Androids Zombies Brains

"This paper attempts to begin to answer four questions. 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?"

"Studying the neurons when a percept changes, even though the visual input is constant, should be a powerful experimental paradigm. We need to construct neurobiological theories of visual awareness and test them using a combination of molecular, neurobiological and local imaging studies. We believe that once we have mastered the secret of this simple form of awareness, we may be close to understanding a central mystery of human life: how the physical events occurring in our brains while we think and act in the world relate to our subjective sensations-that is, how the brain relates to the mind." From Scientific American Sept 92

"Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ënothing it is likeí to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness. This disconcerting fantasy helps to make the problem of phenomenal consciousness vivid, especially as a problem for physicalism."

"Zombies are stipulated to be creatures that are in some way identical to human beings-and thus, in some sense, indistinguishable from human beings-but which lack consciousness. Zombies are at least behaviorally identical to human beings or other conscious creatures, and they may also be like us in other ways."

"Are original intentionality and intrinsic intentionality the same thing? We will have to approach this question indirectly, by pursuing various attempts to draw a sharp distinction between the way our minds (or mental states) have meaning, and the way other things do."

"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes." Published in Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. Reprinted in (P. Grim, ed) The Philosopher's Annual, vol XXI, 1998.

"A multimedia artwork on the nature of conscious experience and the emergence of the self"

A robust and well-organized list compiled by David Chalmers.

"My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise." Found in in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993.

"Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat."

"The brain and its 'agent' debate the provenance of thoughts in the charming language of an old Readers Digest article." Also found in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 1995.

"We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature's very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind."

"... it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it." Published in The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.

"Philosophy of mind and the philosophical issues arising in the allied domain of cognitive sciences constitute a fast developing territory, which is very well introduced by a number of excellent web resources...."

Searchable encyclopedia of topic in the philosophy of mind.

"In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as 'a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.' Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn't human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? "

Available reprints by Daniel Dennett

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

"Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. "

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.