Alexander Pruss's Blog

After Kripke, pretty much everyone nowadays accepts moderate mental externalism: the content of our thoughts depends on the extra-mental wor...

On the Aristotelian account of abstraction, we abstract the forms of things via perception. But here is a problem. First of all, we sometime...

A correspondent pointed me to a cool paper by Neil Sinhababu arguing that the theist can’t consistently run a fine-tuning argument on which...

I’ve been toying with an argument for dualism along these lines: Octopuses are conscious. Technologically advanced aliens are or would be...

There is a vast and rather radical diversity in the inner conscious lives of human beings. Start with the differences in dreams: some people...

I have access to two kinds of information about consciousness: I know the occasions on which I am conscious and the occasions on which I am ...

Colocationists about human beings think that in my chair are two colocated entities: a human person and a human animal. Both of them are mad...

I’ve been thinking a bit about Integerated Information Theory (IIT) as a physicalist-friendly alternative to functionalism as an account of...

I’ve been thinking how best to define computationalism about the mind, while remaining fairly agnostic about how the brain computes. Here is...

A prominent objection to epiphenomenalist theories of qualia, on which qualia have no causal efficacy, is that then we have no way of knowin...

Rob Koons and I have argued that the best functionalist theory of mind is one where the proper function of a system is defined in an Aristo...

I am quite convinced that if standard (non-evolutionary, non-Aristotelian) functionalism is true, then complex organizations such as univers...

Suppose epiphenomenalism is true about qualia, so qualia are nonphysical properties that have no causal impact on anything. Let w 0 be the ...

Suppose that Mary and Twin Mary live almost exactly duplicate lives in an almost black-and-white environment. The exception to the duplicati...

Here’s a fun variant of the black-and-white Mary thought experiment. Mary has been brought up in a black-and-white environment, but knows al...

In the philosophical literature, the main objection to physicalism about consciousness is the epistemic gap: the alleged fact that full know...

Here is a variant on the knowledge argument: All empirical facts a priori follow from the fundamental facts. The existence of consciousn...

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenome...

On typical functionalist views of mind, what mental states a physical system has depends on counterfactual connections between physical prop...

Here is something our old friend Mary, raised in a black and white world, cannot know simply by knowing all of physics: What are the neces...