Philosophy of Mind Commons^™

St. Augustine And St. Thomas Aquinas On The Mind, Body, And Life After Death, Christopher Choma

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Historical and philosophical investigation of the thoughts of two of philosophy's most innovative Christian thinkers. The thesis primarily deals with the relationship between the mind and the body through the lenses of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. Thesis also includes theological discussions of life after death, and how one can be certain that the soul survives the corruption of the body.

I See God Everywhere, Jason Wright

Theses and Dissertations

I would like to share with you how I was able to shed my suffering skin for a life beyond my wildest dreams. My work is about the letting go, my work is about altering perception, my work is about exploring the depths of one’s psyche. My experience is there in every atom of my output and is there for the taking.

Blaise Pascal said “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I am not well-read in the works of Pascal, I became aware of this quote through HBO’s hit period drama …

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …

It Might Not Matter Very Much Whether Insects Are Conscious, Neil Levy

Animal Sentience

In common with most other authors, Mikhalevich & Powell assume that phenomenal consciousness is a “precondition” of moral standing. Although the evidence they present makes it much more likely than usually thought that arthropods are phenomenally conscious, scepticism in the face of this evidence remains intellectually respectable. I suggest that we best make progress here by rejecting the notion that phenomenal consciousness is necessary for moral standing. Mental states that may lack phenomenal properties can do a lot of work in grounding moral standing, and there is less room for scepticism about these mental states than about phenomenal consciousness.

Problems With Basing Insect Ethics On Individuals’ Welfare, Susana Monsó, Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró

Animal Sentience

In their target article, Mikhalevich & Powell (M&P) argue that we should extend moral protection to arthropods. In this commentary, we show that there are some unforeseen obstacles to applying the sort of individualistic welfare-based ethics that M&P have in mind to certain arthropods, namely, insects. These obstacles have to do with the fact that there are often many more individuals involved in our dealings with insects than our ethical theories anticipate, and also with the fact that, in some sense, some insects count as more than an individual and, in another sense, they sometimes count as less than an …

Cognitivism, Feelings, And The Background Structures Of Emotion, David R. Willard

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to call attention to some of the shortcomings of a cognitivist theory’s incorporation of feeling into a philosophy of emotion. There has been a tendency within the cognitivist theories to assume as irreducible the intentional structures through which these theories operate. A consequence of this tendency often sees feelings compartmentalized through internal and external distinctions, such as bodily feelings and world-directed feelings. What appears to be ignored is the notion that prior to all emotional experience we have already found ourselves belonging to a world, and attempts at a phenomenological understanding of a category …

Exploring Eight-Armed Intelligence Through Film, Tierney M. Thys

Animal Sentience

Mather (2019) provides a rich overview of the elements underlying octopus cognition and behavioral flexibility. Recently, two remarkable natural history films, My Octopus Teacher and The Octopus in My House have explored intimate human-octopus relationships with a wild (Octopus vulgaris) and a captive octopus (Octopus cyanea) respectively. Both films show rare behaviors that offer observations to test new hypotheses as well as a novel perspective on our own human relationships and place within the natural world. An interview with filmmaker Craig Foster from My Octopus Teacher reveals the profound and transformative power of forming a trusting …

Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics, Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell

Animal Sentience

Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods …

No Room For Speciesism In Welfare Considerations, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Speciesism should play no role in determining welfare outcomes. Cognition may vary within species as well as between species, but broad classifications such as invertebrates are functionally meaningless in this context. Cognition should relate to welfare only to the extent that it relates to the capacity to suffer or to experience pleasure.

On The Possibility Of Invertebrate Sentience, David Degrazia

Animal Sentience

Mikhalevich & Powell (M&P) set up the basic criteria for according moral status equitably, including the capacity for affect. They argue persuasively against assuming that all invertebrates are insentient and hence ineligible for moral consideration. In addition to the relatively clear case of cephalopods, various arthropods may prove to be sentient. We should be aware of various sources of prejudice that M&P discuss and not assume that it would be absurd to attribute sentience and moral status to certain invertebrates.

Whether Invertebrates Are Sentient Matters To Bioethics And Science Policy, Michael L. Woodruff

Animal Sentience

Mikhalevich & Powell provide convincing empirical evidence that at least some invertebrates are sentient and hence should be granted moral status. I agree and argue that functional markers should be the primary indicators of sentience. Neuroanatomical homologies provide only secondary evidence. Consensus regarding the validity of these functional markers will be difficult to achieve. To be effective in practice, functional markers of sentience will have to be tested and accepted species by species to overcome the implicit biases against extending moral status to invertebrates.

Does Sentience Come In Degrees?, Andrew Y. Lee

Animal Sentience

This commentary is about whether sentience, or what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness,” comes in degrees.

Ethical Considerations For Invertebrates, Scarlett R. Howard, Matthew R.E. Symonds

Animal Sentience

Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) have built on the discussion about which species deserve inclusion in animal ethics and welfare considerations. Here, we raise questions concerning the assessment criteria. We ask how to assess different species for their ability to fulfill the criteria, which criteria are most important, how we quantify them (absolute or on a continuum), and how non-animals such as fungi and plants fit into this paradigm.

Radical Botany: Plants And Speculative Fiction [Table Of Contents], Natania Meeker, Antónia Szabari

Literature

No abstract provided.

On Unifying Declarative Memory, Thomas Ames

Theses

The distinction between episodic and semantic declarative memory systems, as introduced by Tulving (1972, updated in 1984, 1991), was a revolutionary approach to human memory. While the distinction is now widely endorsed in the study of memory, there are debates about what constitutes each system’s domain, how each system is used, how each system functions, and the phenomenal experiences associated with the functioning of each system. On the basis of clinical studies and insights from conditions affecting memory, this paper argues that the episodic/semantic distinction can be reframed as a result of a unified declarative memory system. In this view, …

A New Catechism For The Digital Age, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

Preaching and teaching in our digital age demands theological reflection to answer challenging questions raised by exponential technologies. Can an AI become conscious? Is AI intelligent, really? Can a robot sin? Can we program morality? Can we upload our minds? Is transhumanism a technical possibility? Do we need to rethink eschatology? In this paper I hope to contribute to a constructive dialog. I suggest this catechism format as a means to support the need of the Church to teach sound theological doctrine with respect to these challenging questions. By no means do I wish to imply that this catechism is …

The Next Page Of Yoga Anatomy: An Anatomical Lens On Selected Yoga Asanas, Viana Chau

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Yoga has become a widely-recognized form of physical activity as well as an effective therapeutic intervention. It is a self-discipling way of life, taking advantage of the powerful effects from the combination of breathing exercises (pranayama), physical postures (asanas), and meditation on calming the nervous system and balancing the mind, body, and spirit. However, over time, the contemporary definition of yoga, especially in the United States, has decreased the emphasis on the religious spirituality component and increased the emphasis on physical activity. Although one may argue that this is not the traditional yoga, this change not only breaks down the …

The Reliable Revisionist, Caitlyn Schaffer

Philosophy: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

The present text explores how the topic of head and heart is much more complicated than one would expect, according to Paul Henne and Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, contributors of Neuroexistentialism. “Does Neuroscience Undermine Morality” aims at figuring out the problem of which moral judgments we can trust, judgments from one’s head (revisionism) or judgments from one’s heart (conservatism). My hypothesis suggests the opposite of the authors, I believe that if you are a revisionist, your first order intuitions are reliable. After setting the framework, I make three main arguments. (A.) If you are able to self-correct then you can identify errors …

Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What might we learn if we take seriously the possibility of non-human Languages of Thought (LoT)? A LoT is a combinatorial set of mental representations. And, since mental representations and rules of combination vary in kind, there are many possible LoTs. Simple LoTs might lack familiar features of the putative human LoT, such as object representations, recursively defined rules of combination, sentential connectives, or predicate-argument structure. The most familiar arguments for the existence of LoTs, such as those from productivity, systematicity, concept learning, and perceptual computation, all fail when applied to non-human animals. But recent empirical evidence motivates attributing LoTs …

Mentality And Fundamentality, Christopher D. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extant well-considered problems with physicalism primarily come from two sources: philosophers of mind arguing that subjective experience does not fit into a physicalist world-picture, and metaphysicians trying to figure out the particular commitments of the view. I examine the thesis of physicalism in order to produce a clearer notion of the physical and to help straighten out physicalism’s entailments, while simultaneously providing a strategy for physicalists to sidestep well known anti-physicalist arguments concerning consciousness. This involves both a critical and a positive effort: on the critical side, I expose an issue with a popular way of understanding physicalism called “via …