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Outline notes, suitable for AS/A2
level students, are available on:
Aristotle: body and soul
My own book on this subject is:
Philosophy of Mind in the Teach
Yourself series, click on the link for further details.
There is a
chapter on The Philosophy of Mind, written by David Rothenberg
of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in World
Philosophy.
In it he considers how mind and body are related, issues
concerning artificial intelligence, and also examines both Hindu
and Zen approaches to mind.
The Philosophy of Mind is a
fascinating area of study. It concerns fundamental questions
about the nature of the self, issues of how our minds and our
bodies interact, and the broader questions about the nature of
consciousness. It links to science, in that we experience
ourselves as free and outside the series of physical causes that
might suggest that everything is completely determined on the
physical level. It links also with religion, in that many
religious people believe in some form of life after death or
reincarnation. Does that make any sense? is disembodied life
possible? How does it relate to our idea of what it is to be a
person?
August 25th 2008...
I've just noticed the review of
Matt Carter's Minds and Computers: an introduction to AI in
the July/August edition of Philosophy Now. It suggests that the
book would provide a good introduction to Philosophy of Mind, as
well as going on to explore the more specific issues connected
with Artificial Intelligence. I have not read this book myself
yet; if you have, please feel free to send me your views on it
and I'll try to include them here.
The nature of consciousness is one
of the key areas of exploration in the Philosophy of Mind.
Indeed, once we stop to think about it (and we don't do that
very often, because being conscious is such a natural thing that
we accept it uncritically), the whole relationship between being
conscious of something and the thing of which we are conscious
is a curious thing. Is consciousness something that is simply
going on in the brain - and therefore something that will be
explained completely as neuroscience becomes more specific about
brain functioning? Huge numbers of questions crop up once you
start to unpack these things.
Ryle's is the classic, oft-quoted text on
logical behaviourism. You may not like his conclusions, but in
terms of clarity of thought and lucid argument, his book takes a
lot of beating. Famous for arguing that to mix physical and
mental descriptions, or causes, as though they could simply be
set alongside one another as a 'category mistake', and for
caricaturing Descartes' dualistic view of the self as ' the
ghost in the machine', this book helps to clarify exactly
what we mean when we call an action 'intelligent', or 'wise'.
But don't be totally taken in, for Ryle really does no more that
substitute a 'ghost in the machine' for a 'ghost in the action',
or that's my view. See what you think.
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