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I have been perusing an old book by Simon Blackburn called Spreading the Word.  In it, Blackburn has a very helpful little section describing the relationship between mind, language, and the world in the form of a triangle the corners of which are connected to one another by theories. The mind corner is connect to the world by a theory of knowledge and connected to the language corner by a theory of meaning. The world corner is connected to the language corner by a theory of truth. The idea is that one chooses a corner from which to develop theories for the sides. The task then becomes ensuring that one's corner contains a sufficient factual basis for all the three theories involved (meaning, knowledge, truth). Say you pick the world. The question is: what facts about the world provide the materials for your theories of meaning, truth, and knowledge? Say you pick the human mind. One would have to explain how sentences in natural languages have meanings, how those meanings c...

Humans are said to be unique in virtue of our beliefs, desires, and language use. Or so we thought. That was until we envisaged the possibility of machines doing what we do and doing it better. A.I. paranoia has fed Hollywood and conspiracy theorists in equal measure, but Alex Rosenberg argues that the problem with A.I. fantasies is our presumption that beliefs and desires can be replicated. They can't and that's because they don't exist, not even in humans. Thus, the threat to human distinctiveness comes not from the possibility of A.I. but the possibility that what we think makes us unique is an illusion: ...we are convinced we have something AI will always lack: We are agents in the world, whose decisions, choices, actions are made meaningful by the content of the belief/desire pairings that bring them about. But what if the theory of mind that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes ...

James Krugel is Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University. Krugel suggests that neuroscience can lend some understanding to biblical scholarship on how human beings might hear the voice of God. In a recent interview, Krugel suggests that the ancient worldview of the prophets included the idea that the mind could be penetrated by spiritual entities: The human mind could be penetrated by outside forces. Not only by God—who is sometimes depicted as going inside people, “probing their kidneys and heart” to find out what they’re really thinking—but by various sorts of “spirits.” Some of them were benign, but others were wicked spirits dispatched by Satan to take over. They were like bacteria; you couldn’t see them, but once they got inside of you they would take charge, making you think and do things against your will. So the Bible and other texts from the same period contain prayers specifically designed to ward off these evil spirits. That’s part of what I meant by sem...

To varying degrees, I have learned Greek, Latin, German, French, and English, but dogish lies out of my reach. My grandmother spoke to her dog, but the snuffly little pug's responses never sounded anything like what my grandmother said to him. She said things like, "I do before to be a hudra hud," which meant "good dog." To request a photograph of the dog one would ask if it minded having its "wotytook." As a boy, I was sure it was a real language, but it wasn't - twas fun, but not dogish. Con Slobodchikoff says he has learnt the real thing, at least some of it, and only prairie dogish. According to an article in The New York Times Magazine, Slobodchikoff thinks there really is a language of prairie dogs: Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language. So, what? Dogs talk? Apparently it's possible. The same might be true of whales ...

Joel Green's Thesis: "If, as is often alleged, neuroscientists have discredited a dualist interpretation of the human person, I want to explore the usual corollary that, in doing so, they have also discredited the biblical faith. It will become clear that I take the former claim to be true, the latter to be false." [1] According to Green, the sciences have discredited a dualist ontology of the human person. Green argues that human identity is not grounded in the reference to a substantive, embodied soul but to a set of capacities or functions enabled by a physical base. [2] Green thinks a non-reductive physicalism is compatible with Christian belief and that the Bible does not provide any determinative support for dualism. The most urgent question in taking this position is the question of the intermediate state. Green argues for His argument is roughly as follows: (1) Neuroscience has shown that a dualistic anthropology is false (2) If the Bible either assume...

According to naturalism, the world can be adequately described in terms of what is physical. But what is a good naturalistic explanation of thought? Beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes appear not to fit within the physical universe. While the physical universe can be analyzed in terms of causation, and laws of nature, the life of the mind appears to involve more. What it is to reason about some action seems very different to what it is for a neuron to initiate a causal chain that results in an action. If causation cannot account for reasoning, then what it is that does the reasoning cannot be accounted for in physical terms. Thoughts also appear to be about something, they point at something beyond themselves. But it is difficult to imagine physical entities being about anything and, since the mind is what does the thinking, it would follow that the mind could not be a physical entity. The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) attempts to provide a naturalist answ...

The famed puzzle about the Theseus' ship getting its parts replaced involves an assumption: the ship is made of wood and so are the replacement parts. But what if the parts used to replace the old parts are not wood, but plastic? Perhaps, over time, each wooden part of the ship is replaced with a plastic part. We can even follow the story where it usually goes: the old parts are reassembled in some warehouse somewhere. There lies in the warehouse an old ship with all the old wooden parts while at sea a plastic ship goes about its business bearing the famous name. The question is: does this alter one's judgement about persistence? Would we think of the old wooden parts having a better claim to being the ship of Theseus or are we prepared to allow grandeur to attach to a plastic ship? If you want to make the story more clashing, just imagine the plastic ship being bright yellow, you know, lego yellow. If you are partial to the plastic ship, consider the following: What if ...

“There are no visible objects but men and women and cats and other living organisms… There are no tables or books or rocks or hands or legs.” [1] 10 metaphysical presuppositions: 1. The identity relation is absolute and allows for no relative identity. Absolute identity holds that for any x, x is identical to y iff all that is true of x is true of y. Relative identity is the denial of absolute identity and suggests that identity is sortal relative. 2. Four dimensionalism, the thesis that an object’s parts include its temporal parts (time-slices) is false. 3. Logic is an ideal but the use of non-standard logics in consideration of vagueness should not impinge on the general use of traditional logic. 4. Lewis’s counterpart theory about modal statements is false. 5. Material things are ultimately composed of simples, irreducible parts. 6. The constitutionalist theory of objects is false. The constitutionalist theory holds that a concrete particular c...