The Mind's Awareness of Itself

Philosophical Studies -     

The Mind's Eye Mapped Onto the Brain's Matter

Research on visual mental imagery has been fueled recently by the development of new behavioral and neuroscientific techniques. This review focuses on two major topics in light of these developments. The first concerns the extent to which visual mental imagery and visual perception share common psychological and neural mechanisms; although the research findings largely support convergence between these two processes, there are data that qualify the degree of overlap between them. The second issue involves the neural substrate mediating the process of imagery generation. The data suggest a slight left-hemisphere advantage for this process, although there is considerable variability across and within subjects. There also remain many unanswered questions in this field, including what the relationship is between imagery and working memory and what representational differences, if any, exist between imagery and perception.     

God, The Mind's Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking

Book reviewed:
God, The Mind's Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking by Paul D. Janz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) xi + 232 pp. Reviewed by Michael Hanby Baylor University One Bear Place #97144 Waco, TX 76798-7144 USA     

Dretske on the Mind's Awareness of Itself

Philosophical Studies -     

The Continuity of Consciousness

Abstract: In this paper I discuss two puzzles that concern the sense in which consciousness can be described as ‘continuous’. The first puzzle arises out of recent work by Dainton and Tye, both of whom appear to oscillate between ascribing the property of ‘continuity’ to the stream of experience, and ascribing it to the objects of experience. The second puzzle concerns the notion that the stream of consciousness could be in some sense unreal or illusory—a puzzle stemming from the thought that some of the brain processes underlying consciousness do not exhibit continuity. I argue that these problems can be solved by distinguishing between three possible bearers of the property of ‘continuity’—(1) the State of Consciousness, (2) the Stream of Experience, and (3) what is represented by experience—and two different senses of ‘continuity’—‘strict’ and ‘extreme’ continuity. I conclude by providing a positive account of the continuity of consciousness, according to which the State of Consciousness exhibits ‘strict’ continuity, and the Stream of Experience exhibits ‘extreme’ continuity.     

Multiplicity and indiscernibility

Synthese - The indistinguishability of bosons and fermions has been an essential part of our ideas of quantum mechanics since the 1920s. But what is the mathematical basis for this...     

Spinoza on Composition,Causation, and the Mind's Eternity

Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is often understood as the claim that the mind has a part that is eternal. I appeal to two principles that Spinoza takes to govern parthood and causation to raise a new problem for this reading. Spinoza takes the composition of one thing from many to require causal interaction among the many. Yet he also holds that eternal things cannot causally interact, without mediation, with things in duration. So the human mind, since it is the idea of a body existing in duration, cannot have an eternal part. In order to solve this problem, I propose an aspectual reading of Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind: the mind itself is eternal, under one of its aspects.     

Continuity and Meaning

We see symptoms in our restless and disconnected youth and in the aging baby-boom generation indicating that many people are having difficulty experiencing meaning in their lives. One way to address this is to restore and create continuity in the lives of individuals beginning from the time of birth and proceeding throughout the passages of life. The components of continuity are consistent and coherent child care, a sense of realness, a sense of control, a sense of past, present, and future, availability of spaces without fear, childrearing consistent with the socio-economic environment, experiential marking comprised of historical-cultural narrative and ongoing ritual, and communion. While it is often impossible to have all aspects of continuity present at any one time, the successful intertwining of continuity's threads during one's lifetime can help reestablish purpose and meaning where it may have been lost.     

Continuity and geometric logic

This paper is largely a review of known results about various aspects of geometric logic. Following Grothendieckʼs view of toposes as generalized spaces, one can take geometric morphisms as generalized continuous maps. The constructivist constraints of geometric logic guarantee the continuity of maps constructed, and can do so from two different points of view: for maps as point transformers and maps as bundles.     

The Concept of Number: Multiplicity and Succession between Cardinality and Ordinality

Abstract

This article sets out to analyse some of the most basic elements of our number concept - of our awareness of the one and the many in their coherence with multiplicity, succession and equinumerosity. On the basis of the definition given by Cantor and the set theoretical definition of cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers provided by Ebbinghaus, a critical appraisal is given of Frege’s objection that abstraction and noticing (or disregarding) differences between entities do not produce the concept of number. By introducing the notion of subject functions, an account is advanced of the (nominalistic) reason why Frege accepted physical, kinematic and spatial properties (subject functions) of entities, but denied the ontic status of their quantitative properties (their quantitative subject function). With reference to intuitionistic mathematics (Brouwer, Weyl, Troelstra, Kreisel, Van Dalen) the primitive meaning of succession is acknowledged and connected to an analysis of what is entailed in the term ‘Gleichzahligkeit’ (‘equinumerosity’). This expression enables an analysis of the connections between ordinality and cardinality on the one hand and succession and wholeness (totality) on the other. The conceptions of mathematicians such as Frege, Cantor, Dedekind, Zermelo, Brouwer, Skolem, Fraenkel, Von Neumann, Hilbert, Bernays and Weyl, as well as the views of the philosopher Cassirer, are discussed in order to arrive at an assessment of the relation between ordinality and cardinality (also taking into account the relation between logic and arithmetic) - and on the basis of this evaluation, attention is briefly given to the definition of an ordered pair in axiomatic set theory (with reference to the set theory of Zermelo-Fraenkel) and to the defmition of an ordered pair advanced by Wiener and Kuratowski.     

The Continuity Strategy,Human Behavior,and Behavior Analysis

The Psychological Record - In behavior analysis, continuity refers to the assumption of a similarity of behavioral principles or processes between nonhumans and humans, which is often considered to...