Tag: Max Velmans

  • Max Velmans on Kant

    Quotes from Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness p. 202 «Uncertainty appears to be intrinsic to representational knowledge. Kant’s view that the thing itself in unknowable is nevertheless extreme.» p. 202 «We necessarily base our interactions with the world on the experiences, concepts and theories we have of it, and these representations enable us to interact with…

  • Sense of Being Stared At

    My message to Formative Causation list. 20.04.2013 13:14 Sheldrake’s paper [1] on the sense of being started at was the first paper with which I have got acquainted with Sheldrake’s ideas. The paper was recommended me during a discussion of Velmans’ paper [2] (see also Velmans‘ book [3]). I am not sure that any new…

  • Once more on the world in the brain

    Recently I have raised Max Velmans’ question Is the brain in the world or the world in the brain? on the biosemiotics list. Two of my messages are below. 20.03.2013 11:04 There is my brain in a particular location. I do not experience it directly but I could touch my head with my hand. If…

  • Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?

    Alva Noë “Is the visual world a grand illusion?” Journal of Consciousness Studies. Volume 9, No 5/6, 2002: 1-12. p. 10 “In general, our sense of the perceptual presence of the detailed world does not consist in our representation of all the detail in consciousness now. Rather, it consists in our access now to all…

  • Neuroscience as Science of Thought?

    A text written while reading a discussion on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/groups/rks.consciousness/10151012295220115/ Nowadays one can often hear that neuroscience can explain everything about a human being. The external physical world interacts with human sensory systems, natural neural nets in the brain get excited and this in turn causes excitation of muscles. Modern science has found nothing else…

  • Mental and Physical

    Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness p. 300 “To make matters worse, there are four distinct ways in which body/brain and mind/consciousness might in principle, enter into casual relationship. There might be physical causes of physical states, physical causes of mental states, mental causes of mental states, and mental causes of physical states. Establishing which forms of…

  • Max Velmans’ Reflexive Monism

    My messages to the everything list http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/t/a5d2deabda634c9f 26.05.2012 17:57: I have just finished reading Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness and below there are a couple of comments to the book. The book is similar to Jeffrey Gray’s Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem in a sense that it takes phenomenal consciousness seriously. Let me give…

  • Velmans on Popper’s Objective Knowledge

    Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness p. 215. “As Popper (1972) notes, knowledge that is codified into books and other artefacts has an existence that is, in one sense, observer-free. That is, the books exist in our libraries after their writers are long dead and their readers absent, and they form a repository of knowledge that can…