Curated category
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 asks a single question that has haunted philosophers for centuries. Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can…
- GOFAIJohn Haugeland introduced the phrase good old-fashioned artificial intelligence in 1985. He published it inside his book titled Artificial Intelligence: The…
- MeditationMeditation is a practice in which a person trains attention and awareness, working to detach from reflexive, discursive thinking and reach a mentally clear…
- 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?