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At least the following researchers have a solid background in both philosophy and neuroscience:
Patricia Churchland
Paul Churchland
Gerhard Roth
Besides their personal homepage I recommend the book
Susan Blackmore: Conversations on Consciousness (2005).
It collects conversations with one of the above and some others researchers from either neuroscience ...
6
You are asking one of the outstanding unknown questions in philosophy: do mental states supervene on brain states or not?
"Supervene" is a really great word. If A supervenes on B, it means that if you know everything about B, you automatically can deduce everything about A. For example, the value of a pile of $1 bills supervenes on the list of serial ...
5
A brain state is a snapshot of everything in the central-nervous-system.
A brain state is said to contain everything about a person right the instant it is snapshotted: memories, emotions, skills, opinions, knowledge, etc.
Most importantly it is a snapshot of who you are right that particular instant the snapshot is taken.
If you buy into material/...
5
"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on
nothing." - Victor Hugo
Neuroscience may eventually replace or redefine large portions of what was historically referred to as the philosophy of mind, since questions about the internal workings of e.g. consciousness, memory, language, reasoning and similar phenomena are inherently ...
4
I like jobermark's argument, so I will not repeat it but take it further. It reminds me of a Richard Feynman quote, which we could paraphrase: neuroscience is as useful to philosophers as ornithology is to birds.
Neurological facts do not help to address pressing philosophical concerns, in the same way that knowledge about other species of birds will not ...
4
The link between philosophy and science is not so straightforward, it is rarely possible to say that some scientific developments are directly responsible for some specific philosophical developments. This said, one general trend started even before the term "neuroscience" became fashionable, and "neurophysiology" was more common. Burge describes it in ...
4
PATRICIA TURRISI, 'The Problem of the Philosophical Person', The Pluralist, Vol. 4, No. 1 (SPRING 2009), pp. 68-76, deals with the 'madness' of Socrates and William James. But it's an article, not a book, and too long to quote here.
For Nietzsche :
Jurgen Kleist, Zarathustra s Last Dance, SBN 10: 1448638682 / ISBN 13: 9781448638680
Published by ...
3
The meta-argument you attribute to Spinoza is closely related to the rule-following regress considered by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. To apply a rule in a particular situation we first have to interpret what it means, he muses. But then we need another rule to make the interpretation, and another, and another. We can no more apply a rule, ...
3
I found it. It was Clark paraphrasing him, in (at least) two articles:
Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation (1998): http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/clark/pubs/magic.pdf
Linguistic Anchors in the Sea of Thought (1996): http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/clark/pubs/linguist.pdf
As Rex Kerr suggested, it was indeed from Consciousness ...
3
"If two brains A and B were 100% identical, why would A's self-awareness emerge in A instead of emerging in B and vice versa?" Am I missing something? The answer seems trivial. Presumably the question is talking about A and B being qualitatively identical but quantitatively distinct (Philosophy 101). The reason why A's self awareness emerges in A and not B ...
3
in psychology, philosophy or neuroscience who talk about why negative or obsessive thinking is bad for your mental health?
In neuroscience this is correlated with activation of the
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network and the internal voice/critic and self-identification. Task-focussed mental states such as 'flow' contrast with this, where ...
2
Are there any philosophers who are weak in mathematics or other formal sciences? And is it possible?
“I would like to test the definition of "love of knowledge"”
The word philosophy is of Ancient Greek origin: meaning "love of wisdom." However, the etymology is not much help. The use and meaning of the word "philosophy" has changed throughout history.
“We may note one peculiar feature of philosophy. If someone asks the
question what is mathematics, ...
2
Are there any philosophers who are weak in mathematics or other formal sciences? And is it possible?
Please answer the question directly before giving an explanation.
Which question? The one in the headline, or the one at the end of the question text? Because there is an interesting slippage between the two.
Clearly, no human being, philosopher or otherwise, is going to be equally conversant and skilled in all branches of knowledge.
Which means, it is ...
2
We do not yet know whether the brain is "understandable" in the sense that we accept now. If the brain operates mostly on the basis of several dozen key principles that can be expressed mathematically or with some other formalism, then it will be understandable in the conventional sense. On the other hand, if it is in fact tens of thousands of formulas ...
2
A large portion of philosophy is concerned with knowledge or experience or mind, and has been for millenia. It's not that philosophy is invading biology, really; it's that biologists have convincingly demonstrated that the brain is what physically implements the mind--at least convincingly enough so that it seems prudent to re-examine philosophical thought ...
2
I hope you don't mind me saying this, but you're question made me laugh. Gastrointestiphilosophy - now there's a course I want to take!
But seriously, branches and sub-branches of philosophy aren't 'created' by a board of academic philosophers, and only then can everyone write papers about it and get published. The order of events is the opposite: people ...
2
Neuroscience has the potential to answer robustly many questions that have been asked by philosophers--questions about the nature of perception, consciousness, intuitive morality, and so on. It calls into doubt assumptions that once seemed safe (e.g. internal non-contradiction) and makes solid ideas that did not originally find much favor among philosophers ...
2
Neuroscience will not replace philosophy. Indeed, it will not even be very helpful for understanding psychology. Neuroscience is roughly about the structural and chemical properties of your brain. However, your brain is a universal classical computer: it can compute anything that any other computer can compute. Such a computer can be made up of multiple ...
2
First, I would suggest that meaning is intersubjective; this gets away from the notion of Descartian subjectivity which is self-subsistent; requiring no other.
This is Lacans distinct contribution to modern European philosophy (through his notion of the Mirror, which is just his allegorical method of re-introducing this truth; the face of the mother, or ...
2
If you are asking is the meaning in your head all in your head, then of course the answer is yes. (I'm going to leave aside the details of your formulation, because it is specific to a degree that goes beyond what can be validated with present-day neuroscience.)
But that misses the point of the twin-earth thought experiment. I don't think it's the best ...
2
You're making a category error: you are defining "your experiences" as something disjoint from the physical processes that generate your consciousness. But, of course, if the physicalist view is correct, there is (and can be) no distinction.
You don't ask "by what mechanism does my camera record a picture of what it is pointing at, instead of what some ...
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If by "experience" you just mean qualia then the "connection" is purely accidental. We do not need to compare qualia to agree to call the same objects "green", nor do we need it to associate them to certain frequencies or spectra. We can equally well agree on outputs of optical spectrometers without that. By the way, most colors are not associated to a ...
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EDIT
After rereading your question, I'm not sure if my answer is pertinent. In your opening question, you ask HOW, but you later ask WHY.
EDIT #2
I never meant to suggest that people should embrace ignorance. I was simply pointing out the fact that it can be really hard to think about some of the things around us without becoming a little depressed or ...
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When McGinn states that knowing everything about your brain tells us nothing about your mind, he is overstating the case: an advanced cognitive neuroscience should indeed be able to say something about your memories ... and possibly other mental capacities and cognitive capabilities. But that's all about abstract functional causal organizations, something ...
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Here is the question:
But to what extent do you or philosophers believe (or disbelieve) physicalism because of evidence from science, or is it more from philosophical "evidence" and/or a metaphysical assumption, perhaps influenced by the prevailing scientific zeitgeist and/or the beliefs of most (neuro)scientists that the brain is indeed the source of the ...
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Andrew Eshleman provides an answer to the first question: given determinism can we be accountable, that is, have moral responsibility.
In keeping with this focus on the ramifications of causal determinism for moral responsibility, thinkers may be classified as being one of two types: 1) an incompatibilist about causal determinism and moral responsibility—...
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