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A Starting Point for Philosophical Investigations |
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Finding clarity about what it is for an organism to perceive and to act in physical and social environments, it seems to me, will shed light on longstanding philosophical questions about why we value what we do, about what it is to be a person and why we should take certain things to be real, about the nature and limits of human knowledge. |
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The complexity of conscious experience can seem as if it would defy any attempt at a comprehensive explanation in terms of lawful interactions. If this were right, it might well be foolish to base the answers to more general philosophical questions on an account of the mind. But I hold out hope. A plot of one Iterated Function System makes clear the complexity - and beauty - that can result from very simple rules of transformation, when the results of each successive rule-bound change become the input for the next. |
- Generally, my most keen philosophical interests are in the Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science, including Moral Psychology. I find fruitful approaches to these issues in empirically oriented discussion in contemporary analytic circles, as well as in Ancient Philosophy (Indian and Greek) and the likes of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty.
- I have an abiding interest in how experience with a particular character could arise from the interactions of one's choices with bodily, social, and ecological conditions.
- From my background in Buddhist thought, I inherit a particular curiosity about the moral psychology of attention: how what one chooses to experience shapes what one values and who one is.
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Theories of Mind
