yawn.

y y y

tam tam tam

KYLE WAS BEHIND 9/11!~~!@%!@~@##%

:)))

southpark <33<3<3

I totally have a clue.

heheHEHE!

Whose written the philosophy of mind book that youre reading?

Jaegwon Kim

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Dimensi...0813342694

what is it about

Diclaimer: Mainly written to get a better understanding myself of what i've just read. It's probably a bad idea to read this if you want some true thought-out understanding of this subject, i'm trying to be as vague as possible but there still might be flaws so read on with caution ;)

People wonder how *mind* can come from matter; the book outlines the different theories around and speak of theories that were commonly accepted before and which are now in addition to introducing the reader to problems and "puzzles" each theory presents and solves.

Like before you had a view called dualism which supposes that mind is something nonphysical, so you have a dualism of mind and body that coexists somehow (like an immaterial soul and material body). That view seems to fade out now it seems, although some people still hold it.

Then now the battle seems to be between, as far as i can tell from reading half the book, physicalism and epiphenomenalism:

Epiphenomenalism says that mind sort of is the "end" of a causal chain, almost like you have a hirarchy within the brain and when you compute something it moves upwards in the hierarchy and presumably the "thought" of highest importance, the one that survives all the way is the one you are conscious of; but this view includes the view that as the "conscious" is just the end of the line it really has no effect on your further thinking, that is to say the mental phenomena you are aware of has no further causal importance, in fact, it has no further causal connection to anything.

Physicalism says that mind is essentially matter, whatever you have in your brain can be represented as a configuration of bits of matter and the laws "governing" them. So here you can say that the mental has causal powers because, and only because the mental is the physical configuration of your brain.

You also have the interesting view of functionalism, which says something like that, the physical properties does not carry as much importance in itself as people want it to; it really ammounts to something like if you have a motor on a car that does this and that, you might as well have built it with other materials to serve the same purpose, and thus to relate this to the mind, you have that an alien siliconbased-mind species might have the same first-hand experience we have on a completly different "system" so to speak. This view has a focus on input-output, if that is the same the inner workings may be different for all purposes; this gives rise to questions about how the feeling of red could very well be the feeling of blue for another "system" with the same input-output.

"I'm trying to be as vague as possible" A great career as a philosopher is waiting for you.

Yeah, not to mention the fact that i had feeling someone would reply something like that ^.^

I dont understand a word of your post

that is most wise