As a field, neuroscience concerns itself with gaining an understanding of how physical processes occurring in the nervous system are related to mental phenomena such as perception, motor control, and complex thoughts and behaviors. As teachers of neuroscience, we are charged with facilitating an understanding of these relationships in our students. Therefore, it seems that an in-depth discussio...

The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the ...

Debates about the metaphysical compatibility between miracles and natural laws often appear to prejudge the issue by either adopting or rejecting a strong physicalist thesis (the idea that the physical is all that exists). The operative component of physicalism is a causal closure principle: that every caused event is a physically caused event. If physicalism and this strong causal closure prin...

This paper distinguishes three conceptual problems that attend philosophical accounts of consciousness. The first concerns the problem of properly characterizing the nature of consciousness itself, the second is the problem of making intelligible the relation between consciousness and the ‘physical’, and the third is the problem of creating the intellectual space for a shift in philosophical fr...

Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature concerns how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are cons...

Abstract According to one-level physicalism, reality is exhausted by fundamental physical entities and properties. This position sometimes defended on the basis of truthmaker view ontological commitment. Accordingly, physicalists can affirm higher-level truths without ontologically committing any properties or states affairs; affairs serve as truthmakers all that have truthmakers, a physicalist...

Many researchers consider cancer to have molecular causes, namely mutated genes that result in abnormal cell proliferation (e.g. Weinberg 1998). For others, the causes of cancer are to be found not at the molecular level but at the tissue level where carcinogenesis consists of disrupted tissue organization with downward causation effects on cells and cellular components (e.g. Sonnenschein and S...

Amajor part of the mind–body problem is to explain why a given set of physical processes should give rise to perceptual qualities of one sort rather than another. Colour hues are the usual example considered here, and there is a lively debate as to whether the results of colour vision science can provide convincing explanations of why colours actually look the way they do. The internal phenomen...

Opening a new era in science, psychology's cognitive revolution contradicts traditional doctrine that science has no use for consciousness to explain brain function. Subjective mental states as emergent interactive properties of brain activity become irreducible and indispensable for explaining conscious behavior and its evolution and get primacy in determining what a person is and does. Dualis...