display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 2966 | Can phenomenal qualities exist unsensed? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Halting the slide into panpsychism is the major advantage of holding that phenomenal qualities can exist unsensed. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.170) | |
| A reaction: Presumably unsensed phenomenal qualities would explain the discovery that we seem to make decisions before we are conscious of what we intend to do. That result certainly implied that consciousness had no real function. |
| 2955 | If mental events occur in time, then relativity says they are in space [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: If we assume that mental events are located in time, then it follows immediately, given special relativity, that they are also in space. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.73) | |
| A reaction: A powerful point. Of course, there might (you never know) be something which exists in time but not space (and thoughts clearly exist in time), but (as in Hume's argument against miracles), dualism will overthrow your other basic beliefs about nature. |
| 2950 | Only logical positivists ever believed behaviourism [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Philosophical behaviourism is an absurd theory. Practically the only philosophers who ever held it, at any rate in its crude form, were certain logical positivists. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.25) | |
| A reaction: I presume Lockwood's target here is eliminativist behaviourism, as opposed to methodological behaviourism (which is a reasonable practice to adopt), and 'black box' behaviourism (which has been superseded by functionalism). |
| 2954 | Identity theory likes the identity of lightning and electrical discharges [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: A favourite example of identity theorists is the identification of flashes of lightning with electrical discharges. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.71) | |
| A reaction: Personally I prefer the analogy of the mind being like a waterfall - a non-mysterious physical process which has dramatic properties of its own. If minds must keep busy in order to be minds, they must be processes. |