display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 3223 | Self-consciousness may just be nested intentionality [Rey] |
| Full Idea: It is tempting to think that if a system has concepts for nested intentionality and first-person reflection, it has all that's needed for self-consciousness. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.2.2) | |
| A reaction: If there nothing more than nested intentionality in complex minds like ours, the top level of the nesting would still have a special status. And if the top level always seemed to stay the same while the lower levels changed, I'd probably call it the Self |
| 3162 | Experiments prove that people are often unaware of their motives [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Experiments have shown (Nisbett and Wilson 1977) that people's introspective knowledge is a lot less reliable than they suppose. People are sensitive to but entirely unaware of many factors that influence their social behaviour. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This type of observation rests on an overemphasis on the conscious mind. We are not conscious of liver events, or of deep buried brain events, both of which motivate us. We should only expect introspection to reveal what is fully conscious. |
| 3163 | Brain damage makes the unreliability of introspection obvious [Rey] |
| Full Idea: The most dramatic phenomena undermining the absolute reliability of introspection are those of blindsight and "anosognosia" (unawareness of one's own brain damage). | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: It might depend on what you expected introspection to reveal. If you only expected it to tell you about your consciousness, it would be unreasonable to expect knowledge of blindsight information by introspection. |
| 3195 | If reason could be explained in computational terms, there would be no need for the concept of 'free will' [Rey] |
| Full Idea: If a computational account of reasoning processes could be given, then there is no need to settle the issue of "free will", as reason could get along without it. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.6) |
| 3196 | Free will isn't evidence against a theory of thought if there is no evidence for free will [Rey] |
| Full Idea: We don't need arguments to show that if there were free will then computational accounts of the mind would be inadequate; what is needed is good evidence that there actually exists such free will in the first place. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.6) |