Tag: consciousness

Sam Harris (author, philosopher, neuroscientist) has a fascinating conversation with Bridget about meditation, consciousness, mindfulness, and awareness. They discuss what brought Sam to meditation (drugs, initially), and the decade he spent traveling and diving into Eastern philosophy, mindfulness practices, and silent retreats, until ultimately he went back to college and eventually got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. He and Bridget cover mediation and psychological resilience, being a hostage to your own thoughts, the search for a durable state of well being, the casualties of the spiritual path and the people who follow it, the illusion of self, and how close we are to being psychotic so much of the time.

Full transcript available here: WiW80-SamHarris-Transcript

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The causal pairing problem is a difficulty for the relationship between the mental and the physical in terms of causation. But unlike the more common and obvious problems for substance dualists like interactionism or the problem of causal exclusion for the anti-reductive physicalist, this problem deals directly with the mental. Kim wants to show that […]

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If a mental event m causes a physical event p independently of another physical event p2 then the “casual closure of the physical domain” has been compromised. In order to avoid this physicalist dilemma it must be the case for every m that causes p a physical event p3 must be concurrent with m. In […]

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(This is another old philosophy paper from Seminary. It’s okay. It’s hard to understand because its a precis so there were very specific requirements related directly to the text we were summarizing and analyzing. I cannot remember which one of Kim’s books or articles this precis was on but this is Jaegwon Kim’s best known book […]

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It turns out there are people who doubt the existence of themselves. Ex Machina sounds like a smart movie. Prof. Anil Seth, the author of this review in the New Scientist, writes smartly about the movie and its take on the field of artificial intelligence. I definitely plan to see this movie, which (according to […]

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