Qualia

“Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery is a work of convoluted reflections engaging Renaissance painter Parmigiano, his painting “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, Ashbery himself, and the soul. The poem’s source of inspiration is a physical piece of art, suggesting the poem belongs in the ekphrasis tradition. Immediate tension arises as the painting and the poem belong to vastly different traditions. The technique of ekphrasis in a postmodern tradition has challenged scholars as it…

Philosophy sheds light on many themes, one of the issues philosophy contends is the understanding how mind and body are related. Rene Descartes, a father of philosophical ideology devised “The Argument from Introspection” to attempt to answer such question. The argument from introspection explains that the mind and body are two entirely separate states and therefore cannot be identical to one another. Descartes’ rationale behind the argument is that the body is separable because it can be…

Introduction Are we able to learn about experience solely through physical information? Can this information be suffice to understand the feeling someone gets when they are experiencing something like looking at a red apple or eating said apple? Physicalist believe that all we need to know about experience can be learned through physical information. Frank Jackson, argues against that physicalist claim about physical information being sufficient. Jackson presents the Knowledge argument to…

relates to consciousness and how conscious simply cannot be defined by physicalists as it goes against what they stand for, thus showing that physicalism is false. WORD COUNT: 1497 BIBLIOGRAPHY Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), vol. 32, no. 127, 1982, pp. 127–136. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2960077. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 1974, pp. 435–450. JSTOR, JSTOR,…

What is this vague notion of "intellectual judgement" that makes this possible? How can we even account for "qualia" on the basis of a theory that reduces subjective experience to sense-data? the most damning problem with this theory is that it is uncritically accepted and merely taken as basic. A pure impression, outside of a context is not only undiscoverable…

Is 'culture ' and 'personality ' a false dichotomy as Melford Spiro maintained? How does a person become a member of their culture? Psychological anthropology, emerging in the 1930s, questioned the relationship between the individual and society. This question became a key theme of research of so-called 'culture and personality ' theorists – a question still present within the subdiscipline today (LeVine, 2010). In positioning anthropological analysis along the two theoretical points –…

The Human Person: 2 parts, 1 Substance By Erik Welch Ohio Dominican University Philosophy 206 Section 1 - Thesis: Word Count: 220 The human person is composed of two parts, but only one substance. These two parts are namely the physical body and the immaterial soul (Aquinas & Pasnau, 2002). The human must be one substance because two separate substances could not conceivably function together as a single unit, in an effective and efficient manner, the way the human person does. Yet…

In the philosophy of mind, dualism is known as the separation of the mind from the bodies physical states. Dualism is the idea that our minds are more that just the bodies brain. This means that parts of us are non-physical in nature. Further, there are two different types of dualism and those are property dualism and substance dualism. According to substance dualism, mental properties and physical properties are completely different from one another. “On this view you are your mind and your…

Thoughts Concerning Identity- a refute to Dennett The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has six definitions of the word “identity.” This paper assumes definition 2a: “the distinguishing character or personality of an individual”, to be the best interpretation of what it is to be an individual and what makes someone that person. When asked “Who am I?” the thing that defines us is our identity. The word “universe” is also used in this paper and it should be interpreted as: “everything that…

A.I Artificial Intelligence, a film by Steven Spielberg, tells the Pinocchio-esque story of David, a robotic boy who goes on a journey, in search of a Blue Fairy, so that he can become a real boy and earn the love of Monica, his human mother. Dealing with the idea of artificial intelligence and the question of whether or not a machine can have a mind, this film touches on the philosophy of John. R Searle - whose main thought experiment, The Chinese Room, argues that no matter how a computer…