1

There are a lot of different theories about the nature of consciousness, cognition, and the mind. I'm looking for a set of questions that a person could answer that would then give them some kind of feedback about the degree of alignment between their viewpoints and different theories.

I'm imagining something like a quiz, or a flowchart / decision tree. One might go through a series of basic questions asking about things like whether there can be minds without brains, whether an arbitrary entity that is observationally indistinguishable from a conscious entity should be treated as conscious, and so on. Or maybe something more elaborate, where a person reads through a series of scenarios ("A man in a room translates sequences of Chinese characters from a book...") and the subject has to commit to some kind of stance at the end ("The room+man system can be said to understand sequences of Chinese characters").

Then, after the subject goes through all of the questions, it can say something like "You have a 10% correlation with classical Cartesian dualism, 85% match with computationalism, and 19% match with embodied cognition theories."

I'm just making stuff up, but I think you get the idea. What would be great is a published, peer-reviewed reference to such a set of questions, but even just a simple set of questions used in an undergrad philosophy of mind course would be a great starting place.

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    There is a field of study called experimental philosophy, where philosophers conduct empirical surveys of folk intuitions concerning various subjects and analyze the responses. Perhaps, looking up studies in experimental philosophy of mind and consciousness will give you some ideas.
    – Conifold
    Commented Jul 30, 2020 at 5:52
  • This has been helpful, thank you. I've also found some relevant work in the area of folk psychology where the goal is to understand non-expert beliefs about the way the mind works.I've found some categorizations and classifications of theories of consciousness (essentially lists of defnitions or salient features), but still nothing like what I was originally looking for.
    – user10108
    Commented Aug 1, 2020 at 20:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

There’s a classification for everything thanks to philosophy. Political stances, work vs. fun necessity-based views, religious, etc. Personality type quiz is a good building block to understanding your base foundation and logic on top of it would explain your aptitude towards certain subject and disinterest in others, building upon each other up to the categories that your looking to catch yourself under categorization of.

Improve this answer
2
  • Thanks for your comment. I am able to find some classifications of theories of consciousness or cognition, but what I really want is something like a decision tree with distinguishing questions or attributes. Like if you answer some questions one way, that puts you roughly on the dualist side, but answering them another way puts you in the more monist side of the spectrum. Then subsequesnt attributes ro questions further refine the subcategories.
    – user10108
    Commented Aug 1, 2020 at 20:46
  • Basic personality type and mindset explains the likelihood of developing views that align to these groups. Left brained vs Right brained, introvert, extrovert, All factors matter. I was just giving a basic foundation from which the rest of the tree branches.
    – Emero
    Commented Aug 3, 2020 at 17:15

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .