Non-materialist neuroscience - RationalWiki

Non-materialist neuroscience - RationalWiki
EXCERPT:

Non-materialist neuroscience is one of the latest fronts in the war on science. The battle has been a long time coming and it is surprising it has taken so long to get going. Modern neuroscience is rapidly reducing much of human thought, emotion and behavior into component pieces of neuronal interactions. The combination of computational modeling and non-invasive imaging of living brains has allowed researchers to begin describing how complex thought emerges from the firing patterns of neurons. In a way, neuroscience is the death knell of dualism. When materialist causes become both necessary and sufficient to explain all of human thought then parsimony dictates that references to a soul or other supernatural entities can be tossed out.

Philosophers of Mind Interviewed in 3:AM Magazine

Philosophers of Mind Interviewed in 3:AM Magazine
   
(last updated June 29, 2013)

1. Brown, Richard
2. Carruthers, Peter
3. Churchland, Patricia
4. Dennett, Daniel
5. Egan, Frances
6. Fodor, Jerry
7. Jacobson, Anne Jaap
8. Machery, Edouard
9. Mandik, Pete
10. McGinn, Colin
11. Papineau, David
12. Pierce, Bryony
13. Sawyer, Sarah
14. Schwitzgebel, Eric
15. Stalnaker, Robert
16. Tye, Michael

Zombies: The Movie - Less Wrong

Zombies: The Movie - Less Wrong

Correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth

The correspondence between René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, edited by Jonathan Bennett. One of the main things that Elisabeth famously gives Descartes a hard time about is the problem of mental causation.

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/descelis.pdf

Behaviorism, Philosophical Conceptions of.

Behaviorism, Philosophical Conceptions of. Mandik, P. (in press) In: Kaldis, B. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

William James on willpower

William James

From William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890):

As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

Free online sources of Descartes's Meditations

René Descartes

Free online sources of Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes:

• http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/de.html
• http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/
• http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/meditations.html

First post in This Is Philosophy of Mind

This first post serves just to test some features of the blog. More stuff is coming soon.