How Aristotle Changes Anaxagoras’s Mind

Overview: from Aristotle to the Bits of an Informational Mind

How can anything, let alone the mind, be informational? At the time of writing (January 2012), it is estimated that more than 300 million people in the world use laptops or personal computers, of which about 50 million use the internet to access virtual worlds where virtual creatures can exist.1 While a scientist may regard this activity in the perspective of how well the technology works, phil...

How Philosophy of Mind

By the 1960s many (perhaps most) philosophers had adopted ‘physicalism’ ─ the view that physical causes fully account for mental activities. However, controversy persists about what count as ‘physical causes’. ‘Reductive’ physicalists recognize only microphysical (elementary-particle-level) causality. Many (perhaps most) physicalists are ‘non-reductive’ ─ they hold that entities considered by o...

How Philosophy of Mind

By the 1960s most philosophers had adopted ‘physicalism’ ─ the view that physical causes fully account for mental activities. However, controversy persists about what count as ‘physical causes.’ ‘Reductive’ physicalists recognize only microphysical (elementary-particle-level) causality. Many (perhaps most) physicalists are ‘non-reductive’ ─ they hold that entities considered by other (‘special’...

How Brain Reveals Mind

In the last decade, careful studies of the living brain have opened the way for human consciousness to return to the heights it held before the behavioristic coup of 1913. This is illustrated by seven cases: (1) the discovery of widespread brain activation during conscious perception; (2) high levels of regional brain metabolism in the resting state of consciousness, dropping drastically in unc...

How the mind works.