliana denomination of his own invention. Science
had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed
complexity of brain tissueessentially an alien computational materialto the mystery of
dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on
strict atheism, he said. And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.
Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in Sum, as bits of
networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial organism, or any
of a thousand other possibilities, and then test those ideas against the available evidence?
Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind
at the same time, he said. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But
certainty is an absurd one.

A garden-variety agnostic might have left it at that. But Eagleman, as usual, took things a step
further. Two years ago, in an interview on a radio show, he declared himself the founder of a
new movement. Possibilianism had a membership of one, he said, but he hoped to attract
more. Im not saying here is the answer, he told me. Im just celebrating the vastness of
our ignorance. The announcement was only half serious, so Eagleman was shocked to find,
when he came home from his lab later that night, that his e-mail in-box was filled, once
again, with messages from listeners. You know what? most of them said. Im a
Possibilian, too! The movement has since drawn press from as far away as India and
Uganda. At last count, close to a thousand Facebook members had switched their religious
affiliation to Possibilian.

Pric
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85

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/24/incognito-secret-brain-david-eagleman

David Eagleman's previous book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, was a delightful
collection of short fables, each offering a wish-fulfillment image of life after death in which
the wish turns out to contain its own perverse consequences. The fable principle was
grounded in a nicely ironic psychology, subtly underpinned by Eagleman's own profession,
neuroscience. Using fiction, Eagleman found a neat way of revealing how the mind cannot
escape the contradictions of its underlying construction.

With this new book, Eagleman dispenses with fiction. This is a straight account of his own
neuroscientific beliefs. Belief is the appropriate term, because Incognito isn't precisely an
examination of neuroanatomy or neurological case histories; nor is it an exploration of the
philosophical struggle involved in explaining the relationship between brain and mind. It is,
rather, a breathless account of possible implications opened up by the rise of neuroscience as
a way of looking at the world.

What are these implications? First, the process of learning more about the

brain has changed our idea of what it means to be human. Man's sense of self
has been rocked by key scientific revolutions in our understanding of the
universe: the discovery that earth was not its centre, that time is deep not
shallow, that humans were not God-created but a product of evolution. Brain
science, Eagleman believes, provides the final frontier in our understanding of
our own littleness and contingency: the realisation that consciousness is not
the centre of the mind but a limited and ambivalent function in a vast
cosmological circuitry of non-conscious neurological functions. Hence,
most of our mental operations occur "incognito".

We should not worry about all this "decentering", Eagleman concludes, because science
shows us that brain and mind and life are even more wondrous and exciting than we thought.

This interpretation of modern intellectual development is ahistorical and incorrect. As an

enthusiast of Freudian models of the unconscious, it should be perfectly apparent to
Eagleman that the decentering of the conscious mind took place long before the rise of
contemporary neuroscience. We haven't needed fMRI scans, or software metaphors of brain
circuitry, to tell us that we are subject to non-conscious drives that override our limited
rational faculties. We got that much not only from Freud but from romantic poetry and 19th-
century Russian novels.

Nor have we needed the finer developments of functional neuroanatomy to tell us that brain
damage causes changes in behaviour, thus undermining simplistic notions of free will or
91

criminal culpability. Eagleman canters through various well-known neurological cases, none
original to this book, in which criminal acts or radical changes in personality have been
shown to be the result of brain damage or disease. Appearing not to notice the glaring
chronological anomaly, he cites the case of Phineas Gage, the American railroad foreman
whose brain was violently punctured by an iron rod. Amazingly, Gage survived and could
still function. But he was so drastically altered as a personality that colleagues could scarcely
recognise him. The basic elements of the mind-brain problem have been chewed over in this
case ever since it occurred in 1848.

This book belongs to a popular trend of neuro-hubris wildly overstating the ramifications of
a science that is still in its infancy. The true fascination of neuroscience lies not in bombastic
philosophical claims but in the fine detail of brain function, illustrations of the mind-brain
problem, and the human interest of case histories. There isn't even that much actual
neuroscience in Incognito. Its illustrations are drawn just as much from the annals of
evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics and more traditional forms of psychology.

The contrast with Sum could not be more vivid. Eagleman is the rarest kind of science writer:
better at translating his knowledge into fiction than explaining it as fact.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/06/01/david-eagleman-incognito/

By Maria Popova

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by neuroscientist David Eagleman is one of my favorite
books of the past few years. So, as a proper neuro-nut, its no surprise I was thrilled for this
weeks release of his latest gem, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain a fascinating,
dynamic, faceted look under the hood of the conscious mind to reveal the complex machinery
of our subconscious.

Bringing a storytellers articulate and fluid narrative to a scientists quest, Eagleman dances
across an incredible spectrum of issues brain damage, dating, drugs, beauty, synesthesia,
criminal justice, artificial intelligence, optical illusions and much more to reveal that
things we take as passive givens, from our capacity for seeing a rainbow to our ability to
overhear our name in a conversation we werent paying attention to, are the function of
remarkable neural circuitry, biological wiring and cognitive conditioning.

The three-pound organ in your skull with its pink consistency of Jell-o is an alien kind
of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly
outstrips anything weve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart:
youre the busiest, brightest thing on the planet. ~ David Eagleman

Sample some of Eaglemans fascinating areas of study with this excellent talk from
TEDxAlamo:

Equal parts entertaining and illuminating, the case studies, examples and insights in
Incognito are more than mere talking points to impressed at the next dinner party, poised
instead to radically shift your understanding of the world, other people, and your own mind.
92

And if Incognito tickles your fancy, you might also enjoy V. S. Ramachandrans The Tell-Tale
Brain: A Neuroscientists Quest for What Makes Us Human, Mark Changizis The Vision
Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About
Human Vision and Joshua Foers Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of
Remembering Everything, as well as these 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the
brain.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/11/intuition-vs-rationality/

Maria Popova

In putting together this recent reading list of nine essential books on reading and writing a
master-toolkit for a worthy New Years resolution to read more and write better I found
myself rereading Anne Lamotts Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, one
of my all-time favorite books.

A particular passage from it has stayed with me over the years, and reemerges by some
uncanny, invisible mechanism at critical times of my life, as if to remind me where the truth
lies:

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the
rational mind. The rational mind doesnt nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth,
because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true.
Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

A similar sentiment is attributed to, though likely a paraphrasing of, one of historys most
celebrated heroes of science the alleged pinnacle of rationality, Albert Einstein:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created
a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Steve Jobs reflects in Walter Isaacsons much-discussed biography of him, one of the best
biographies and memoirs of 2011:

The people in the Indian countryside dont use their intellect like we do, they use their
intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. Thats had a
big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned and it is the great
achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They
learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not.
Thats the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
93

In the olden days, librarians were expected to use intuition to categorize books. When did we
lose this value system in how we think about the categorization curation, systematization,
organization of todays information sphere and, perhaps more importantly, of the hearts
sphere?

http://macintoshhowto.com/other/some-of-my-favourite-steve-jobs-quotes.html

When youre a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, youre not going to use a
piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it.
Youll know its there, so youre going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you
to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to
make it simple.

Remembering that Ill be dead soon is the most important tool Ive ever encountered to help
me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all
pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death,
leaving only what is truly important.

http://macintoshhowto.com/other/steve-jobs.html

I started reading Steve Jobs biography last week, its a challenge. Steve jobs is selfish to the
extreme, bordering on evil. Its a bit like when I read my Johnny Cash biography: I found
myself being repulsed by the destructiveness of a man I thought I admired. Its so interesting
I thought I might take a few posts to write my thoughts.

In his early days no one can work with Jobs. Hes rude, arrogant, and he stinks (literally he
doesnt shower and refuses to admit he smells). He hangs around cult leaders taking a fair
few drugs and has no problems using their tricks to manipulate the people around him, He
mistreats his closest friends, his parents even his own daughter. As a student he works at Atari
where they put Jobs on his own nightshift because everyone refuses to work with him. This is
my point he can get away with acting completely egotistically because people think they
need him.

A classic case of his egotism is after the Apple II is launched. Scotty, whose job was to
manage Steve jobs personal issues, assigns Wozniac employee badge # 1 and Jobs # 2. Heres
what happens

Not surprisingly, jobs demanded to be #1. I wouldnt let him have it, because that would
stretch his ego even more said Scotty. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed
a solution. He would have badge #0.
94

Maybe its not that Jobs is actually more selfish than the rest of us, rather Steve lets out what
we are on the inside. Like House, he says what he thinks, without regard to any social
conventions or thoughts for others. And hes just such a genius that he can just throw a
tantrum and get his own way and apparently get away with it. It almost makes me feel dirty
using an Apple computer. He really is not the kind of guy you want as a friend. Ill keep
reading though

http://macintoshhowto.com/other/rational-thought-vs-intuition.html

Steve Jobs observes from his trip to India that intuition is as powerful as rational thought, but
that in the Western world we value rational thought more than we value intuition. This is
exactly what Einsten said

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have
created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Albert Einstein.

This is also the point Malcolm Gladwell makes in his book Blink. I read it a year ago and I
think its the first time I really began to value the power of intuition. Our brain can
subconsciously make a snap decision that is better than a conclusion we reach after hours and
hours of analysis. The snap decision is actually the result of a complex process of
subconscious thought that instantly weighs up things we are not even aware of. Thats
intuition.

Steve Jobs observes:

The people in the Indian countryside dont use their intellect like we do, they use their
intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. Thats had a
big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned ( and

conditioned to follow set socio-cultural, institutionalized forms and patters and rules) and
it is the great achievement of Western civilisation. In the villages of India, they never learned
it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is
not. Thats the power of intuition and experiential wisdom. Steve Jobs, by Walter
Isaacson, p48.

As I read the early chapters of Jobs biography its clear that hes not the smart guy, Wozniac
is. Jobs maybe has more of this intuition though: the ability to come to a clear vision of
what is needed and of how to get there. The ability to instantly perceive the value of an idea.

https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=Intuition

https://www.rep.routledge.com/search?searchString=intuition&newSearch=
95

Intuitionism
By McCarty, David Charles

Ultimately, mathematical intuitionism gets its name and its epistemological parentage from a
conviction of Kant: that intuition reveals basic mathematical principles as true a priori.
Intuitionisms mathematical lineage ...

"intuition" appears most in:

Intuitionism and antirealism

5

Metamathematics: intuitionistic systems and translation

theorems

Intuition - noun
noun: intuition

1. the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for

conscious reasoning.

"we shall allow our intuition to guide us"

instinct, intuitiveness; More

synonyms: sixth sense, clairvoyance, second sight

"he works according to intuition"

o a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling

rather than conscious reasoning.

plural noun: intuitions

"your insights and intuitions as a native speaker are positively

sought"

hunch, feeling (in one's bones), inkling, (sneaking) suspicion, idea,

synonyms: sense, notion; More

https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/intuition
96

We think of intuition as a magical phenomenonbut hunches are formed out of

our past experiences and knowledge. So while relying on gut feelings doesn't
always lead to good decisions, it's not nearly as flighty a tactic as it may sound.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intuition

oun
1.
direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate
apprehension.
2.
a fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way.
3.
a keen and quick insight.
4.
the quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.
5.
Philosophy.

1. an immediate cognition of an object not inferred or determined by a previous

cognition of the same object.

2. any object or truth so discerned.

3. pure, untaught, noninferential knowledge.

6.
Linguistics. the ability of the native speaker to make linguistic judgments, as of the
grammaticality, ambiguity, equivalence, or nonequivalence of sentences, deriving from the
speaker's native-language competence.

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Scientific-Facts-About-Intuition-Developing-Intuition

But scientists who study the phenomenon say it's a very real ability that can be
identified in lab experiments and visualized on brain scans. Read on for gripping
findings about your gut feelings, plus surprising ways to tune in to your body's
signals and tap the inner powers of your mind.

"We all process things that we're not consciously aware ofit's a feeling of
knowing that uses an older brain structure," says neuroscientist Beatrice de
Gelder, PhD, who researches blindsight. But because we're so dependent on our
sense of sight, she says, we're not used to trusting our intuitive vision track. "If
you find yourself in a situation that's making you feel nervous, you may have
spotted a reason for concern without even knowing it," says Hirsch. "Pay
attention to the sensation."

Your Brain

Your powers of deduction, reason, and cognition are all important factors in your
97

perception of the world. But your judgment is working even when you're not
conscious of the gears turningand even when you're not conscious, period.

Driven by Distraction

If you had to guess whether it's easier to take in new information when your
attention is focused or when you're distracted, you'd guess the former, right? If
so, you'd be wrong. In a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2009,
researchers presented subjects with a series of abstract images. The participants
gave their full attention to half the pictures but were deliberately distracted by
another task while viewing the rest. When shown the images again and asked to
identify which they'd seen before, they fared better with the pictures they'd
viewed while distracted. "Our intuitive brains are processing information even
when we're not paying attention," says Ken Paller, PhD, a coauthor of the study.
"And with the brain's analytical system occupied by another task, the intuitive
systemwhich excels at picking up the gist of a scene or situationis better able
to do its work."

Similarly, Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University in the

Netherlands, has found that distraction can help us make better decisions. In
2006 Dijksterhuis asked study subjects to evaluate four models of cars based on
12 variables. He found that only about 25 percent of those who were given
uninterrupted time to ponder their choice opted for the best model, compared
with 60 percent of people who were asked to make a spontaneous decision after
looking over the cars and then performing another task. "While they were
focusing on something else, the unconscious mind was processing the
information and integrating it into a valid selection," Dijksterhuis explains

Deirdre Barrett, PhD, a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of The
Committee of Sleep, studies the ways in which dreams themselves can yield
practical insights. In one of her studies, more than one-third of the subjects
reported that a dream about a problem guided them to a solution. "Dreams help
us get unstuck from our waking mind-set," Barrett says. "They allow us to see
solutions that aren't apparent to our logical, conscious minds."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intuition
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/intuition.html

Unconscious thought process that produces rapid, uninferred knowledge or solution. Though
it is not analytic in the sense that it does not deliberately look for cause-and-effect (causal)
relationships, intuition is not mere guesswork. Instead, it draws on previously acquired
experiences and information and directly apprehends a totality. Intuition can be visionary or
delusionary, uncannily correct or horrendously wrong in its conclusions.

http://www.intuition.org/

Is intuition not just another umbrella notion covering a number of different ideas? Perhaps we
should analyse it and explore the different things this notion refers to? For example by
98

different types of intuition that are conflated into the notion, the different aims of different
types of intuition, the different functions of different types of intuition, more clear intuition
compared to more nebulous and vague intuition, intuition of and by concepts, colours,
sounds, tastes etc, specific intuitions and more general intuitions, intuitions concerning
different areas or domains of knowledge and disciplines, more particular or self-enclosed
intuitions and those with references to other ideas and things, etc.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08082b.htm
Intuition (Latin intueri, to look into) is a psychological and philosophical term which
designates the process of immediate apprehension or perception of an actual fact, being, or
relation between two terms and its results. Hence the words Intuitionism or Intuitionalism
mean those systems in philosophy which consider intuition as the fundamental process of our
knowledge or at least give to intuition a large place (the Scottish school), and the words
Intuitive Morality and Intuitional Ethics denote those ethical theories which base morality on
an intuitive apprehension of the moral principles and laws or consider intuition as capable of
distinguishing the moral qualities of our actions (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson Reid, Dugald
Stewart). As an element of educational method intuition means the grasp of knowledge by
concrete, experimental or intellectual, ways of apprehension. The immediate perception of
sensuous or material objects by our senses is called sensuous or empirical intuition, the
immediate apprehension of intellectual or immaterial objects by our intelligence is called
intellectual intuition. It may be remarked that Kant calls empirical intuitions our knowledge
of objects through sensation, and pure intuition our perception of space and time as the forms
a priori of sensibility. Again, our intuitions may be called external or internal, according as
the objects perceived are external objects or internal objects or acts.

The importance of intuition as a process and element of knowledge is easily seen if we

observe that it is intuition which furnishes us with the first experimental data as well as with
the primary concepts and the fundamental judgments or principles which are the primitive
elements and the foundation of every scientific and philosophical speculation. This
importance, however, has been falsely exaggerated by some modern philosophers to an extent
which tends to destroy both supernatural religion and the validity of human reason. There has
been an attempt, on their part, to make of intuition, under different names, the central and
fundamental element of our power of acquiring knowledge, and the only process or operation
that can put us into contact with reality. So we have the creation or intuition of the ego and
non ego in the philosophy of Fichte; the intuition or intellectual vision of God claimed by the
Ontologists in natural theology (see ONTOLOGISM), W. James's unconscious intuition or
religious experience (The Varieties of Religious Experience), Bergson's philosophy of pure
intuition the experience or experiential consciousness of the Divine of the Modernists
(Encyclical "Pascendi gregis"). According to the Ontologists, our knowledge of notions
endowed with the character of necessity and universality, as well as our idea of the Infinite,
are possible only through an antecedent intuition of God present in us. Other philosophers
start from the principle that human reasoning is unable to give us the knowledge of things in
themselves. The data of common sense, our intellectual concepts, and the conclusions
reached through the process of discursive reasoning do not, they say primarily represent
reality, but acting under diverse influences such as those of our usual and practical needs,
common sense and discursive reason result in a deformation of reality; the value of their data
and conclusions is one of practical usefulness rather than one of true representation (see
99

PRAGMATISM). Intuition alone, they maintain, is able to put us in communication with

reality and give us a true knowledge of things. Especially in regard to religious truths, some
insist, it is only through intuition and internal experience that we can acquire them. "God",
says the Protestant A. Sabatier in his Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion, "is not a
phenomenon which can be observed outside of the ego, a truth to be demonstrated by logical
reasoning. He who does not feel Him in his heart, will never find Him outside . . . . We never
become aware of our piety without at the same time feeling a religious emotion and
perceiving in this very emotion, more or less obscurely, the object and the cause of religion,
namely, God." The arguments used by the Schoolmen to prove the existence of God, say the
Modernists, have now lost all their value; it is by the religious feeling, by an intuition of the
heart that we apprehend God (Encycl. "Pascendi gregis" and "II programma dei modernisti").

Such theories have their source in the principle of absolute subjectivism and relativism the
most fundamental error in philosophy. Starting with Kant's proposition that we cannot know
things as they are in themselves but only as they appear to us, that is, under the subjective
conditions that our human nature necessarily imposes on them, they arrive at the conclusion
that our rational knowledge is subjectively relative, and that its concepts, principles, and
process of reasoning are therefore essentially unable to reach external and transcendental
realities. Hence their recourse to intuition and immanence. But it is easy to show that if
intuition is necessary in every act of knowledge, it remains essentially insufficient in our
present life, for scientific and philosophical reflection. In our knowledge of nature we start
from observation; but observation remains fruitless if it is not verified by a series of
inductions and deductions. In our knowledge of God, we may indeed start from our nature
and from our insufficiency and aspirations, but if we want to know Him we have to
demonstrate, by discursive reasoning, His existence as an external and transcendent Cause
and Supreme End. We may indeed, in Ethics have an intuition of the notion of duty, of the
need of a sanction; but these intuitive notions have no moral value if they are not connected
with the existence of a Supreme Ruler and Judge, and this connection can be known only
through reasoning. The true nature, place, and value of intuition in human knowledge are
admirably put forth in the Scholastic theory of knowledge. For the Schoolmen the intuitive
act of intellectual knowledge is, by its nature, the most perfect act of knowledge, since it is an
immediate apprehension of and contact with reality in its concrete existence, and our supreme
reward in the supernatural order will consist in the intuitive apprehension of God by our
intelligence: the beatific vision. But in our present conditions of earthly life, our knowledge
must of necessity make use of concepts and reasoning. All our knowledge has its starting-
point in the intuitive data of sense experience, but in order to penetrate the nature of these
data, their laws and causes, we must have recourse to abstraction and discursive reasoning. It
is also through those processes and through them alone that we can arrive at the notion of
immaterial beings and of God himself (St. Thomas, "Contra Gentes", I, 12; "Summa
Theologica" I:84-88, etc.) . Our mind has the intuition of primary principles (intellectus) but
their application, in order to give us a scientific and philosophical knowledge of things, is
subject to the laws of abstraction and successive reasoning (ratio, discursus, cf. I:58:3, II-
II:49:5, ad 2um). Such a necessity is, as it were, a normal defect of human intelligence; it is
the natural limit which determines the place of the human mind in the scale of intellectual
beings.
100

Concepts and reasoning therefore are in themselves inferior to intuition; but they are the
normal processes of human knowledge. They are not, however a deformation of reality,
though they give only an imperfect and inadequate representation of reality and the more
so according to the excellency of the objects represented they are a true representation of
it. (Contradiction?)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. In
philosophy it is a priori|a priori knowledge or experiential belief characterized by its
immediacy. Beyond this, the nature of intuition is debated.

Quotes

Intuition is the wisdom formed by feeling and instinct - a gift of knowing

without reasoning... Belief is ignited by hope and supported by facts and
evidence - it builds alignment and creates confidence. Belief is what sets
energy in motion and creates the success that breeds more success.

o Angela Ahrendts in:Angela Ahrendts Reveals The Secret To

Burberrys Success, Vogue, 5 August 2013.

Intuition is the very force or activity of the soul in its experience

through whatever has been the experience of the soul itself.

o Edgar Cayce, John Van Auken in:The Psychic Sense: How to Awaken
Your Sixth Sense to Solve Life's Problems and Seize Opportunities,
ARE Press, 2006, p. 76.

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below
the conscious level.

o Joyce Brothers, As quoted in Words of Wisdom : More Good Advice

(1990) edited by William Safire and Leonard Safir, p. 199.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as

some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness
where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and
compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

o Deepak Chopra in:Deepak Chopra On Enlightened Leadership,

Forbes,12 January 2011.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad
time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry,
insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any
importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

o Deepak Chopra in Exclusive: Deepak Chopra Explores the Evolution

of God, Forbes, 25 September 2012.
101

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will,

the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic
elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and
individuality.

o Richard Courant in: Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins What is

Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods,
Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 23.

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on

which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

o Rene Descartes in: Key Philosophical Writings, Wordsworth Editions,

1997, p. 31.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is

only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying
behind the appearance.

o Albert Einstein in: Morton A. Meyers Happy Accidents: Serendipity in

Modern Medical Breakthroughs, Arcade Publishing, 2007, p. 14

God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily
jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met. - Farrah Fawcett.

God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the

combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.

o Farrah Fawcett in Norman M. Brown, Ellen S. Amatea Love and

Intimate Relationships: Journeys of the Heart, Psychology Press,
2000, p. 297.

Intuition Peak is the sharp peak of elevation 780 m in Levski Ridge, Tangra
Mountains, Livingston Island, situated 1.4 km NNW of Helmet Peak and 5.4
km SE of Atanasoff Nunatak. According to the Bulgarian topographic
survey Tangra 2004/05. It is named in appreciation of the role of scientific
intuition for the advancement of human knowledge.

o SCAR Gazetteer in: Intuition Peak, Composite Gazetteer Of

Antarctica.

Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you

intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness
later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been
bathing in this environment during childhood.

o Carlos Ghosn in: Richard M. Smith Carlos Ghosn: In the Drivers

Seat, Newsweek, 20 June 2008.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be
trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's
102

thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition.

o Steve Jobs in: Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, on

June 12, 2005. Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005),
Stanford News, June 14, 2005.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so

that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to
them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

o Immanuel Kant in: Wayne P. Pomerleau Twelve Great Philosophers:

A Historical Introduction to Human Nature, Rowman & Littlefield, 1
January 1997, p. 243.

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or
gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

o D. H. Lawrence in Leslie Paul Thiele The Heart of Judgment: Practical

Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative, Cambridge University Press,
04-Sep-2006, p. 195.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business -

everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can
sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining
together, then a knowingness occurs.

o David Lynch in: Andy Battaglia David Lynch, A.V. Club, 23 January
2007.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society

precisely because there is so much data.

o John Naisbitt in: Larry Chang Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of
Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, Gnosophia Publishers, 2006, p.
419.

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously

and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

o Jawaharlal Nehru, Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), p. 506 (1949),

p. 310 (1961); On Mahatma Gandhi

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we

discover.

o Henri Poincare in: Shelley Sacks, Wolfgang Zumdick Atlas of the

Poetic Continent: Pathways in Ecological Citizenship, Temple Lodge
Publishing, 2013, p. 60.
103

Alles Anschauen gehet aus von einem Einflu des Angeschaueten auf den
Anschauenden, von einem ursprnglichen und unabhngigen Handeln des
ersteren, welches dann von dem letzteren seiner Natur gem
aufgenommen, zusammengefat und begriffen wird.

o All intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one

who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former,
which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter.

o Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (1799), as translated by

Richard Crouter (Cambridge: 1988), pp. 24-25.

Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply

points the way.

o Florence Scovel Shinn (1989), Wisdom of Florence Scovel Shinn, p.

65.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

o Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1977.

The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity; moving beyond it

necessitates intuition, which in turn configures new perspectives and
conquers fears.

o Dan Stevens in: Dan Stevens: my week on the porch, The Telegraph,
6 January 2013.

Faith is a passionate intuition.

o William Wordsworth in: Trust on Trial: Who Do You Trust and Why?,
iUniverse, 2010, p. 33.

Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man

Albert Einstein.

I asked, "If God reveals himself in nature, why not in man?" "Have you never
been awed by the power of man's rational mind?" Einstein quizzed. "And man's
intuition, man's inspiration? - William Hermanns, .

I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no faith in

speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time here and
now. - Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein, William Hermanns, in: Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, Branden Books, 1
April 1983
104

My intuition made me work. Many people think that the progress of the
human race is based on experiences of an empirical, critical nature, but I
say that true knowledge is to be had only through a philosophy of
deduction. For it is intuition that improves the world, not just following the
trodden path of thought. Intuition makes us look at unrelated facts and
then think about them until they can all be brought under one law. To look
for related facts means holding onto what one has instead of searching for
new facts. Intuition is the father of new knowledge, while empiricism is
nothing but an accumulation of old knowledge. Intuition, not intellect, is
the open sesame of yourself.

o Albert Einstein in:p.16.

I asked, "If God reveals himself in nature, why not in man?" "Have you
never been awed by the power of man's rational mind?" Einstein quizzed.
"And man's intuition, man's inspiration>?

o William Hermanns, , p. 26.

Prophet or not, what I say is more often felt through intuition than thought-
through-intellect.I hope the nations will learn their lesson, that there is no
security in national armies. After the war we must renounce all military
defense and create an atmposphere of international trust.

o Albert Einstein in: p. 56.

The truly religious man has no fear of life and no fear of death; his faith
must be in his conscience. Then he will have the intuition to observe and
judge what happens around him. Then, he can acknowledge that
everything unfolds true to strict natural law, sometimes with tremendous
speed. I am therefore against all organized religion, too often in history,
men have followed the cry of battle rather than the cry of truth.

o Albert Einstein in: p. 65.

I'm a mystic, and you, too, because you love intuition. And I believe that
the soul is eternal, or, if you wish, the mind is eternal and carries
experiences from one plane of existence to another or from one time
period to another- since we have bodies to fulfill a purpose, and they are
involved with space and time.

o William Hermanns, in: p. 71.

Intuition and the opportunity to be at the right place at the right time. I
couldn't have come to my conclusions without the discoveries before me
of great scientists.

o Albert Einstein in:P.88.

I have faith in my intuition, the language of my conscience, but I have no

faith in speculation about Heaven and Hell. I'm concerned with this time
here and now.
105

o Albert Einstein in: p. 94.

There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to
us is as important as what is cut and dried, and, second that our faculties
are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and serene beauty in crude
forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads us to greater
understanding of ourselves and the universe.

o Albert Einstein in: p. 109.

Farewell scheming intellect -

my soul be my only property,
the intuition be my profit
to set my neighbor free.

o William Hermanns in: p. 136.

Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish

anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's
life, however, where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever
knowing precisely how. One can never know why, but one must accept
intuition as fact.

o Albert Einstein in: p. 137.

Descartes's Changing Mind

In the Rules Descartes ties abstraction to intuition. The two main characteristics
of intellectual intuition are first, the purely intellectual nature of the operation
itself and, second, the absolute certainty and assurance that accompanies it.
Thus, an intuition is an insight into necessary connections between the two
simple ideas or two elements of an idea. - Descartes.
Peter Machamer, J. E. McGuire Descartes's Changing Mind, Princeton University Press, 06 July 2009

Concomitantly, the shift away from intuitions of simple natures is

accompanied by a shift away from abstraction, as the epistemic model for
gaining knowledge, to a model that requires many of our core ideas to be
innate in the mind. Thus, in place of the earlier methods of abstracting by
direct intuition and compunding from sensuous and non-sensuous
experience, increasingly Descartes brings to the fore the view that
knowledge always involves innate ideas.

o In: p. 3.

In the Rules Descartes ties abstraction to intuition. The two main

characteristics of intellectual intuition are first, the purely intellectual
nature of the operation itself and, second, the absolute certainty and
assurance that accompanies it. Thus, an intuition is an insight into
necessary connections between the two simple ideas or two elements of
an idea.
106

o Descartes in: p:7.

By intuition, I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the

deceptive judgment of imagination as it botches things together, but the
conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that
there can be no doubt about what we are understanding. Alternatively, it
comes to the same thing intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear
and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason.

o Descartes in: p:9.

Our analysis of the performative nature of the cogito should make clear
that for Descartes its validity is an immediate intuition of a truth contained
in an idea grasped in an instant, an intuition that contains no temporal
successiveness.

o In: p. 69.

But he [Descartes] also makes clear that he is appealing to a mental

intuition with roots in the Rules. This is the notion that we possess mental
acts whose content is such that we are not aware of a movement or a
sort of sequence, as is the case in deductive chains of reasoning.

o In: p. 70.

Thus, Descartes makes a clear distinction, in the Second Reply, between

the truth of a mental content to which we immediately attend and that
truth recalled by memory when the initial intuition is no longer attended
to. He illustrates his point in reference to the cognito: When someone says
I am thinking, therefore I am , or exist, he does not deduce existence
from thought by means of syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-
evident by a simple intuition of the mind.

o In: p. 71.

Descartes defines intuition as the conceptual act of the pure and attentive
mind.that springs from the light of reason alone.

o In: p. 166.

Descartes, by means of intuition and abstraction, seeks to establish the

ultimate features of things as they are in themselves; that is, he seeks to
establish an objective ontology of natures that compose material bodies.

o In: p. 178.

Australian elite leaders and intuition

Jung (1977), legitimised intuition to some extent through defining the four basic
psychological functions as intuition, thinking, feeling and sensation, and these
107

concepts have been incorporated into standardised personality evaluation tests

used daily all over the world.
Martin Robson, Peter Miller Australian elite leaders and intuition, Southern Cross University, 2006

Intuition is defined as a non-rational, holistic, cognitive process that is

enhanced by experience and associated with affect.

Jung (1977), legitimised intuition to some extent through defining the four
basic psychological functions as intuition, thinking, feeling and sensation,
and these concepts have been incorporated into standardised personality
evaluation tests used daily all over the world.

Interest in the use of intuition as a viable approach to decision-making and

judgements in environments of rapid change and complexity has
increased in recent years.

Intuition as a judgement/decision-making skill is important for

contemporary leaders because it is more able to cognitively process
complex systems than our rational minds.

o V. Denes-Raj and S. Epstein (1994).

Much of the confusion surrounding intuition, adding to the complexity of

conducting research on intuition, is due to the use of this term in so many
ways.

o O. Behling and N. Eckel (1991).

Intuition has long been associated with the mystic, irrational and
paranormal.

o D. Cappon (1994).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning,
or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired.[1][2] Different writers give the
word "intuition" a great variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to
unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious
pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for
conscious reasoning.[3][4]There are philosophers who contend that the word "intuition" is often
misunderstood or misused to mean instinct, truth, belief, meaning, and other subjects,
whereas others contend that faculties such as instinct, belief and intuition are factually
related.[5][6]

The word "intuition" comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as consider or from late
middle English word intuit, "to contemplate".[1]

1 Philosophy
108

Both Eastern and Western philosophers have studied the concept in great
detail. Philosophy of mind deals with the concept of intuition. There are
philosophers who contend that this concept is often confused with
other concepts such as truth, belief, and meaning in philosophical
discussion.[6]

Raymond DePaul, Michael; M. Ramsey, William. "One Prevalent Misuse of

Intuition". Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in
Philosophical Inquiry. England: Rowman & littlefield publisher Inc. p. 84.
Retrieved 22 December 2014.

o 1.1 Eastern philosophy

1.1.1 Hinduism

1.1.2 Buddhism

1.1.3 Islam

o 1.2 Western philosophy

In the West, intuition does not appear as a separate field of study, and early mention
and definition can be traced back to Plato. In his book Republic he tries to define
intuition as a fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of
reality.[21] In his discussion with Meno & Phaedo, he describes intuition as a pre-
existing knowledge residing in the "soul of eternity," and a phenomenon by which one
becomes conscious of pre-existing knowledge. He provides an example of
mathematical truths, and posits that they are not arrived at by reason. He argues that
these truths are accessed using a knowledge already present in a dormant form and
accessible to our intuitive capacity. This concept by Plato is also sometimes referred
to as anamnesis. The study was later continued by his followers.[22]

In his book Meditations on first philosophy, Descartes refers to an intuition as a pre-

existing knowledge gained through rational reasoning or discovering truth through
contemplation. This definition is commonly referred to as rational intuition.[23] Later
philosophers, such as Hume, have more ambiguous interpretations of intuition. Hume
claims intuition is a recognition of relationships (relation of time, place, and
causation) while he states that "the resemblance" (recognition of relations) "will strike
the eye" (which would not require further examination) but goes on to state, "or rather
in mind" attributing intuition to power of mind, contradicting the theory of
empiricism.[24][25]

Immanuel Kant finds intuition is thought of as basic sensory information provided by

the cognitive faculty of sensibility (equivalent to what might loosely be called
perception). Kant held that our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of
space, and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time.[26]
Intuitionism is a position advanced by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer in philosophy of
mathematics derived from Kant's claim that all mathematical knowledge is
knowledge of the pure forms of the intuition that is, intuition that is not empirical.
109

Intuitionistic logic was devised by Arend Heyting to accommodate this position

(and has been adopted by other forms of constructivism in general). It is characterized
by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence it does not in general
accept rules such as double negation elimination and the use of reductio ad absurdum
to prove the existence of something.[citation needed]

Intuitions are customarily appealed to independently of any particular theory of how

intuitions provide evidence for claims, and there are divergent accounts of what sort
of mental state intuitions are, ranging from mere spontaneous judgment to a special
presentation of a necessary truth.[27] However, in recent years a number of
philosophers, especially George Bealer have tried to defend appeals to intuition
against Quinean doubts about conceptual analysis.[28] A different challenge to
appeals to intuition has recently come from experimental philosophers, who argue that
appeals to intuition must be informed by the methods of social science.[citation needed]

The metaphilosophical assumption that philosophy depends on intuitions has

recently been challenged by some philosophers. Timothy Williamson has argued that
intuition plays no special role in philosophy practice, and that skepticism about
intuition cannot be meaningfully separated from a general skepticism about
judgment. On this view, there are no qualitative differences between the methods of
philosophy and common sense, the sciences or mathematics.[29]

2 Psychology

o 2.1 Jung

o 2.2 Modern psychology

In more-recent psychology, intuition can encompass the ability to know valid

solutions to problems and decision making. For example, the recognition primed
decision (RPD) model explains how people can make relatively fast decisions without
having to compare options. Gary Klein found that under time pressure, high stakes,
and changing parameters, experts used their base of experience to identify similar
situations and intuitively choose feasible solutions. Thus, the RPD model is a blend of
intuition and analysis. The intuition is the pattern-matching process that quickly
suggests feasible courses of action. The analysis is the mental simulation, a
conscious and deliberate review of the courses of action.[31]

A lot of time instinct is misinterpreted as intuition and its reliability considered to be

dependent on past knowledge and occurrences in a specific area. For example,
someone who has had more experiences with children will tend to have a better
instinct about what they should do in certain situations with them. This is not to say
that one with a great amount of experience is always going to have an accurate
intuition.[32]
110

Intuitive
abilities were quantitatively tested at Yale University in the 1970s. While
studying nonverbal communication, researchers noted that some subjects were able to
read nonverbal facial cues before reinforcement occurred.[33] In employing a similar
design, they noted that highly intuitive subjects made decisions quickly but could not
identify their rationale. Their level of accuracy, however, did not differ from that of
non intuitive subjects.[34]

3 Colloquial usage

4 See also

5 References

6 External links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental
events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the
physical body, particularly the brain. The mindbody problem, i.e. the relationship of the
mind to the body, is commonly seen as one key issue in philosophy of mind, although there
are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the
physical body, such as how consciousness is possible and the nature of particular mental
states.[2][3][4]

Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind
body problem.

Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct
kinds of entities (independent substances).

The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of
physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous
monism and functionalism.[18]

Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist

position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the
body.[18] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the
fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences
that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to
identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations that is, the functional
products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking
about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in
evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to
111

psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with
different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue
that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve
recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.[1]

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but

that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that
integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolution has for biology.[2][3][4]

Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures
are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations[5] including the abilities to infer others'
emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with
others. They report successful tests of theoretical predictions related to such topics as
infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price,
and parental investment.[6]

The theories and findings of EP have applications in many fields, including economics,
environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.[7][8]

Criticism of evolutionary psychology involves questions of testability, cognitive and

evolutionary assumptions (such as modular functioning of the brain, and large uncertainty
about the ancestral environment), importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations,
as well as political and ethical issues due to interpretations of research results.[9][10]

and the various neurosciences.[19][20][21][22] Reductive physicalists assert that all mental
states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological
processes and states.[23][24][25] Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the mind is not a
separate substance, mental properties supervene on physical properties, or that the predicates
and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot
be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.[26][27] Continued
neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues; however, they are far from
being resolved. Modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities
and the intentionality (Intentionality is a philosophical concept and is defined by the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to
stand for, things, properties and states of affairs".[1 ) of mental states and properties can be
explained in naturalistic terms.[28][29]

1 Mindbody problem
2 Dualist solutions to the mindbody problem

2.1 Arguments for dualism

112

The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism appeals to the

common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from
inanimate matter.

Another important argument in favor of dualism is that the mental and the
physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable,
properties.[31]

They would almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice
versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be
too mechanistic, or simply unintelligible.[8] Many modern philosophers of
mind think that these intuitions are misleading and that we should use our
critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, to
examine these assumptions to determine whether there is any real basis
to them.[8

Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events "qualia"

or "raw feels".[31] There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a
familiar shade of blue, and so on. There are qualia involved in these
mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything
physical

If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the

brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning
consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects
physical reality.

Another possible argument that has been proposed by C. S. Lewis[33] is the Argument
from Reason: if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical
causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a
reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to
consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing this
or anything elsewe could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.

The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody,

and developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind.

2.2 Interactionist dualism

2.3 Other forms of dualism

o 2.3.1 Psychophysical parallelism

o 2.3.2 Occasionalism

o 2.3.3 Property dualism

o Property dualism is the view that the world is constituted of just one
kind of substance the physical kind and there exist two distinct
113

kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In

other words, it is the view that non-physical, mental properties
(such as beliefs, desires and emotions) inhere in some physical
bodies (at least, brains). How mental and physical properties relate
causally depends on the variety of property dualism in question,
and is not always a clear issue. Sub-varieties of property dualism

o 2.3.4 Dual aspect theory

o Dual aspect theory or dual-aspect monism is the view that the

mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the
same substance.

o In modern philosophical writings, the theory's relationship to neutral

monism has become somewhat ill-defined, but one proffered
distinction says that whereas neutral monism allows the context of
a given group of neutral elements and the relationships into which
they enter to determine whether the group can be thought of as
mental, physical, both, or neither, dual-aspect theory suggests that
the mental and the physical are manifestations (or aspects) of some
underlying substance, entity or process that is itself neither mental
nor physical as normally understood. Various formulations of dual-
aspect monism also require the mental and the physical to be
complementary, mutually irreducible and perhaps inseparable
(though distinct).[49][50][51]

o 2.3.5 Experiential dualism

A philosophy of mind that regards the degrees of freedom between mental and
physical well-being as not necessarily synonymous and thus implying an experiential
dualism between body and mind. As example of these disparate degrees of freedom is
given by Allan Wallace who notes that it is, "experientially apparent that one may be
physically uncomfortablefor instance, while engaging in a strenuous physical
workoutwhile mentally cheerful; conversely, one may be mentally distraught
while experiencing physical comfort."[52] Experiential dualism notes that our
subjective experience of merely seeing something in the physical world seems
qualitatively different than mental processes like grief that comes from losing a loved
one for instance. This philosophy also is a proponent of causal dualism which is
defined as the dual ability for mental states and physical states to affect one another.
Mental states can cause changes in physical states and vice versa.

However, unlike cartesian dualism or some other systems, experiential dualism does
not posit two fundamental substances in reality: mind and matter. Rather,
experiential dualism is to be understood as a conceptual framework that gives
credence to the qualitative difference between the experience of mental and
physical states. Experiential dualism is accepted as the conceptual framework of
Madhyamaka Buddhism.
114

o 2.3.6 Hylomorphic dualism

3 Monist solutions to the mindbody problem

In contrast to dualism, monism does not accept any fundamental divisions. The
fundamentally disparate (discrepancy, inconsistency, imbalance) nature of reality
has been central to forms of eastern philosophies for over two millennia. In
Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how experience is
understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy
are physicalist.[18] Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing
substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best
science

3.1 Physicalistic monisms

o 3.1.1 Behaviorism

o 3.1.2 Identity theory

Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart[25] and Ullin
Place[59] as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned
that, if mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are
probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental
state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of
coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain
brain regions".[25]

The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the
Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type
corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single
physical type. For anomalous monism, the tokentoken
correspondences can fall outside of the typetype correspondences.
The result is token identity.
115

Despite its initial plausibility, the identity theory faces a strong challenge in the form
of the thesis of multiple realizability (the thesis that the same mental property,
state, or event can be implemented by different physical properties, states or events),
first formulated by Hilary Putnam.[27] It is obvious that not only humans, but many
different species of animals can, for example, experience pain

o The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of

mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings
of physical events.[60] Anomalous monism (see below) and most
other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories.[61]
Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type
identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.
[25]

o 3.1.3 Functionalism

Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the
inadequacies of the identity theory.[27] Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of
an empirical computational theory of the mind.[62] At about the same time or slightly
after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of
functionalism that analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of
functional roles.[63] Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of
functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and
Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by the
naturalistic philosophy of mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.

What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that
mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states
and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism abstracts away
from the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it
in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is
characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining
certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether
the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the
role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney.[62

3.1.4 Non-reductive physicalism Non-reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential

convictions with regard to mindbody relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states
must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states
cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.[53] Hence, the question
arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous
monism[26] is an attempt to formulate such a Non-reductive physicalism.

Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are
not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there
116

can be no change in the mental without some change in the physicalcausal reducibility
between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.[64]

Because non-reductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological distinction
between mind and body and to try to solve the "surfeit of explanations puzzle" in some
way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to epiphenomenalism, in
that it is the brain that is seen as the root "cause" not the mind, and the mind seems to be
rendered inert.

Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain
states, having no influence on physical states

o 3.1.5 Weak emergentism

o Weak emergentism is a form of "non-reductive physicalism" that

involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms
of increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own
special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties
causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others
maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene
over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter
group therefore holds a less strict, or "weaker", definition of
emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property
P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically
impossible for another object to lack property P if that object is
composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O
and has those parts in an identical configuration.

o 3.1.6 Eliminative materialism

o If one is a materialist and believes that all aspects of our common-

sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive
neuroscience, and that non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then
one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative
materialism.There are several varieties of eliminative
materialism.. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate
awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model of the mind in which thought
and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-like states
called "propositional attitudes"

3.2 Non-physicalist monisms

o 3.2.1 Idealism

o 3.2.2 Neutral monism

4 Mysterianism
5 Linguistic criticism of the mindbody problem
117

Each attempt to answer the mindbody problem encounters substantial problems. Some
philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion.[68]
These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of
linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory.[69] They argue that it is an
error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be
accepted that human experience can be described in different waysfor instance, in a
mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the
one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong
contexts.[69] This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The
brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabularythe search for mental
states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.[69]

Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker.
[68]
However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position
that the mindbody problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to
the manner of Wittgenstein.[70

6 Externalism and internalism

7 Naturalism and its problems
The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical)
world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties
that no other material thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore
explain how it is possible that these properties can nonetheless emerge from a
material thing. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to
as the "naturalization of the mental".[53] Some of the crucial problems that this
project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and the nature of
intentionality.[53]

7.1 Qualia

7.2 Intentionality

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards

(about) or be in relation with something in the external world.[29] This
property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic
referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to
reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural
processes are not true or false, they simply happen

8 Philosophy of perception
9 Philosophy of mind and science
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to
examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental
processes are intimately related to bodily processes, the descriptions that the
118

natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the

philosophy of mind.[2] There are many scientific disciplines that study processes
related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer
science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and
psychology.[77]

9.1 Neurobiology

The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural

sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study
are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the
foundations of mental activity and behavior.[78] The increasing success of
biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the
absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition:
"there can be no change in the mental states of a person without
a change in brain states."[77

9.2 Computer science

9.3 Near-Death research

9.4 Psychology

9.5 Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its
processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does, and how it works. It includes
research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is
represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language,
memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animal)
and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research
disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience,
linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education.[86] It spans many levels of
analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and
planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organisation. Rowlands argues that
cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. The
position is taken that the "classical sandwich" of cognition sandwiched between
perception and action is artificial; cognition has to be seen as a product of a strongly
coupled interaction (between or of what?) that cannot be divided this way.[87][88]

10 Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition

11 Mind in Eastern philosophy

11.1 Mind in Hindu philosophy

o 11.1.1 Dualism
119

o 11.1.2 Vedanta monistic idealism

o 11.1.3 Materialism

11.2 Buddhist philosophy of mind

o 11.2.1 Abhidharma theories of mind

o 11.2.2 Indian Mahayana

o 11.2.3 Tibetan Buddhism

o 11.2.4 Zen Buddhism

12 Topics related to philosophy of mind

12.1 Free will

12.2 Self

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism

Biological naturalism is a theory about, among other things, the relationship between
consciousness and body (i.e. brain), and hence an approach to the mind-body
problem. It was first proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 and is defined
by two main theses: 1) all mental phenomena from pains, tickles, and itches to the
most abstruse thoughts are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the
brain; and 2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.

This entails that the brain has the right causal powers to produce intentionality.
However, Searle's biological naturalism does not entail that brains and only brains can
cause consciousness. Searle is careful to point out that while it appears to be the case
that certain brain functions are sufficient for producing conscious states, our current
state of neurobiological knowledge prevents us from concluding that they are
necessary for producing consciousness. In his own words:

"The fact that brain processes cause consciousness does not imply that only brains
can be conscious. The brain is a biological machine, and we might build an artificial
machine that was conscious; just as the heart is a machine, and we have built artificial
hearts. Because we do not know exactly how the brain does it we are not yet in a
position to know how to do it artificially." (Biological Naturalism, 2004)

There have been several criticisms of Searle's idea of biological naturalism.

Jerry Fodor suggests that Searle gives us no account at all of exactly why he believes
that a biochemistry like, or similar to, that of the human brain is indispensable for
intentionality. Fodor thinks that it seems much more plausible to suppose that it is the
way in which an organism (or any other system for that matter) is connected to ( that
both the organism and the environment developed together during evolution for
120

example the former evolved in the environment and because of the environment?) its
environment that is indispensable in the explanation of intentionality

John Haugeland takes on the central notion of some set of special "right causal
powers" that Searle attributes to the biochemistry of the human brain..

Searle himself actually does not rule out the possibility for alternate arrangements of
matter bringing forth consciousness other than biological brains. He also disputes that
Biological naturalism is dualistic in nature in a brief essay entitled "Why I Am Not a
Property Dualist".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_physicalism

Type physicalism (also known as reductive materialism, type identity theory,

mindbrain identity theory and identity theory of mind) is a physicalist theory, in
the philosophy of mind. It asserts that mental events can be grouped into types, and
can then be correlated with types of physical events in the brain. For example, one
type of mental event, such as "mental pains" will, presumably, turn out to be
describing one type of physical event (like C-fiber firings).(So you employ some kind
of differentiation of types of events, occurrences in the brain? Why use only different
types? Increase and different other things as well as types!!)

Type physicalism is contrasted by token identity physicalism, which argues that mental
events are unlikely to have "steady" or categorical biological correlates. These positions make
use of the philosophical typetoken distinction (e.g., Two persons having the same "type" of
car need not mean that they share a "token", a single vehicle). Type physicalism can now be
understood to argue that there is identicalness between types, whereas token identity
physicalism says one can only describe a particular, unique, brain event.

There are other ways a physicalist might criticize type physicalism; eliminative materialism
and revisionary materialism question whether science is currently using the best
categorisations. (LINGUISTIC PROBLEMS caused by inadequate ideas and
concepts!) In the same way talk of demonic possession was questioned with scientific
advance, categorisations like "pain" may need to be revised.

Contents
1 Background

According to U.T. Place,[1] one of the popularizers of the idea of type-identity in the 1950s
and 1960s, the idea of type-identity physicalism originated in the 1930s with the psychologist
E. G. Boring and took nearly a quarter of a century to gain acceptance from the philosophical
community. Boring, in a book entitled The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness (1933)
wrote that:

To the author a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the
same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two
events but the same event. The mind-body correlations as formulated at present, do not admit
121

of spatial correlation, so they reduce to matters of simple correlation in time. The need for
identification is no less urgent in this case (p. 16, quoted in Place [unpublished]).

There were actually subtle but interesting differences between the three most widely credited
formulations of the type-identity thesis, those of Place, Feigl and Smart which were published
in several articles in the late 1950s.

One of the most influential and common objections to the type identity theory is the argument
from multiple realizability. The multiple realizability thesis asserts that mental states can be
realized in multiple kinds of systems, not just brains, for example. Since the identity theory
identifies mental events with certain brain states, it does not allow for mental states to be
realized in organisms or computational systems that do not have a brain. This is in effect an
argument that the identity theory is too narrow because it does not allow for organisms
without brains to have mental states. However, token identity (where only particular tokens of
mental states are identical with particular tokens of physical events) and functionalism both
account for multiple realizability.

The response of type identity theorists, such as Smart, to this objection is that, while it may
be true that mental events are multiply realizable, this does not demonstrate the falsity of type
identity. As Smart states:

"The functionalist second order [causal] state is a state of having some

first order state or other which causes or is caused by the behavior to
which the functionalist alludes. In this way we have a second order type
theory."[2]

The fundamental point is that it is extremely difficult to determine where, on the continuum
of first order processes, type identity ends and merely token identities begin

2 Versions of type identity theory

2.1 U.T. Place

2.2 Feigl and Smart

3 Criticism and replies

3.1 Multiple realizability

3.2 Qualia

4 See also
5 Notes

6 References and further reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism
122

Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mindbody relationship. It was first
proposed by Donald Davidson in his 1970 paper Mental Events. The theory is twofold and
states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is
anomalous,( deviating from or inconsistent with the common order, form, or rule; irregular;
abnormal: Advanced forms of life may be anomalous in the universe) i.e. under their mental
descriptions, relationships between these mental events are not describable by strict physical
laws.[1] Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge
laws associated with the type-identity theory. Since the publication of his paper, Davidson
has refined his thesis and both critics and supporters of anomalous monism have come up
with their own characterizations of the thesis, many of which appear to differ from
Davidson's.

Resolving the contradiction

So how are the three seemingly irreconcilable principles above resolved? Davidson
distinguishes causal relations, which are an extensional matter and not influenced by the
way they are described, from law-like relations, which are intensional and dependent on the
manner of description. There is no law of nature under which events fall when they are
described according to the order in which they appeared on the television news. When the
earthquake caused the Church of Santa Maria dalla Chiesa to collapse, there is surely some
physical law(s) which explains what happened, but not under the description in terms of the
event on Channel 7 at six p.m. causing the events on Channel 8 at six fifteen. In the same
way, mental and physical events are causally related but not qua mental events. The
mental events have explanatory predicates which are physical as well as predicates which
are irreducibly mental. Hence, AM is a form of predicate dualism which accompanies
ontological monism.

Finally, for those who objected that this is not really a form of physicalism because there is
no assurance that every mental event will have a physical base, Davidson formulated the
thesis of supervenience. Mental properties are dependent on physical properties and there
can be no change in higher-level properties without a corresponding change in lower-level
properties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_mind)

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an

alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Its core idea is that mental
states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role that
is, they have causal relations to other mental states, numerous sensory inputs, and
behavioral outputs.[1] Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical
implementation and behavioral output.[2] Therefore, it is different from its predecessors of
Cartesian dualism (advocating independent mental and physical substances) and Skinnerian
behaviorism and physicalism (declaring only physical substances) because it is only
concerned with the effective functions of the brain, through its organization or its "software
programs".

Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be realized on
multiple levels; in other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems, even
123

perhaps computers, so long as the system performs the appropriate functions. While
computers are physical devices with electronic substrate that perform computations on inputs
to give outputs, so brains are physical devices with neural substrate that perform
computations on inputs which produce behaviors.

Contents
1 Multiple realizability
According to standard functionalist theories, mental states are the
corresponding functional role, mental states can be sufficiently explained
without taking into account the underlying physical medium (e.g. the
brain, neurons, etc.) that realizes such states; one need only take into
account the higher-level functions in the cognitive system. Since mental states
are not limited to a particular medium, they can be realized in multiple
ways, including, theoretically, within non-biological systems, such as computers
2 Types

2.1 Machine-state functionalism

2.2 Psycho functionalism

2.3 Analytic functionalism

A third form of functionalism is concerned with the meanings of theoretical

terms in general. This view is most closely associated with David Lewis
and is often referred to as analytic functionalism or conceptual
functionalism. The basic idea of analytic functionalism is that theoretical
terms are implicitly defined by the theories in whose formulation they
occur and not by intrinsic properties of the phonemes they comprise. In
the case of ordinary language terms, such as "belief", "desire", or
"hunger", the idea is that such terms get their meanings from our
common-sense "folk psychological" theories about them, but that such
conceptualizations are not sufficient to withstand the rigor imposed by
materialistic theories of reality and causality. Such terms are subject to
conceptual analyses which take something like the following form:

Mental state M is the state that is preconceived by P and causes Q.

Forexample, the state of pain is caused by sitting on a tack and causes loud cries, and
higher order mental states of anger and resentment directed at the careless person who
left a tack lying around. These sorts of functional definitions in terms of causal roles
are claimed to be analytic and a priori truths about the submental states and the
(largely fictitious) propositional attitudes they describe. Hence, its proponents are
known as analytic or conceptual functionalists. The essential difference between
analytic and psychofunctionalism is that the latter emphasizes the importance of
laboratory observation and experimentation in the determination of which mental state
terms and concepts are genuine and which functional identifications may be
considered to be genuinely contingent and a posteriori identities. The former
(analytic or conceptual functionalists) , on the other hand, claims that such
identities are necessary and not subject to empirical scientific investigation.
124

2.4 Homuncular functionalism

Since mind-mind supervenience seemed to have become acceptable in

functionalist circles, it seemed to some that the only way to resolve the
puzzle was to postulate the existence of an entire hierarchical series of
mind levels (analogous to homunculi) which became less and less
sophisticated in terms of functional organization and physical composition
all the way down to the level of the physico-mechanical neuron or group of
neurons. The homunculi at each level, on this view, have authentic
mental properties but become simpler and less intelligent as one
works one's way down the hierarchy.

2.5 Mechanistic functionalism

Mechanistic functionalism, originally formulated and defended by

Gualtiero Piccinini[7] and Carl Gillett[8][9] independently, augments previous
functionalist accounts of mental states by maintaining that any
psychological explanation must be rendered in mechanistic terms.

3 Physicalism
There is much confusion about the sort of relationship that is claimed to exist (or not exist)
between the general thesis of functionalism and physicalism. It has often been claimed that
functionalism somehow "disproves" or falsifies physicalism tout court (i.e. without further
explanation or description). On the other hand, most philosophers of mind who are
functionalists claim to be physicalistsindeed, some of them, such as David Lewis, have
claimed to be strict reductionist-type physicalists.

Functionalism is fundamentally what Ned Block has called a broadly metaphysical thesis as
opposed to a narrowly ontological one. That is, functionalism is not so much concerned with
what there is than with what it is that characterizes a certain type of mental state, e.g.
pain, as the type of state that it is.

On this understanding, type physicalism can be seen as incompatible with

functionalism, since it claims that what characterizes mental states (e.g.
pain) is that they are physical in nature, while functionalism says that
what characterizes pain is its functional/causal role and its relationship
with yelling "ouch", etc. However, any weaker sort of physicalism which
makes the simple ontological claim that everything that exists is made
up of physical matter is perfectly compatible with functionalism.
Moreover, most functionalists who are physicalists require that the properties
that are quantified over in functional definitions be physical properties. Hence,
they are physicalists, even though the general thesis of functionalism itself does
not commit them to being so.

4 Criticism

4.1 China brain

125

Ned Block[14] argues against the functionalist proposal of multiple

realizability, where hardware implementation is irrelevant because only
the functional level is important. The "China brain" or "Chinese nation"
thought experiment involves supposing that the entire nation of China
systematically organizes itself to operate just like a brain, with each
individual acting as a neuron. According to functionalism, so long as the
people are performing the proper functional roles, with the proper causal
relations between inputs and outputs, the system will be a real mind, with
mental states, consciousness, and so on. However, Block argues, this is
patently absurd, so there must be something wrong with the thesis of
functionalism since it would allow this to be a legitimate description of a
mind.

4.2 The Chinese room

The Chinese room argument by John Searle[18] is a direct attack on the

claim that thought can be represented as a set of functions. The thought
experiment asserts that it is possible to mimic intelligent action without
any interpretation or understanding through the use of a purely functional
system. In short,

4.3 Inverted spectrum

Another main criticism of functionalism is the inverted spectrum or

inverted qualia scenario, most specifically proposed as an objection to
functionalism by Ned Block.[14][19] This thought experiment involves
supposing that there is a person, call her Jane, that is born with a condition
which makes her see the opposite spectrum of light that is normally
perceived

Therefore, the argument goes, since there can be two people who are
functionally identical, yet have different mental states (differing in their
qualitative or phenomenological aspects), functionalism is not robust
enough to explain individual differences in qualia. [20]

David Chalmers tries to show[21] that even though mental content cannot
be fully accounted for in functional terms, there is nevertheless a
nomological correlation between mental states and functional states in
this world. A silicon-based robot, for example, whose functional profile
matched our own, would have to be fully conscious. His argument for this
claim takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum. The general idea is that
since it would be very unlikely for a conscious human being to experience
a change in its qualia which it utterly fails to notice, mental content and
functional profile appear to be inextricably bound together, at least in the
human case.

A related critique of the inverted spectrum argument is that it assumes

that mental states (differing in their qualitative or phenomenological
aspects) can be independent of the functional relations in the brain. Thus,
it begs the question of functional mental states: its assumption denies the
possibility of functionalism itself, without offering any independent
justification for doing so. (Functionalism says that mental states are
produced by the functional relations in the brain.) This same type of
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problemthat there is no argument, just an antithetical assumption at

their basecan also be said of both the Chinese room and the Chinese
nation arguments

4.4 Twin Earth

The Twin Earth thought experiment, introduced by Hilary Putnam,[22] is

responsible for one of the main arguments used against functionalism,
although it was originally intended as an argument against semantic
internalism..

Therefore, so the argument goes, since two people can be functionally

identical, yet have different mental states, functionalism cannot
sufficiently account for all mental states.

Most defenders of functionalism initially responded to this argument by attempting to

maintain a sharp distinction between internal and external content. The internal
contents of propositional attitudes, for example, would consist exclusively in those
aspects of them which have no relation with the external world and which bear the
necessary functional/causal properties that allow for relations with other internal
mental states. Since no one has yet been able to formulate a clear basis or justification
for the existence of such a distinction in mental contents, however, this idea has
generally been abandoned in favor of externalist causal theories of mental contents
(also known as informational semantics). Such a position is represented, for example,
by Jerry Fodor's account of an "asymmetric causal theory" of mental content. This
view simply entails the modification of functionalism to include within its scope a
very broad interpretation of input and outputs to include the objects that are the causes
of mental representations in the external world.

The twin earth argument hinges on the assumption that experience with an imitation
water would cause a different mental state than experience with natural water.
However, since no one would notice the difference between the two waters, this
assumption is likely false. Further, this basic assumption is directly antithetical to
functionalism; and, thereby, the twin earth argument does not constitute a genuine
argument: as this assumption entails a flat denial of functionalism itself (which would
say that the two waters would not produce different mental states, because the
functional relationships would remain unchanged).

4.5 Meaning holism

Another common criticism of functionalism is that it implies a radical form of

semantic holism. Block and Fodor[19] referred to this as the damn/darn problem. The
difference between saying "damn" or "darn" when one smashes one's finger with a
hammer can be mentally significant. But since these outputs are, according to
functionalism, related to many (if not all) internal mental states, two people who
experience the same pain and react with different outputs must share little (perhaps
nothing) in common in any of their mental states. But this is counter-intuitive; it
127

seems clear that two people share something significant in their mental states of being
in pain if they both smash their finger with a hammer, whether or not they utter the
same word when they cry out in pain.

Another possible solution to this problem is to adopt a moderate (or molecularist)

form of holism. But even if this succeeds in the case of pain, in the case of beliefs and
meaning, it faces the difficulty of formulating a distinction between relevant and non-
relevant contents (which can be difficult to do without invoking an analytic-synthetic
distinction, as many seek to avoid).

4.6 Triviality arguments

According to Ned Block, if functionalism is to avoid the chauvinism of type-

physicalism, it becomes overly liberal in "ascribing mental properties to things that do
not in fact have them".[14] As an example, he proposes that the economy of Bolivia
might be organized such that the economic states, inputs, and outputs would be
isomorphic to a person under some bizarre mapping from mental to economic
variables.[14]

Hilary Putnam,[23] John Searle,[24] and others[25][26] have offered further arguments that
functionalism is trivial, i.e. that the internal structures functionalism tries to discuss
turn out to be present everywhere, so that either functionalism turns out to reduce to
behaviorism, or to complete triviality and therefore a form of panpsychism

Formulations of functionalism which stipulate absolute requirements on interaction

with external objects (external to the functional account, meaning not defined
functionally) are reduced to behaviorism instead of absolute triviality, because the
input-output behavior is still required.

Peter Godfrey-Smith has argued further[27] that such formulations can still be reduced
to triviality if they accept a somewhat innocent-seeming additional assumption. The
assumption is that adding a transducer layer, that is, an input-output system, to an
object should not change whether that object has mental states. The transducer layer is
restricted to producing behavior according to a simple mapping, such as a lookup
table, from inputs to actions on the system, and from the state of the system to
outputs. However, since the system will be in unique states at each moment and at
each possible input, such a mapping will always exist so there will be a transducer
layer which will produce whatever physical behavior is desired.

Godfrey-Smith believes that these problems can be addressed using causality, but that
it may be necessary to posit a continuum between objects being minds and not being
minds rather than an absolute distinction

The general theory of adaptive biological systems, named practopoiesis (meaning

creation of actions), has been used to derive a theory that explains mental operations
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as an adaptive process. Much like species adapt through evolution and an organism
adapts through development, the theory of anapoiesis (meaning re-creation) proposes
that a thought is a process of adaptation to the immediate environment. This is
performed by fast physiological machinery that can operate within a few 100s of
milliseconds and relies on the mechanisms of neural adaptation. A key difference
between anapoietic approach and the functional approach is that for anapoietic
process much of the information needed for the mental operations is located outside
the organism. If mental operations are an adaptive process, they do not juggle
symbols internally (like a computer) but make guesses of what changes should be
made to the nervous system and then test them against the environment.

The mechanisms of anapoiesis offer a solution to the problem of the Chinese Room
posed by John Searle

Cognitive science

Consciousness

Consciousness is difficult to define, though many people seem to think they know
intuitively what it is. Attempts at definition have included: sentience, awareness,
subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of
selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it,
and the executive control system of the mind,[1] or the state or quality of awareness,
or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[2][3] In
contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of
its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and
function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it.

Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly
shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and
Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything
that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making
conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our
lives."[5]

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to
comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties. Issues of
concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is
fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained
mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be
recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be
understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and
physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing
machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of
artificial intelligence.
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Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades, consciousness has
become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, with
significant contributions from fields such as psychology, neuropsychology and
neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically
and psychologically for information to be present in consciousnessthat is, on
determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The
majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects
for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do
this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight,
denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and
other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and

responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness
and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful
communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli.[6] Issues
of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in
severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which
consciousness is impaired or disrupted.[7]

(For some time I have noticed that it is possible to be conscious without

the use of words, concepts and ideas. This reminds me of one state during
meditation or contemplation, where or when the mind is blanked or
without concepts or ideas produced by words or language.

I have explored this often by what I would call pre-consciousness or pre-

conceptual (mediated) consciousness, or pure consciousness of
awareness. I found that my mind is blank (or blanked out from concepts
etc) or I willingly create this state a state where I do not employ words
or concepts or use them to mediate to have or be conscious or aware. I
am generally conscious but not of any specific feeling, subject-matter or
object. Then I turn my visual focus in or to a certain direction. I take in
the whole scene without concentrating on a, one or specific objects. I
tried this with other senses, I hear sounds but do not specify them as from
a particular producer of sound, I tried this with taste and touch. I rub my
hand on different textures, feel the texture but does not identify the object
producing the texture or the feeling of the texture and without employing
words or concepts. I attempted to illustrate that it is possible to be
conscious or aware without the mediation of concepts, language or words.

I wondered if there exists a relationship between this pre-conceptual or

pure conscious awareness and that of certain species of animals, babies or
very young children and early or primitive mankind?
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To me it seems as if consciousness is an umbrella word that covers many

different types of things, states, situations, processes and conditions. All
of these, and other things, can and should be identified, differentiated and
conceptualized so as to overcome the restrictions of using this one word,
and the mistaken, misleading or fake problems created and caused by
the use of this nebulous notion.

The coherence of the concept

Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is.[22]
While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as
consciousness,[23] skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of
consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in
illusions. Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness
depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body,
or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world,
but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we
end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness
separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.[24] More generally, many
philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition
that does not involve circularity or fuzziness.[21]

Types of consciousness

Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood
intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it.[23] Others, though,
have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it
either means different things to different people (for instance, the objective versus subjective
aspects of consciousness), or else is an umbrella term encompassing a variety of distinct
meanings with no simple element in common.[25]

Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called
phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness).[26] P-consciousness, according
to Block, is simply raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions
and feelings with our bodies' and responses at the center. These experiences, considered
independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other
hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report,
reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we
perceive is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access
conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on.
Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this
distinction,[27] others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-
consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-
consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.[28]

Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the
story. William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at
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least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness;
control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability;
introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)and that even
this list omits several more obscure forms.[29]

There is also debate over whether or not a-consciousness and p-consciousness always co-
exist or if they can exist separately. Although p-consciousness without a-consciousness is
more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block for
instance suggests the case of a zombie that is computationally identical to a person but
without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I dont know
whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I
have illustrated their conceptual possibility." [30

Forms of consciousness

While philosophers tend to focus on types of consciousness that occur 'in the mind', in other
disciplines such as sociology the emphasis is on the practical meaning of consciousness. In
this vein, it is possible to identify four forms of consciousness:[31]

1. Sensory experience, "the phenomenal sense that something exists in

relation to, or has an impact on, a person". The concept of affect attests
to this kind of consciousness, as does sense data' "

2. Practical consciousness, or "knowing how (Ryle) to do things, knowing

how to go on. As writers as different as Wittgenstein and Marx have
elaborated, it is "basic to human engagement"

3. Reflective consciousness, "the modality in which people reflect upon the

first two forms. It is the stuff of ordinary philosophy and day-to-day
thinking about what has been done and what is to be done" (already
second- order or meta..)

4. Reflexive consciousness, or "reflecting on the basis of reflection, and

interrogating the nature of knowing in the context of the constitutive
conditions of being".(Meta- cognition !)

Mindbody problem
Main article: Mindbody problem

Illustration of dualism by Ren Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory

organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem
to be correlated: but what is the basis of this connection and correlation between what seem
to be two very different kinds of processes?

The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the
answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism
132

Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles
governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that
consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms..

A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of
explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the
missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories
of consciousness.[42] Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain
theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart
Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal
consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum
mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi,
J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel[43] could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff,
which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and
philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be
unconvincing.[44]

Problem of other minds

Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that
experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is
subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that
other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?[46] This is called the problem of other
minds.[4

The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem
of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability
to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences.[54] Also, it is difficult to
reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often
taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally
wrong. Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals due
to the fact that he believed only humans have a non-physical mind.[55] Most people have a
strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as
insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on
personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed.[54]

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally
believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never
rigorously be known. Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay
titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there
is something that it is like to be that organism something it is like for the organism"; and
he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can
never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it
does itself.[56] Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as
incoherent.[57] Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal
consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs
about things they cannot directly perceive Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds
reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.[58]
133

On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the
University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals
with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals.
After the conference, they signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, the 'Cambridge
Declaration on Consciousness', which summarizes the most important findings of the survey:

"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not
scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not
obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far
East. It is not obvious to the society."[59]

"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals [...], including all mammals and
birds, and other creatures, [...] have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the
capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."[60]

Artifact consciousness

One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by
pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too
loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful; but he proposed to replace all such
questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the Turing test.[63] To
pass the test, a computer must be able to imitate a human well enough to fool interrogators. In
his essay Turing discussed a variety of possible objections, and presented a counterargument
to each of them. The Turing test is commonly cited in discussions of artificial intelligence as
a proposed criterion for machine consciousness; it has provoked a great deal of philosophical
debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of
passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,[64] while David Chalmers argues that a
philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.[65] A third group of scholars
have argued that with technological growth once machines begin to display any substantial
signs of human-like behavior then the dichotomy (of human consciousness compared to
human-like consciousness) becomes pass and issues of machine autonomy begin to
prevail even as observed in its nascent form within contemporary industry and technology.[49]
[50]
Jrgen Schmidhuber argues that consciousness is simply the result of compression.[66] As
an agent sees representation of itself recurring in the environment, the compression of this
representation can be called consciousness.

In 2014, Victor Argonov has suggested a non-Turing test for machine consciousness based
on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments.[72] He argues that a
deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produces judgments
on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or binding) having no
innate (preloaded) philosophical knowledge on these issues, no philosophical discussions
while learning, and no informational models of other creatures in its memory (such models
may implicitly or explicitly contain knowledge about these creatures consciousness).
However, this test can be used only to detect, but not refute the existence of
consciousness. A positive result proves that machine is conscious but a negative result proves
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nothing. For example, absence of philosophical judgments may be caused by lack of the
machines intellect, not by absence of consciousness.

For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of
mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective
terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.[73] In 1975 George
Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow,
serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones.[74]
Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have
associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of
experimental work published in books,[75] journals such as Consciousness and Cognition,
Frontiers in Consciousness Research, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with
regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of
Consciousness.[76]

Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on

psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using
subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma,
illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts. The
first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human
subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by
neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is
impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing
consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural
and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.[40

Measurement

The Necker cube, an ambiguous image

Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a

universally accepted operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are
specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion used is verbal
report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions
are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.[77] For example, subjects who
stare continuously at a Necker cube usually report that they experience it "flipping" between
two 3D configurations, even though the stimulus itself remains the same.[78] The objective is
to understand the relationship between the conscious awareness of stimuli (as indicated by
verbal report) and the effects the stimuli have on brain activity and behavior. In several
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paradigms, such as the technique of response priming, the behavior of subjects is clearly
influenced by stimuli for which they report no awareness, and suitable experimental
manipulations can lead to increasing priming effects despite decreasing prime identification
(double dissociation).[79]

Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it
raises a number of issues.[80] For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin
to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain
errorsbut it is difficult to make sense of the idea that subjects could be wrong about their
own experiences, and even more difficult to see how such an error could be detected.[81]
Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means
treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do
this have not been widely adopted.[82] Another issue with verbal report as a criterion is that it
restricts the field of study to humans who have language: this approach cannot be used to
study consciousness in other species, pre-linguistic children, or people with types of brain
damage that impair language. As a third issue, philosophers who dispute the validity of the
Turing test may feel that it is possible, at least in principle, for verbal report to be dissociated
from consciousness entirely: a philosophical zombie may give detailed verbal reports of
awareness in the absence of any genuine awareness.[83]

Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not
the only possible criterion.[80] In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of
verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement. The last three of these can
be used as indicators of consciousness when verbal behavior is absent.[84] The scientific
literature regarding the neural bases of arousal and purposeful movement is very extensive.
Their reliability as indicators of consciousness is dispute

Neural correlates

Schema of the neural processes

underlying consciousness, from Christof Koch

A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the
relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously
takes place in their brainsthat is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope
is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain
activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness. Several brain imaging
techniques, such as EEG and fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in
these studies.[88]

Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated
with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity. This idea arose from
proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma
136

oscillations could solve the so-called binding problem, by linking information represented in
different parts of the brain into a unified experience.[89] Rodolfo Llins, for example, proposed
that consciousness results from recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific
thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus)
thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the gamma band frequency via synchronous
oscillations.[90]

A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not
sufficient to produce consciousness: it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness
even when areas such as the primary visual cortex show clear electrical responses to a
stimulus.[91] Higher brain areas are seen as more promising, especially the prefrontal cortex,
which is involved in a range of higher cognitive functions collectively known as executive
functions. There is substantial evidence that a "top-down" flow of neural activity (i.e., activity
propagating from the frontal cortex to sensory areas) is more predictive of conscious
awareness than a "bottom-up" flow of activity.[92] The prefrontal cortex is not the only
candidate area, however: studies by Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues have shown, for
example, that visually responsive neurons in parts of the temporal lobe reflect the visual
perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e.,
bistable percepts during binocular rivalry).[93]

Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to

the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these
responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of
consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience of stimulus intensity (brightness,
contrast). In the research group of Danko Nikoli it has been shown that some of the changes
in the subjectively perceived brightness correlated with the modulation of firing rates while
others correlated with the modulation of neural synchrony.[94] An fMRI investigation
suggested that these findings were strictly limited to the primary visual areas.[95] This
indicates that, in the primary visual areas, changes in firing rates and synchrony can be
considered as neural correlates of qualiaat least for some type of qualia.

In 2011, Graziano and Kastner[96] proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In
that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-
parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people.
The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these
cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as hemispatial neglect. In the
attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to
a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person's attentional processing. Attention
is a style of information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of
interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema

Explanatory gap

The explanatory gap is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine for the
difficulty that physicalist theories of mind have in explaining how physical
properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced.[1] In
the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the
137

sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid
in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike
for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a
satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the
hard problem".[2]

To take an example of a phenomenon in which there is no gap, imagine a modern

computer: as marvelous as these devices are, their behavior can be fully explained by
their circuitry. By contrast, it is thought by many mind-body dualists (e.g. Ren
Descartes, David Chalmers) that subjective conscious experience constitutes a
separate effect that demands another cause, a cause that is either outside the physical
world (dualism) or due to an as yet unknown physical phenomenon (see for instance
quantum mind, indirect realism).

Proponents of dualism claim that the mind is substantially and qualitatively

different from the brain and that the existence of something metaphysically extra-
physical is required to "fill the gap".

The nature of the explanatory gap has been the subject of some debate. For example,
some consider it to simply be a limit on our current explanatory ability.[3] They argue
that future findings in neuroscience or future work from philosophers could close
the gap. However, others have taken a stronger position and argued that the gap
is a definite limit on our cognitive abilities as humansno amount of further
information will allow us to close it.[4] There has also been no consensus regarding
what metaphysical conclusions the existence of the gap provides. Those wishing to
use its existence to support dualism have often taken the position that an epistemic
gapparticularly if it is a definite limit on our (PRESENT!) cognitive abilities
necessarily entails a metaphysical gap.[5]

Levine and others have wished to either remain silent on the matter or argue that no such
metaphysical conclusion should be drawn.[1] He agrees that conceivability (as used in the
Zombie and inverted spectrum arguments) is flawed as a means of establishing metaphysical
realities; but he points out that even if we come to the metaphysical conclusion that qualia are
physical, they still present an explanatory problem. Joseph Levine works on philosophy of
mind and is best known for inventing the explanatory gap argument [1] (cited over 1000 times
on Google Scholar) and author of popular and academic philosophy books.[2][3][4] The idea is
that an unbridgeable gap exists when trying to comprehend consciousness from the
perspective of natural science as a scientific explanation of mental states would require a
reduction from a physical process to phenomenal experience. The property of mental states to
be experienced from a subjective point of view (see Qualia) might not be reducible from the
objective, i.e. outside perspective of science. In this sense there would be a gap between the
outside perspective of science and the internal perspective of phenomenal experience.

While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not suffice to put
the mind-body problem to rest. Even if conceivability considerations do not establish
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that the mind is in fact distinct from the body, or that mental properties are
metaphysically irreducible to physical properties, still they do demonstrate that we
lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.(BUT both mental terms
and physical terms are mere ideas, concepts, words, language! Do when then employ
two types of languages or two systems of concepts? Of course not, it depends on the
dualist or monist assumptions underlying our use, usage of the terms as if they are
or refer to or express mental properties or physical properties.)

However, such an epistemological or explanatory problem might indicate an

underlying metaphysical issuethe non-physicality of qualia, even if not proven by
conceivability arguments is far from ruled out.

In the end, we are right back where we started. The explanatory gap argument
doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature.
Of course a plausible explanation for there being a gap in our understanding of nature
is that there is a genuine gap in nature. But so long as we have countervailing reasons
for doubting the latter, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the former.[6]

At the core of the problem, according to Levine, is our lack of understanding of what
it means for a qualitative experience to be fully comprehended. He emphasizes that
we don't even know to what extent it is appropriate to inquire into the nature of this
kind of experience. He uses the laws of gravity as an example, which laws seem to
explain gravity completely yet do not account for the gravitational constant.
Similarly to the way in which gravity appears to be an inexplicable brute fact of
nature, the case of qualia may be one in which we are either lacking essential
information or in which we're exploring a natural phenomenon that simply is not
further apprehensible. Levine suggests that, as qualitative experience of a physical or
functional state may simply be such a brute fact, perhaps we should consider whether
or not it is really necessary to find a more complete explanation of qualitative
experience.

Levine points out that the solution to the problem of understanding how much there
is to be known about qualitative experience seems even more difficult because we
also lack a way to articulate what it means for actualities to be knowable in the
manner that he has in mind. He does conclude that there are good reasons why we
wish for a more complete explanation of qualitative experiences. One very significant
reason is that consciousness appears to only manifest where mentality is demonstrated
in physical systems that are quite highly organized. This, of course, may be
indicative of a human capacity for reasoning that is no more than the result of
organized functions. Levine expresses that it seems counterintuitive to accept this
implication that the human brain, so highly organized as it is, could be no more than a
routine executor. He notes that although, at minimum, Materialism appears to entail
reducibility of anything that is not physically primary to an explanation of its
dependence on a mechanism that can be described in terms of physical
fundamentals, that kind of reductionism doesn't attempt to reduce psychology to
physical science. However, it still entails that there are inexplicable classes of facts
which are not treated as relevant to statements pertinent to psychology.
139

Functional psychology

Hard problem of consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why we
have qualia or phenomenal experienceshow sensations acquire characteristics, such
as colors and tastes.[1] The philosopher David Chalmers, who introduced the term
"hard problem" of consciousness,[2] contrasts this with the "easy problems" of
explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states,
focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their
solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their
proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can
be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena.
Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he
argues that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of
all the relevant functions is explained".[3]

The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial and has been disputed by

philosophers such as Daniel Dennett[4] and cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas
Dehaene.[5] Clinical neurologist and skeptic Steven Novella has dismissed it as "the
hard non-problem".[6]

Scientific attempts

There have been scientific attempts to explain subjective aspects of consciousness, which is
related to the binding problem in neuroscience.

The binding problem is a term used at the interface between neuroscience, cognitive science
and philosophy of mind that has multiple meanings.

Firstly, there is the segregation problem: a practical computational problem of how brains
segregate elements in complex patterns of sensory input so that they are allocated to discrete
"objects". In other words, when looking at a blue square and a yellow circle, what neural
mechanisms ensure that the square is perceived as blue and the circle as yellow, and not vice
versa? The segregation problem is sometimes called BP1.

Secondly, there is the combination problem: the problem of how objects, background and
abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.[1] The combination
problem is sometimes called BP2.

However, the difference between these two problems is not always clear. Moreover, the
historical literature is often ambiguous as to whether it is addressing the segregation or the
combination problem.[1][2]

Dennett[26] has proposed that our sense that our experiences are single events is illusory and
that, instead, at any one time there are "multiple drafts" of sensory patterns at multiple sites.
Each would only cover a fragment of what we think we experience. Arguably, Dennett is
140

claiming that consciousness is not unified and there is no phenomenal binding problem. Most
philosophers have difficulty with this position (see Bayne[24..

The disadvantage, as for Dennett, is the counter-intuitive concept of multiple "copies" of

experience. The precise nature of an experiential event or "occasion", even if local, also
remains uncertain.

The majority of theoretical frameworks for the unified richness of phenomenal experience
adhere to the intuitive idea that experience exists as a single copy, and draw on "functional"
descriptions of distributed networks of cells. Baars[31] has suggested that certain signals,
encoding what we experience, enter a "Global Workspace" within which they are "broadcast"
to many sites in the cortex for parallel processing. Dehaene, Changeux and colleagues[32] have
developed a detailed neuro-anatomical version of such a workspace. Tononi and colleagues[33]
have suggested that the level of richness of an experience is determined by the narrowest
information interface "bottleneck" in the largest sub-network or "complex" that acts as an
integrated functional unit. Lamme[28] has suggested that networks supporting reciprocal
signaling rather than those merely involved in feed-forward signaling support experience.
Edelman and colleagues have also emphasized the importance of re-entrant
signaling.Cleeremans[34] emphasizes meta-representation as the functional signature of signals
contributing to consciousness.

In general, such network-based theories are not explicitly theories of how consciousness is
unified, or "bound" but rather theories of functional domains within which signals contribute
to unified conscious experience. A concern about functional domains is what Rosenberg[35]
has called the boundary problem; it is hard to find a unique account of what is to be included
and what excluded. Nevertheless, this is, if anything is, the consensus approach.

Within the network context, a role for synchrony has been invoked as a solution to the
phenomenal binding problem as well as the computational one. In his book, The Astonishing
Hypothesis,[36] Crick appears to be offering a solution to BP2 as much as BP1. Even von der
Malsburg, introduces detailed computational arguments about object feature binding with
remarks about a "psychological moment". The Singer group also appear to be interested as
much in the role of synchrony in phenomenal awareness as in computational segregation.

The apparent incompatibility of using synchrony to both segregate and unify might be
explained by sequential roles. However, Merker[12] points out what appears to be a
contradiction in attempts to solve the phenomenal unification problem (BP2) in terms of a
functional (effectively meaning computational) rather than a local biophysical, domain, in the
context of synchrony.

Functional arguments for a role for synchrony are in fact underpinned by analysis of local
biophysical events. However, Merker[12] points out that the explanatory work is done by the
downstream integration of synchronized signals in post-synaptic neurons: "It is, however, by
no means clear what is to be understood by 'binding by synchrony' other than the threshold
advantage conferred by synchrony at, and only at, sites of axonal convergence onto single
dendritic trees..." In other words, although synchrony is proposed as a way of explaining
binding on a distributed, rather than a convergent, basis the justification rests on what
141

happens at convergence. Signals for two features are proposed as bound by synchrony
because synchrony effects downstream convergent interaction. Any theory of phenomenal
binding based on this sort of computational function would seem to follow the same
principle. The phenomenality would entail convergence, if the computational function does.

Although BP1 and BP2 are different, this need not invalidate the assumption, implicit in
many of the quoted models, that computational and phenomenal events, at least at some point
in the sequence of events, parallel each other in some way. The difficulty remains in
identifying what that way might be. Merker's[12] analysis suggests that either (1) both
computational and phenomenal aspects of binding are determined by convergence of signals
on neuronal dendritic trees, or (2) that our intuitive ideas about the need for "binding" in a
"holding together" sense in both computational and phenomenal contexts are misconceived.
We may be looking for something extra that is not needed. Merker, for instance, argues that
the homotopic connectivity of sensory pathways does the necessary work.

The nature of, and solution to, BP2 remains a matter of controversy.

Many eminent theorists, including molecular biologist and neuroscientist Francis Crick and
mathematical physicist and philosopher Roger Penrose, have worked in this field.
Nevertheless, even as sophisticated accounts are given, it is unclear if such theories address
the hard problem as Chalmers formulated it. Eliminative materialist philosopher Patricia
Smith Churchland famously remarked about Penrose's theories that "Pixie dust in the
synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules."[14]

Consciousness is fundamental or elusive

Some philosophers, including David Chalmers in the late 20th century and Alfred North
Whitehead earlier in the 20th century, argued that conscious experience is a fundamental
constituent of the universe, a form of panpsychism sometimes referred to as
panexperientialism. Chalmers argued that a "rich inner life" is not logically reducible to the
functional properties of physical processes. He states that consciousness must be described
using nonphysical means. This description involves a fundamental ingredient capable of
clarifying phenomena that has not been explained using physical means. Use of this
fundamental property, Chalmers argues, is necessary to explain certain functions of the
world, much like other fundamental features, such as mass and time, and to explain
significant principles in nature.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel posited in 1974 that experiences are essentially subjective
(accessible only to the individual undergoing them), while physical states are essentially
objective (accessible to multiple individuals). So at this stage, he argued, we have no idea
what it could even mean to claim that an essentially subjective state just is an essentially non-
subjective state. In other words, we have no idea of what reductivism really amounts to.[13]

New mysterianism, such as that of the philosopher Colin McGinn, proposes that the human
mind, in its current form, will not be able to explain consciousness.[15]
142

Deflationary accounts

Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett[4] and Peter Hacker[16] oppose the idea that there is
a hard problem. These theorists have argued that once we really come to understand
what consciousness is, we will realize that the hard problem is unreal. For instance,
Dennett asserts that the so-called hard problem will be solved in the process of answering the
"easy" ones (which, as he has clarified, he does not consider "easy" at all).[4] In contrast with
Chalmers, he argues that consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe and
instead will eventually be fully explained by natural phenomena. Instead of involving the
nonphysical, he says, consciousness merely plays tricks on people so that it appears
nonphysicalin other words, it simply seems like it requires nonphysical features to account
for its powers. In this way, Dennett compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability
to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.[17]

To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the powers of
consciousness, Dennett describes a normal phenomenon called change blindness, a visual
process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in a series of alternating images.[18] He
uses this concept to argue that the overestimation of the brain's visual processing implies that
the conception of our consciousness is likely not as pervasive as we make it out to be. He
claims that this error of making consciousness more mysterious than it is could be a misstep
in any developments toward an effective explanatory theory. Critics such as Galen Strawson
reply that, in the case of consciousness, even a mistaken experience retains the essential face
of experience that needs to be explained, contra Dennett.

To address the question of the hard problem, or how and why physical processes give rise to
experience, Dennett states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more
than the performance of functions or the production of behavior, which can also be
referred to as the easy problems of consciousness.[4] He states that consciousness itself is
driven simply by these functions, and to strip them away would wipe out any ability to
identify thoughts, feelings, and consciousness altogether. So, unlike Chalmers and other
dualists, Dennett says that the easy problems and the hard problem cannot be separated from
each other. To him, the hard problem of experience is included amongnot separate from
the easy problems, and therefore they can only be explained together as a cohesive unit.[17]

Like Dennett, Hacker argues that the hard problem is fundamentally incoherent and that
"consciousness studies", as it exists today, is "literally a total waste of time":[16]

The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurdthey are in pursuit
of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of
consciousness which they have is incoherent. Within the network context, a role for
synchrony has been invoked as a solution to the phenomenal binding problem as well as the
computational one. In his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis,[36] Crick appears to be offering a
solution to BP2 as much as BP1. Even von der Malsburg, introduces detailed computational
arguments about object feature binding with remarks about a "psychological moment". The
Singer group also appear to be interested as much in the role of synchrony in phenomenal
awareness as in computational segregation.
143

The apparent incompatibility of using synchrony to both segregate and unify might be
explained by sequential roles. However, Merker[12] points out what appears to be a
contradiction in attempts to solve the phenomenal unification problem (BP2) in terms of a
functional (effectively meaning computational) rather than a local biophysical, domain, in the
context of synchrony.

Functional arguments for a role for synchrony are in fact underpinned by analysis of local
biophysical events. However, Merker[12] points out that the explanatory work is done by the
downstream integration of synchronized signals in post-synaptic neurons: "It is, however, by
no means clear what is to be understood by 'binding by synchrony' other than the threshold
advantage conferred by synchrony at, and only at, sites of axonal convergence onto single
dendritic trees..." In other words, although synchrony is proposed as a way of explaining
binding on a distributed, rather than a convergent, basis the justification rests on what
happens at convergence. Signals for two features are proposed as bound by synchrony
because synchrony effects downstream convergent interaction. Any theory of phenomenal
binding based on this sort of computational function would seem to follow the same
principle. The phenomenality would entail convergence, if the computational function does.

Although BP1 and BP2 are different, this need not invalidate the assumption, implicit in
many of the quoted models, that computational and phenomenal events, at least at some point
in the sequence of events, parallel each other in some way. The difficulty remains in
identifying what that way might be. Merker's[12] analysis suggests that either (1) both
computational and phenomenal aspects of binding are determined by convergence of signals
on neuronal dendritic trees, or (2) that our intuitive ideas about the need for "binding" in a
"holding together" sense in both computational and phenomenal contexts are misconceived.
We may be looking for something extra that is not needed. Merker, for instance, argues that
the homotopic connectivity of sensory pathways does the necessary work.

The nature of, and solution to, BP2 remains a matter of controversy.

. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

Critics of Dennett's approach, such as Chalmers and Nagel, argue that Dennett's argument
misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property
and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to refer to Dennett's
book Consciousness Explained as Consciousness Ignored or Consciousness Explained Away.
[4]
Dennett discussed this at the end of his book with a section entitled Consciousness
Explained or Explained Away?[18]

Though the most common arguments against deflationary accounts and eliminative
materialism are the argument from qualia and the argument that conscious experiences are
irreducible to physical statesor that current popular definitions of "physical" are incomplete
the objection follows that the one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that
the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the
reality. Critics of the deflationary approach object that qualia are a case where a single reality
cannot have multiple appearances. For example, the philosopher John Searle pointed out:
"where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality".[19]
144

A notable deflationary account is the higher-order theories of consciousness.[20] In 2005, the

philosopher Peter Carruthers wrote about "recognitional concepts of experience", that is, "a
capacity to recognize [a] type of experience when it occurs in one's own mental life", and
suggested that such a capacity does not depend upon qualia.[21]

The philosophers Glenn Carruthers and Elizabeth Schier said in 2012 that the main
arguments for the existence of a hard problemphilosophical zombies, Mary's room, and
Nagel's batsare only persuasive if one already assumes that "consciousness must be
independent of the structure and function of mental states, i.e. that there is a hard problem".
Hence, the arguments beg the question. The authors suggest that "instead of letting our
conclusions on the thought experiments guide our theories of consciousness, we should let
our theories of consciousness guide our conclusions from the thought experiments".[22]

In 2013, the philosopher Elizabeth Irvine pointed out that both science and folk psychology
do not treat mental states as having phenomenal properties, and therefore "the hard
problem of consciousness may not be a genuine problem for non-philosophers (despite its
overwhelming obviousness to philosophers), and questions about consciousness may well
'shatter' into more specific questions about particular capacities".[23]

The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci distances himself from eliminativism, but he said in 2013
that the hard problem is still misguided, resulting from a "category mistake":[24]

Of course an explanation isn't the same as an experience, but that's because the two are
completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot
experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of
how and why it is possible to be you.

Personhood in Western philosophy

In philosophy, the word "person" may refer to various concepts. According to the
"naturalist" epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the
term may designate any human (or non-human) agent who: (1) possesses continuous
consciousness over time; and (2) who is therefore capable of framing representations
about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.[7]

According to Charles Taylor, the problem with the naturalist view is that it depends
solely on a "performance criterion" to determine what is an agent. Thus, other things
(e.g. machines or animals) that exhibit "similarly complex adaptive behaviour" could
not be distinguished from persons. Instead, Taylor proposes a significance-based view
of personhood:

What is crucial about agents is that things matter to them. We thus cannot simply
identify agents by a performance criterion, nor assimilate animals to machines...
[likewise] there are matters of significance for human beings which are peculiarly
human, and have no analogue with animals.

[8]
145

Others,such as American Philosopher Francis J. Beckwith, argue that personhood is

not linked to function at all, but rather that it is the underlying personal unity of the
individual.

What is crucial morally is the being of a person, not his or her functioning. A human
person does not come into existence when human function arises, but rather, a human
person is an entity who has the natural inherent capacity to give rise to human
functions, whether or not those functions are ever attained. A human person who
lacks the ability to think rationally (either because she is too young or she suffers
from a disability) is still a human person because of her nature. Consequently, it
makes sense to speak of a human beings lack if and only if she is an actual person.
[9]

Philosopher J. P. Moreland clarifies this point:

It
is because an entity has an essence and falls within a natural kind that it can possess
a unity of dispositions, capacities, parts and properties at a given time and can
maintain identity through change.

[10]

Harry G. Frankfurt writes that, "What philosophers have lately come to accept as
analysis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of that concept at all." He
suggests that the concept of a person is intimately connected to free will, and
describes the structure of human volition according to first- and second-order desires:

Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, [humans] may also
want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting
to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals
appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the
first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No
animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-
evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.[11][12]

The criteria for being a person... are designed to capture those attributes which are the
subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard
as most important and most problematical in our lives.

Harry G. Frankfurt

According to Nikolas Kompridis, there might also be an intersubjective, or

interpersonal, basis to personhood:

What if personal identity is constituted in, and sustained through, our relations with
others, such that were we to erase our relations with our significant others we would
also erase the conditions of our self-intelligibility? As it turns out, this erasure... is
precisely what is experimentally dramatized in the science fiction film, Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a far more philosophically sophisticated meditation on
146

personal identity than is found in most of the contemporary literature on the topic.
[13]

Other philosophers have defined persons in different ways. Boethius gives the
definition of "person" as "an individual substance of a rational nature" ("Natur
rationalis individua substantia").[14] Peter Singer defines a person as being a
conscious, thinking being, which knows that it is a person (self-awareness).[15]

Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are as follows: (1) is
alive, (2) is aware, (3) feels positive and negative sensations, (4) has emotions, (5) has
a sense of self, (6) controls its own behaviour, (7) recognises other persons and treats
them appropriately, and (8) has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While
many of White's criteria are somewhat anthropocentric, some animals such as
dolphins would still be considered persons.[16] Some animal rights groups have also
championed recognition for animals as "persons".[17]

Another approach to personhood, Paradigm Case Formulation, used in Descriptive

Psychology and developed by Peter Ossorio, involves the four interrelated concepts of
1) The Individual Person, 2) Deliberate Action, 3) Reality and the Real World, and 4)
Language or Verbal Behavior. All four concepts require full articulation for any one of
them to be fully intelligible. More specifically, a Person is an individual whose history
is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical pattern.
Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an
Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that, and (c) has chosen to do that. A person is
not always engaged in a deliberate action but has the eligibility to do so. A human
being is an individual who is both a person and a specimen of Homo sapiens. Since
persons are deliberate actors, they also employ hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical
reasons when selecting, choosing or deciding on a course of action. As part of our
"social contract" we expect that the typical person can make use of all four of these
motivational perspectives. Individual persons will weigh these motives in a manner
that reflects their personal characteristics. That life is lived in a dramaturgical
pattern is to say that people make sense, that their lives have patterns of significance.
The paradigm case allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons,
manufactured persons, former persons, "deficit case" persons, and "primitive"
persons. By using a paradigm case methodology, different observers can point to
where they agree and where they disagree about whether an entity qualifies as a
person.[18][19]

Philosophical zombie Philosophy of mind

Reverse engineering

Simulated consciousness

Turing test

13
147

In the preceding brainstorming, brain dumping or data collection we would have to find some
generalizations so as to be able to come to consistent and non-contradictory conclusions so
that we can develop hypotheses, to be identified, explored, modified and investigated. These
generalizations do not concern trends in the discussions of the mind-body problem, intuition,
(meta)ontological approaches and theories such as NR, etc, but the ways of proceeding, the
methods, techniques and tools employed to develop reasoning and arguments, argumentation
for or against the different positions that were depicted. In other words we execute a certain
type of meta-exploration (a meta-ontology), with meta-reasons (other than those that
motivate, guide and steer the first-order positions we depicted, presented and illustrated) for
the exploration of these (first-order) approaches, speculations, descriptions, theories or
models of the nature and operation of the mind, brain and consciousness (and the difference
or similarity, identity or lack of it between them and the existence or absence of inter and
intra links or connections) of human beings.

We find here, among the ideas, models or theories of the nature and the existence or non-
existence of the mental and the physical (in this case the brain, its components, bio-
chemistry and other relevant organs, features and systems of the embodied person) and the
type, if any, relationship between the mental and the physical seemingly endless different
approaches and positions. Obviously not all of them can be correct, although each appears
to be meaningful in its own right. And, this has gone on for more than 2000 years in the
discourse of philosophy. Is this what philosophos or the love of wisdom has come to mean in
philosophy and more specifically in contemporary philosophy and the field of mental and
physical studies? Must one draw the conclusion that philosophizing consists of producing an
alternative model to all existing ones concerning the nature, the existence or non-existence
and the relationships between the mental and the physical? Although one is aware prior to the
production of this model that it will not be successful and that it will suffer from similar or
other inconsistencies, problems and discrepancies than all existing models. Is this what the
nature, purpose and function of the doing of philosophy is about? The production of another,
alternative model, in this case of the so-called mind-body problem (or other forms or features
of mental and the physical)?

All this appears like an endless playing with ideas, words, concepts and language in ways that
with a little meta-cognition and foresight the philosopher should surely be aware that he is
only going to fabricate yet another theory or, probably well reasoned, argued for and
expressed with great clarity, a seemingly consistent metaphysical system of speculations
about this, or other, philosophical problems? Should one respond to this situation or this
problem with the doing of philosophy and the discipline of philosophy with scepticism and
relativism? That this and other traditional philosophical problems are not valid problems
and/or that they are not problems suitable to the discourse, discipline and socio-cultural
practice of philosophizing? Or, are their alternative ways to deal with this problem, ways that
do not involve scepticism and relativism and the questioning of the possibility, relevance and
meaningfulness of the philosophical enterprise?

If these allegedly philosophical problems, concerning consciousness, persons, mind etc,

were solved or dissolved surely it will be the case that no subject-matter for the discourse of
philosophy existed in these, and related, fields? In other words there will be no need to do
philosophy in these fields at least and that will be the end of philosophy, if these false
148

philosophical issues, problems and concerns and the ways of identifying, conceiving and
(mistakenly?) conceptualizing them were investigated and dealt with. With the clarification of
these problems and the dis/solving of that what remains there will be no more a need for the
doing of philosophy, in these areas at least as the problematic contexts themselves will
disappear.

Are there any real, meaningful and valid philosophical problems and questions? Problems
that are not simply created by the misleading use of words, that are expressed in seemingly
meaningful, reasoned ways and valid arguments? What are these real philosophical problems
and what are the norms or standards that should be employed and that are required to deal
with, identify, conceive, conceptualize and express thus, if any, problems? In other words, are
their standards for identifying and conceptualizing, meaningful, valid and real problems in
the discourse of philosophy? This is of course a meta-philosophical view concerning many
assumptions of the discourse, discipline, socio-cultural practice of philosophy and the doing
of philosophy.

14

Here are phrases from, labels of or positions in some of the things I have posted here. How is
it possible that a number of people, philosophers, can employ reason, reasoned arguments,
logic and all sorts of technical definition and terms and be so convinced of the validity, truth
and meaningfulness of alternative and often opposing views of the same issue, question or
problem?

Ontological pluralism, metaphysical nihilism, descriptive theory, bad descriptions, theory of

reference, the infinite depths of fields of sense, the uniform status of concepts and objects, a
new realist ontology, the identity of thought and being, the object domain investigated by the
natural sciences, properties of objects themselves, the idea of totality, regulative idea,
ultimate horizon, the world does not exist, world view, discursive presupposition, unrestricted
quantification, mereological, ontological reality,maximally spatio-temporal extended theory,
substance dualism, biological naturalism, emergent materialism, anomalous monism, non-
reductive physicalism, neurobiological properties, physical staus , properties and
components, metal states, components and properties, property dualism, one kind of
substance but two properties, double and dual aspect theory, interpretative perspective,
contingent conditions, teleological not Darwinian, materialist or mechanistic view, subjective
experience, physicalism, neural Darwinism, multiple drafts model, adaptionist, intentional
state, etc .

These are a few examples of terms that are created to label the numerous different positions
and approaches to the problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem. It seems as
soon as a position or a theory has been developed, alternative positions approaches and views
are created. Perhaps it is possible to identify progress of advancement in this? I doubt that
this is the case. Is this endless development of approaches and substitution of theories that do
not seem to go anywhere how a discipline should be practised? In this light it appears as if
each theory is nothing but the preferred fictional perspective of an individual? But because
of the use of sound reasoning, judgements, argumentation to criticize and reject the theories
of other philosophers and to express ones own position this entire game has the air of being a
149

rational enterprise, very different from literature and the types of imagination used in those
discourses, but also different from the manner in which sciences are executed and practised.
The doing of philosophy appears to be different from all other socio-cultural practices, but
not quite clear about what and how it should be executed, while concerned with ever more
microscopic and detailed aspects of some issue or problem? What are the reasons that those
involved in this enterprise persist in this praxis, what motivates them and why do they begin
and continue to do this? Is it possible to identify socio-cultural and psychological reasons for
someones involvement in the doing of philosophy and the continued practice of it? In the
case of Socrates and his method, if we are to believe what is said about them, one can still
understand why anybody would execute that method when confronted with those who hold
uncritical and dogmatic beliefs and have restricted attitudes. But, it is more difficult to grasp
why anyone would be involved in turning out the reasoned games with words in the ways a
Derrida, Davidson, Searle, and other professional, academic philosophers do. Perhaps we
should investigate why individuals are involved in a certain socio-cultural practice? Is it
because society bestows a cultural value on doing philosophy, creating visual, performance or
installation and other modern media art, a certain sport, science, etc? Is it because individuals
share certain similar values, attitudes, norms, ideals, motivations, purpose, interpretations of
the meaning and purpose of human life, personality types, characteristics, desires, needs and
passions..? Or is it something intrinsic to the discourse and the doing of philosophy? Or the
values, rational, norms, attitudes, purpose and goals of this discipline, the social and cultural
status of this socio-cultural practice? Does the doing of philosophy, the execution and beauty
of sound reasoning, the construction of valid arguments and argumentation to develop ones
own speculative, theoretical system or to criticize and destruct the hypotheses, speculations
and theories of another? Has it something to do with a power trip, causing one to feel strong
and powerful and important because one is creating and defending truth, meaning, correct
usage of words, the proper meaning of ideas, the validity and contextually-relevant conditions
of the real truth or conditions of truthfulness and meaningfulness, justified beliefs, etc?
What are the warriors of truthfulness, the knights battling for meaningful ideas, the disciples
and soldiers of straight and correct thinking, sound reasoning, valid arguments and legitimate
argumentation trying to defend, establish and destroy or remove from the face of the earth or
out of the discourse of philosophy and the doing of meaningful philosophizing?

15

Confronted with this seemingly endless positions concerning the mind-body problem,
resembling what occur with all philosophical problems, when automatically or intuitively
have a number of reactions. Initially one wishes to reject them and all of the discipline they
are indices of disarray, endless opinions, attempts to come up with the absolute, authentic
and real opinion of mind and brain, etc. In an attempt to apply the strategy of looking for
alternatives to that situation, those positions, thinking of other, more meaningful examples
than those presented by the situation. Mine was to reject all of them and the discourse they
originate in and represent, and that I do not wish to have anything to do with a discipline that
allows and invites such opinions, all of which appears like one-upmanship and power seeking
expressions. I wish to move to another more general, meta-view, the big picture, not to dirty
my hands in the mud of the mistaken notions, the misleading ideas and confused thinking of
this game, then I recognized many of the positions that I also briefly encountered and
considered over the years surely here is a bizarre mistaken usage of words and very
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confused and misleading notions, reject the whole enterprise as mistaken for a number of
reasons, implicit assumptions and underlying pre-suppositions, are these not merely two, or
more, different perspectives (and description, expressions of these) on the same (not, not the
same or identical, that is not correct) phenomenon/a, is it not obvious that my embodied self,
my person is material, bio-chemical, consisting of many interconnected systems and organs
and other knee-jerk reactions such as how could something ghostly like the mind be free
floating in this material body or in those of my dogs? Its is so obvious that they are truly
conscious of what occurs around and to them, that they react in certain ways when they are
happy, feel or are ill, see me for a re-union after many months as if I have never been away so
that it appears as if their minds function in different ways from standard humans as if their
memory is different, almost just about the here and now except when they sleep and make
movements as if they run in their sleep, cry, bark, etc It intuitively appears as if there is only
embodiment, different material properties, levels and dimensions that have been developed
during the evolution of our species as potential in our genes and are realized in the standard,
embodied person during his development because of that what are embedded in/as his genes
as potentials and other aspects of nature and nurture or socialization into some direction or
form because of the personality type of the individual.

What leads to this natural holism of a person, groups, sub-cultures of the hood and more
exclusive groups, societies, cultures and sub-cultures to appear as if they are more than, other
than the embodied, personal, subjective and intersubjective selves they re/represent to us? As
if the embodiment, like that of animals such as our dogs, trees, plants, the grass of the lawn
are or have spirit, consciousness? Is it not because those are living organisms, because
being alive, life are confronting us, an encounter that is not the case when viewing a corpse
of a loved one or a stranger, a beloved pet or road-kill? What are our expectations and norms
when encountering living organisms, fauna and flora? We expect life, consciousness and
signs of the presence of life in other people, our pets, plants and the lawn, so that we project
all sorts of things on those phenomena. Then we extend those expectations and projections by
means of folk psychology we have internalized in our Western culture, in various more or
less educated, informed ways of our socio-economic classes, our personality-types, gender,
age and other variables.

Now the philosophically thinking and questioning individual feel the need to identify more
general forms and patterns in these expectations and projections of all standard people. To be
able to do this in what appears as necessary to the questioning person he employs all sorts of
standard ways to gather information or relevant data about this phenomenon of being alive,
life, living, consciousness and mind. This data collection already is cognitively selecting and
biased. Almost automatically generalizations are made from them by means of this natural
attitude about that what appears as most striking about someone who has consciousness or
who is conscious. Although this ghost in the machine of the human and other bodies that
confront us is invisible, we wish to project something more, something else on them, things
that will make sense of why this human or animal embodiment and presence is different from
and more than the mere presence of the dead wood the table, chair or bed are fabricated from
and because of this need for an explanation of life (that we assume must be other than and
more than mere meat, mere flesh, mere skin the organ we perceive and to which we reduce
the person viewed by us and all his innards. We might accept some or all of our internalized
folk psychology of this encounter or feel the philosophical need to question it by comparing it
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to observations about this person, people and eventually our-selves, our own thinking, and
our thinking about these things and perhaps even parts of our own bodies. All these things are
undifferentiated as if in a melting pot all thrown together, and normally viewed as such until
we begin to separate them artificially when we begin to think about them and attempt to grasp
them as having a deeper sense. This we do by separating them into features, parts or aspects
by means of all kinds of classifications that are more or less informed and educated. One of
these are to separate or try to separate people into mind and body or matter or nature, and
dependent on how informed we are, their physiology, with an emphasis on the brain, unless
we are a trained physician confronted with a sick person (focussing on more detailed aspects
of the individual). Now we sit with the problem of the physical body, the physicality of the
person who have a brain, or is a brain, is his brain, and his consciousness. All these and many
other thoughts about the person in general are mere speculation, fabricated considerations,
view points and unfounded generalizations, hypotheses and conclusions. And to understand
this whole we are confronted with better we speculate about possible underlying patterns and
ideas that could provide us with an explanation, a meta- or second-order view an idea or a
belief consisting of a set or system of more or less coherent notions. And depending on our
type and level of philosophical schooling and being informed about theories of human beings,
brains, consciousness, the mind-body relationship, etc we begin to articulate our thoughts
concerning these things. And as we do this we make explicit patterns, trends and forms in our
thinking about this subject and thereby reveal the ism we are committed to when we think
about this topic (usually in isolation, as an independent area, domain, field of sense or context
that are unrelated to and not from a more general frame of reference such as a world view or
situating of the whole person, people, human beings in a larger social, inter-personal, natural
and other types of earthbound environments).

16

Aspects of many, even most, approaches to the mind-body or nature problem appear
meaningful and acceptable, often expressing clearly some notions oneself had. One might
even momentarily imagine that a certain notion represents what one thinks or have thought,
but when seeing criticism of it one doubts it validity as the way to conceptualize and solve or
dissolve the problem. Another possible reaction is surprise that the problem existed for so
long and cannot be solved and sometimes automatically begins to look for answers to the
problem or ways to deal with it. These and all other intuitive responses share a similar notion
namely that the problem as it stands is accepted as meaningful and valid. It is assumed that
the conceptualization, the identification, conceiving and wording of the problem is sound and
meaningful and that without exploring implicit assumptions and underlying pre-suppositions
that determine that and how the problem is perceived and presented. One need to investigate
and identify these assumptions and how they determine the constitution of the problem. Such
assumptions will usually form part of a mixture of ones more general, usually mostly tacit
metaphysical (ontological, epistemological, methodological) assumptions and a diversity of
other attitudes, values, norms and notions. As a result one would have to explore, identify and
investigate the nature of ones own take on these things.

Because of my sceptical attitude and relativistic approach I question the meaningfulness and
relevance of this problem as it at present stands or is conceived. It is not that I completely
reject that there might be such a meaningful problem, but I question the existence of such a
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problem in the way/s it has been conceived and presented until now. This sceptical position
often goes on to say: when we have more information, data and insight from cognitive and
related experiments and sciences we will see what the problem really is like. My attitude is
slightly different as I wish to emphasize that we might eventually, by means of such sciences
and other ways or approaches (including explicit metaphysical, ontological, methodological
and epistemological theories and frames of reference) be able to conceive this problem in a
more meaningful manner if there is such a problem or set of problems?

My concentration on the different approaches, models, theories or speculations concerning

the mind-body problem should be viewed in the context of my questioning of its much wider
horizon of the discipline of philosophy or its general situatedness or appearance, namely in
the discourse of philosophy. This is why I question the rationale for and the nature of the
philosophical discourse itself why is it that a discipline enable and allow the conceiving, the
existence and the development of problems that apparently cannot be conceptualized in a
meaningful manner and that existing ways of perceiving and expressing the problem do not
allow the problem to be solved or dissolved? It seems as if there is no systematic manner in
which this and many other problems (metaphysical, ontological and epistemological) that
existed since the origin of the discourse can be expressed and expressed in one systematic
manner that enable it to be investigated. This is why I am sceptical about the continued and
meaningful existence and practice of this discipline, its rationale, principles, purpose, goals,
assumptions and need to exist. Against this background it should be meaningful why all the
suggested functions of the philosophical discourse, proposals concerning its applications and
the utility of studying it academically appear as ridiculous and leave me sceptical. Reasons
that are given for the making of these suggestions can be applied to other disciplines and
fields of study. For example critical thinking and areas of formal, informal and propositional
logic and mathematics could assist in the development of critical and clear, straight and non-
fallacious thinking skills, reasoning, arguments and argumentation as well as an awareness of
things such as the nature and types of cognitive bias.

17

In the light of this critique of the philosophical discipline, the questions concerning the tacit
metaphysical (ontological, epistemological and methodological) assumptions of this socio-
cultural practice and the endless repetition of the same (mistaken?) problems one wishes to
ask if there exist no worthwhile philosophical approach and meaningful subject-matter? To
me the answer to such scepticism appears to be the worthwhile, so-called Socratic method.

Of course it also has, makes and employs explicit and implicit assumptions, goals, aims and a
fairly clear purpose, but without the need for the pre-supposition of metaphysical grounds and
attempts to validate such grounds by a methodology of reasoning, arguments and logic. This
method does not attempt to describe and argue for a metaphysical position, any ontological
position or -ism but concentrates on the identification of assumptions of participants in the
dialogue and attitudes determined by or implied by those assumptions. Greater clarity for the
participants concerning certain issues being discussed appears to be one of the aims, limited
and clear aims that are frequently realized by means of a suitable approach and an appropriate
method without the need for making metaphysical assumptions or attempting to prove some
ontological position and related notions or the theory they are alleged to express by means of
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reasoning, arguments, argumentation and speculation. The self-restrictions imposed by the

Socratic method do not require or subscribe to a particular metaphysical or ontological -ism
or position as they only concern the execution, employment or application of the method.

Two more specific points on the so-called Socratic Method. A) This one is negative no
attempt at the construction or development of an all-inclusive philosophical (metaphysical,
ontological, epistemological, methodological, etc) theory is attempted by making wide-
ranging generalizations or drawing, often unsupported, conclusions. Thus this method or
approach remains ism free and do not become restricted or boxed in by the numerous
metaphysical and other assumptions accompanying all philosophical systems. B) This one is
positive the method reminds one of the better or best aspects of analytic philosophy or
more specifically conceptual analysis of the kind found in Philosophical Investigations. I
merely use this book as an illustration and do not make a case out for Wittgenstein, I am not
another uncritical disciple of him or any other person or movement, or the umbrella school or
movement of so-called analytic philosophy. The method/s found in this work reminds me of
the so-called Socratic Method where the writer has a dialogue with himself, instead of with
another person as is the case with Socrates. One of ten find this technique in philosophical
and other writings, reasoning and arguments where a dialogue with oneself or an unknown or
unidentified partner/s occur. This is the restriction of Platos dialogue where the participants
are identified, that leads to the unnecessary creation of all sorts of metaphysical problems
because of the attempt at systematization or systemizing. This is the positive aspect o the
Socratic and PI methods no systemizing, attempt to identify, conceive or express
metaphysical generalizations, conclusions or theories is made. This freedom from
metaphysics is the eternal value and universal validity of this, these methods. Philosophy can
and must learn from this do not attempt to make generalization, draw restrictive or
restricting metaphysical conclusions or create metaphysical theories, theory construction or
theory building.

18

If you find it impossible to restrict yourself to what the Socratic or PI Methods did and
enable one to do and feel compelled to develop some form of systematized metaphysical
speculations, do not imagine that merely because you employ sound reasoning, informal or
other forms of Logic, valid arguments and argumentation and Critical Thinking that you are
involved in the doing of philosophy or philosophizing or created a philosophical theory or
metaphysical, ontological etc system (consisting of philosophical statements). All sorts of
discourses, disciplines and socio-cultural practices and mere rational discussion, dialogue
and social interaction employs these techniques, tools or instruments and they are not trying
to or aiming at being philosophy or doing philosophy.

If after all these insights you still think that the doing of philosophy is possible, necessary and
meaningful or that the construction of metaphysical or speculative philosophical systems
are valid and serve some kind of purpose, at least try to restrict yourself to the processes and
stages of theorizing. I have dealt with the details of the different features, stages and steps of
theorizing and the contexts in each step or in each stage. I also gave details of the nature and
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type of assumptions that most likely will be made. See this link for a number of articles and
books on Theorizing, its stages, etc https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian.

To summarize theorizing: it is usually approximate, there are a number of things that might
form part of theorizing but that in themselves are not (yet) theorizing, it usually begin with
data collection, brain dumping or brainstorming concerning a particular question or problem,
patterns, ideas and notions might be seen in the collected data, they will be investigated and
conjectures concerning them might be developed, it is said that the development of theory is
much like the trial and error of the process of evolution, making comparisons or developing
metaphors will often occur and has been shown to be a usual tool during the development of
a theory, a number of hypotheses concerning general trends and generalizations about the
data, their implications and assumptions will be made and tested in a number of different
ways, one will of course look for inconsistencies, fallacies and cognitive bias during all the
steps and stages of theorizing, while employing sound reasoning, valid logic, argumentation
and arguments at all times. Conclusions will probably be drawn to conclude the preliminary
model that are constructed, this might eventually become a meaningful, relevant and useful
theoretical proposition or an approximate theoretical position and theory.

We will always find one or more of the following tools being employed during theorizing

Attempts to identify and deal with inconsistencies in the work of others dealing with the
subject-matter being dealt with during ones own theorizing, as well as trying to identify them
in ones own reasoning and thinking this will occur in all stages of theorizing and especially
during the step of data collection (the latter will consist of ones ideas and a survey of those of
other sources, for example other thinkers); attempting to find alternative examples to ideas
and other proposals of other thinkers and ones own, this will occur during all steps of the
process/es of theorizing and is the explicit focus when searching for illustrations of ones
view point during the step of creating and employing comparisons, metaphors and other
techniques of imaginary experiments such as the development and application of alternative
perspectives and frames of reference; trying to situate data, metaphors and the contents and
implications of them and that of imaginary experiments, ideas of ones own or other thinkers
and conjectures, hypotheses, generalizations, conclusions and the entire model or theory in a
larger framework, frame of reference, alternative perspectives or the so-called big picture.

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