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Concepts in the philosophy of mind

  • MindThe mind thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It is, by any measure, the most intimate thing each of us possesses, and yet philosophers…
  • Problem of other mindsThe problem of other minds begins with a question that sounds almost absurd: how do you actually know that anyone else has a mind?
  • GOFAIGOFAI, short for good old-fashioned artificial intelligence, is a term the philosopher John Haugeland introduced in 1985, in his book Artificial…
  • MeditationOlder than any wellness app and stranger than calm, meditation was built to ask what the mind is. Listen to the story and follow the thread.
  • ReasonReason is the capacity to consciously apply logic, drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information with the aim of seeking truth.
  • KnowledgeKnowledge has a definition philosophers have been arguing about for centuries, and the argument is not close to settled.
  • ThoughtThought, in its most ordinary meaning, is the cognitive activity that runs without any direct input from the senses. You can weigh an idea, judge whether a…
  • SoulIn 1901, a physician named Duncan MacDougall placed dying patients, bed and all, onto an industrial-sized scale. He wanted to weigh the soul as it left the…
  • ConsciousnessConsciousness is the fact of being aware of something inside yourself, or of states and objects in the world around you.
  • TimeTime is what a clock reads. Physicists settled on that blunt, almost evasive definition to escape a trap, because defining time any other way tends to fold…
  • Self-reflectionSelf-reflection is the ability to witness and evaluate one's own cognitive, emotional, and behavioural processes. More than three thousand years ago, three…
  • Stochastic parrotEmily M. Bender and colleagues published a paper in 2021 titled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?