Tags / 16 quotes from 6 sources
#cause
Carl Sagan - Wikipedia
Atheism
An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Quattro modi della relazione causale
Anche la concezione del rapporto causa/effetto appare innovativa. Shotoku riconosce quattro possibilità di relazione: cumulativa, retributiva, reciproca e affine. Gli esempi vertono sulla pratica spirituale. La causa può avere effetti cumulativi: il continuo esercizio della…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Causal interaction between mind and body
What exactly are the relations between the mental and the physical, and in particular how can there be causal relations between them? It seems impossible that there should be causal relations between two completely different metaphysical realms, the physical realm of extended…
Free will in a causally closed world
Do I genuinely have free will, or is it only an illusion? The question comes in a very sharp form for Descartes, because if my free will is a feature of my mind, how can it have any effect on the physical world, if the physical world is entirely determined? This problem is an…
Epiphenomenalism: consciousness as froth on the wave
Some philosophers who think that we could explain how consciousness is caused by brain processes cannot see how consciousness could have any causal powers of its own. Granted that somehow or other consciousness, and mental phenomena generally, are dependent on brain processes…
Mental states defined by their function
At this point the materialists made a move that was crucial for subsequent philosophizing about the mind. They said: what token brain states have that makes them mental states is a certain type of function in the overall behavior of the organism. Not surprisingly, this doctrine…
Beliefs have no intrinsic features
Mental states such as beliefs are not defined by any intrinsic features, rather they are defined by their causal relations, and these causal relations constitute their function.
Davidson's anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a view put forward by Donald Davidson20 for which he advances the following argument: Step 1: There are causal relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Step 2: Wherever there are events related as cause and effect they must fall under…
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 of consciousness already implies that consciousness is something over and above its neurobiological base. I deny that…
Memories that refer to their own causes
The most biologically basic intentional phenomena, including perceptual experiences, intentions to do something, and memories, have a peculiar logical feature in their conditions of satisfaction. It is part of the conditions of satisfaction of, for example, my memory that I…
Induction cannot ground the uniformity of nature
Unless we presuppose some sort of uniformity of nature, the uniformity of nature guaranteed by causality and causation, we have no ground for inductive arguments. But, and this is the crucial point, there is no ground for the belief in the uniformity of nature, because any such…
Causation as one damn thing after another
This felt determination of the mind gives us the conviction that there are necessary connections in nature. But that conviction is nothing but an illusion. The only reality is the reality of priority, contiguity, and constant conjunction. Causation on Hume’s account is…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The head-tailed cat
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again…
Is birth the cause of death?
Moreover, as the egg/chicken relation suggests, not all the features of a total situation have to appear at the same time. The existence of a man implies parents, even though they may be long since dead, and the birth of an organism implies its death. Wouldn’t it be as…
The Chicken And The Pig - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Chicken and the pig fable
The fable of The Chicken and the Pig is about commitment to a project or cause. When producing a dish made of ham and eggs, the pig provides the ham which requires his sacrifice and the chicken provides the eggs which are not difficult to produce. Thus the pig is really…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Unity is an effect, not a cause
unity is not a cause: it is an effect of a remarkably disunified,…