8  Philosophy of mind

Published

January 11, 2026

What is consciousness?

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8.1 Consciousness

8.1.1 Introduction

  • Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, sapience
  • Embodiment
  • Subconscious
  • Hume
    • bundle theory: A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I.iv, section 6
  • Freud
  • Jung
  • Mach 1
  • Putnam
  • Nagel 2
  • Phenomenal vs access consciousness
    • Ned Block
  • Searle: a biological process like digestion
  • Churchland’s
  • Dennett 3
  • Chalmers 4

1 Mach (1914).

2 Nagel (1974).

3 Dennett (1991).

4 Chalmers (1996).

8.1.2 Perception

5 Mark & Marion (2010).

6 Gefter & Hoffman (2016).

See also:

8.2 Dualism

8.2.1 Introduction

  • Mind-body problem
  • Plato
  • Descartes
  • Gödel
  • Kripke
Figure 8.1: Drawing by René Descartes in Treatise of Man (1633), supposing the function of the epiphysis (pineal gland) in transmitting sensory inputs to the immaterial spirit (source: Wikimedia).

8.2.2 Criticism

  • Gilbert Ryle
    • “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”
    • The Concept of Mind (1949)
  • Bunge
    • Bunge, M. (2010). Mind and Matter: A Philosophical Inquiry. 7

7 Bunge (2010).

8.3 Physicalism

8 Tollefsen (1999).

9 Montero (1999).

10 Dennett (2012).

11 MacFarquhar (2014).

Figure 8.2: Ney explains physicalism at the International Summer School in the Philosophy of Physics (2016) (source: my tweet).

See also:

8.4 Externalism

12 Carney (2020).

8.5 Panpsychism

See also:

8.6 Illusionism

13 Ross (2000).

14 Frankish (2016).

15 Dennett (2016).

8.7 Neuroscience

8.7.1 Theoretical neuroscience

16 Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988).

17 Tononi (2004).

18 Tononi (2010).

19 Friston (2010).

20 Andrews (2021).

8.7.2 Experimental neuroscience

21 Lettvin, Maturanat, McCulloch, & Pitts (1959).

22 Tononi & Edelman (1998).

23 Koch, Massimini, Boly, & Tononi (2016).

24 Cohen, Dennett, & Kanwisher (2016).

25 MICrONS Consortium (2025).

8.7.3 Computational neuroscience

26 Reimann, M.W. et al. (2017).

8.8 Language

8.8.1 Origin of language

27 Fodor (1975).

28 Grzankowski (2015).

29 C. McCarthy (2017).

See also:

8.8.2 Universal grammar

30 Norvig (2011).

8.8.3 Animal cognition

31 Davidson (1982).

32 McKay (2020).

8.9 Free will

33 Aaronson (2013).

8.10 Artificial intelligence and mind

8.10.1 Introduction

  • Strong vs weak, general vs narrow AI
  • Kurzweil, R. (2012). How to Create a Mind. 34

34 Kurzweil (2012).

Proposal (1955) for the Dartmouth Workshop:

The speeds and memory capacities of present computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the major obstacle is not lack of machine capacity, but our inability to write programs taking full advantage of what we have. 35

35 J. McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, & Shannon (1955).

See also:

8.10.2 Symbolic vs connectionist AI

  • TODO

See also:

8.10.3 Criticism

36 Dreyfus (1965).

37 Dreyfus (1972).

38 Landgrebe & Smith (2023).

See also:

8.10.4 Counter criticism

Hamming:

Even if you believe in evolution, still there can be a moment when God, or the gods, stepped in and gave man special properties which distinguish him from the rest of living things. This belief in an essential difference between man and the rest of the world is what makes many people believe machines can never, unless we ourselves become like the gods, be the same as a human in such details as thinking, for example. Such people are forced, like the above mentioned Jesuit trained engineer, to make the definition of thinking to be what machines cannot do. Usually it is not so honestly stated as he did, rather it is disguised somehow behind a facade of words, but the intention is the same!

Physics regards you as a collection of molecules in a radiant energy field and there is, in strict physics, nothing else. Democritus (b. around 460 B.C.) said in ancient Greek times, “All is atoms and void”. This is the stance of the hard AI people; there is no essential difference between machines and humans, hence by suitably programming machines then machines can do anything humans can do. Their failures to produce thinking in significant detail is, they believe, merely the failure of programmers to understand what they are doing, and not an essential limitation. 39

39 Hamming (1997), p. 43.

8.10.5 Computer vision and mind

40 Takagi & Nishimoto (2022).

8.10.6 Language models and mind

41 Browning & LeCun (2022).

42 Piantadosi (2023).

43 Katzir (2023).

Experimentallly:

Overall, these results suggest that, beyond the marginal effects of the models’ architectures, the middle—but not the outer—layers of deep language models systematically converge towards brain-like representations. 44

44 Caucheteux & King (2020).

See also:

8.11 My thoughts

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8.12 Annotated bibliography

8.12.1 Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat?

8.12.1.1 My thoughts

  • TODO

8.12.2 Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained.

8.12.2.1 My thoughts

  • TODO

8.12.3 Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

8.12.3.1 My thoughts

  • TODO

8.12.4 Kurzweil, R. (2012). How to Create a Mind.

8.12.4.1 My thoughts

  • TODO