The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 130 of 254

No more than, but more than just, matter

The way I put it is that we are no more than, but more than just, matter. In other words, we are made up of nothing more than physical stuff, but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary. You cannot fully describe what it is to be a person in the…

Saved 23 April 2015

#materialism #reductionism #self #language

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L'io si definisce in relazione all'altro

Si parla in modo diverso rivolgendosi a un proprio pari, un superiore, un subordinato o uno straniero. La gerarchia risponde, per grandi linee, a una esigenza…

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Behaviorism smuggles desire back in

I said earlier that the behaviorists would analyze Jones’s belief that it is going to rain into sets of statements about his rain-avoidance behavior. But the…

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Causal reduction without ontological reduction

On the dualist’s conception, consciousness is definitely something over and above its material substrate. Indeed the dualist supposes that the irreducibility…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #reductionism #ontology #consciousness #cause

For consciousness, appearance is reality

But why couldn’t we show that consciousness was an illusion like sunsets and thus do an eliminative reduction? Eliminative reductions rest on the distinction…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #consciousness #illusion #reductionism

Mud, Beethoven and surface features

So consciousness differs from other phenomena such as liquidity and solidity that have surface features, in that we are reluctant to carve off the surface…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #reductionism #consciousness #music

Pain and our definitional practices

there is an asymmetry between colors on the one hand and pains and consciousness on the other, because we would lose the point of having the concepts of…

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