The Splintered Mind

Suspiciously simple, you might think. Here it goes: (1.) No general theory of consciousness can be justified except on the grounds that it ...

I hadn't seen this curveball illusion before. Very striking and surprising. I haven't had a chance to look into the theory behind...

The term "conscious" is ambiguous between an epistemic and a phenomenal sense (as I'll explain shortly). So is the term ...

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy, tranformative in the d...

Yes, it's about that time. Here's a link to a series of posts in 2007 I wrote about applying to Ph.D. programs. All the same advi...

Gilbert Harman famously wrote: When Eloise sees a tree before her, the colors she experiences are all experienced as features of the tree a...

... call for papers here .

There was a time when I could visualize the obverse, and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. This is not as though the Zahir w...

Consciousness must, it seems, be a vague phenomenon. The newly formed zygote has no conscious experience; the two-year-old child has conscio...

by guest blogger Robert Schwartz , Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Disclaimer Although I will try to speak in ...

Usually, philosophy is advocacy. Sometimes it's disruption without a positive position in mind. More rarely, it's confession . The...

You probably -- like most people -- think your intelligence is above average, that you're a better-than-average driver , and that your c...

Here are three types of conscious experience, or "phenomenology", that it's difficult to deny: (1.) sensory experience (like t...

In both cognitive science and folk psychology, the dominant metaphor for memory – a metaphor that both reflects and reinforces a certain way...

... Chapter 7 of my book in draft (provisionally titled Perplexities of Consciousness ) is now up on my website . The chapter is independen...

with links to many articles in the area, is up here .

Last week , and in various previous posts , I've discussed a questionnaire Josh Rust and I sent to several hundred ethicists and non-e...

As you may know, I'm writing a book about the inaccuracy (in my view) of people's judgments about their stream of conscious experien...

By Australia's ABC national radio, featuring Simon Longstaff and me, here .

Or so it seems, from the data I'm looking at here. As discussed on this blog several times previously , last spring Josh Rust and I co...

In the famous "trolley problems" (developed by contemporary philosophers such as Phillipa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson ), a hy...

Professors appear to think that voting regularly in public elections is about as morally good as donating 10% of one's income to charity...

To get published in a top venue in sociology or social or personality psychology, one must be careful about many things -- but not about the...

In the usual taxonomy of mental states (usual, that is, among contemporary analytic philosophers of mind) belief is one thing, desire quite...

(by guest blogger Tamler Sommers ) First, let me offer my thanks to Eric for giving me this opportunity and to everyone who commented on my ...

We've all had this experience: The clock tower starts chiming. At first, you're paying no attention, but about three or four chimes ...