Tags / 8 quotes from 2 sources
#reductionism
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
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 difficulty with that is that we can only begin to make such a reduction on the assumption that Jones desires to stay…
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 feature and redefine the notion in terms of the causes of the surface feature, because the point of the concept is to…
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 consciousness if we carved off the first-person ontology and redefined the words in third-person terms. In that sense the…
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 between appearance and reality. But we cannot show that the very existence of consciousness is an illusion like sunsets…
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…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
No further facts about persons
in the split-brain case, there is a truth about what has happened to the person which we cannot know on the basis of the physical facts, namely, which of them is me. This is an example of what Derek Parfit calls a ‘further fact’ view of the self.8 According to such theories…
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…
Non-reductive physicalism
This way of looking at things – sometimes called non-reductive physicalism – seems to be the only way to reconcile…