Much Ado About Nothing: The discarded representations revisited

Published in Nafs va badan dar akhlāq va Insānshenāsī (Soul and Body in Ethics and Anthropology) Vol. 7, Qom: ‎Research Center for Islamic Theology and Philosophy, Acadamy of Islamic Sciences and Culture, 1393/2014, ‎‎158-202.‎, 2015

Theists sometimes describe God as a mind without a body. In this paper ‎several questions related to this claim are considered: Is it possible for there ‎to be minds without bodies? Do minds have to have parts? Do minds have to ‎be temporal? What is the nature of consciousness? I will argue that in a ‎plausible sense of “mind” God does not have a mind. Furthermore, I will try ‎to show that there are important theological traditions, including the ‎dominant stream in Islamic philosophy, in which God is not understood as ‎having a mind, but is nevertheless knowing, willing, and living.‎

2018

Evolution did not stop with life per se. At the very least it built brains from which sprang minds from which sprang consciousness, the greatest of the world's many mysteries. This chapter takes up the question of brains, minds and consciousness. The not-so-surprising implication here, is that these greatest of creation's wonders are also part of the story. No longer in long, slow, cycles of blind selforganization, somehow the Great Ordering Oneness found a way to build a system which consciously shapes the world and itself as if by plan. More self-aware and more potentially powerful than anything that has ever existed, thinking beings are a world-transforming force in their own right.

Philosophical Books

First published in 1949, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind is one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophy. Described by Ryle as a 'sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work' on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind is a radical and controversial attempt to jettison once and for all what Ryle called 'the ghost in the machine': Descartes' argument that mind and body are two separate entities. As well as rejecting dualism about the mind, Ryle goes much further, arguing that more recent materialist or functionalist theories of mind do not solve the Cartesian puzzle either and even accept some of its fundamental, mistaken, propositions. It is because of these mistaken propositions that associated problems, such as mental causation and 'other minds', arise in the first place. Ryle builds his case via an erudite and beautifully written account of the will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation and observation, imagination and the intellect. Some of the problems he tackles, such as the distinction between 'knowing how and knowing that', challenged some of the bedrock assumptions of philosophy and continue to exert important influence on contemporary philosophy. A classic work of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of the mind and human behaviour. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes a substantial commentary by Julia Tanney. Together with the reissue of both volumes of Ryle's Collected Papers, it provides essential reading for new readers interested not only in the history of analytic philosophy but in its power to challenge major currents in philosophy of mind and language today.

Religious Studies, 2010

I reconsider the idea that there is an analogy to be drawn between belief in other minds and belief in God, and examine two approaches to the relevant beliefs. The first ‘explanatory inductive’ approach gives rise to difficulties in both contexts, and involves some questionable assumptions. The second ‘expressivist’ approach is more promising, and presupposes a more satisfactory metaphysical framework in the first context. Its application in a theological context is similarly insightful, and offers an intellectually respectable, but by no means irresistible, version of the doctrine that nature is a book of lessons.

International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management, 2024

The exploration of the mind is a fundamental pursuit spanning philosophy and psychology, with implications reaching into diverse practical realms. This paper delves into the intricacies of mental states, examining historical perspectives from ancient philosophers to modern theorists. Philosophical inquiries into intentionality, consciousness, and the nature of mental phenomena are scrutinized, alongside empirical investigations by psychologists. The discourse navigates through contrasting theories such as dualism, materialism, and functionalism, shedding light on the challenges of reconciling subjective experiences with objective observations. The problem of other minds and the tension between internalism and externalism are dissected, revealing the complex interplay between individual cognition and external influences. Ultimately, this analysis underscores the intricate nature of philosophical inquiries into consciousness and the mind.

This work investigates into the nature of the mind as one of the classical problems in western philosophy. It argues that mind as a philosophical contention has been a philosophical concern from the Pre-Socratics till date. This work argues further that the main thrust of the debate oscillates between the conception of the mind as singularity in nature and mind as contiguous with non-mental phenomena. On these heels, theories and counter-theories have been advanced. The theories advanced arguably have been influenced by reaction to earlier theories of the mind and events of each epoch. The work further argues that scientism has further opened the contention to newer dimensions and nuances. This work concludes that the mind is a perennial philosophical challenge regardless of the massive contributions and theories that have been hypothesized on the subject matter.

I propose a new approach to the constitutive problem of psychology ‘what is mind?’ The first section introduces modifications of the received scope, methodology, and evaluation criteria of unified theories of cognition in accordance with the requirements of evolutionary compatibility and of a mature science. The second section outlines the proposed theory. Its first part provides empirically verifiable conditions delineating the class of meaningful neural formations and modifies accordingly the traditional conceptions of meaning, concept and thinking. This analysis is part of a theory of communication in terms of inter-level systems of primitives that proposes the communication-understanding principle as a psychological invariance. It unifies a substantial amount of research by systematizing the notions of meaning, thinking, concept, belief, communication, and understanding and leads to a minimum vocabulary for this core system of mental phenomena. Its second part argues that written human language is the key characteristic of the artificially natural human mind. Overall, the theory both supports Darwin’s continuity hypothesis and proposes that the mental gap is within our own species. Keywords: Cognitive science, communication, meaning, nature of mind, psychology, representation, thinking, understanding, written human language.

1999

This thesis is basically concerned with synthesis of some of the philosophical conceptions of mind. The history of the use and the description of the term ‘mind' reveal a multiplicity of views. First, a metaphysical relativity with which mind is treated, either as a substance, process or act and potency; the two opposing theories of mind, the monism vis-a-vis dualism and the multiple theoriesthe identity, idealist and materialist views that address the subject. Secondly, the eight(8) main conceptions of mind as provided by Reber: ■ Mind as a totality o f hypothesized mental processes and acts that may serve as explanatory devices for psychological data. • Mind as a totality o f the conscious and unconscious mental experiences o f an individual organism (usually, though not always, a human organism). • Mind as a collection o f processes • Mind as equivalent to brain • Mind as an emergent property • Mind as a list o f synonyms for example, psyche, soul, self and the like. • Mind a...

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2013

This paper explores one aspect of God’s omniscience, that is, his knowledge of human minds. In §1 I spell out a traditional notion of divine knowledge, and in §2 I argue that our understanding of the thoughts of others is a distinct kind of knowledge from that involved in knowledge of the physical world; it involves empathizing with thinkers. In §3 I show how this is relevant to the question of how, and whether, God understands the thoughts of man. There is, we shall see, some tension between the alleged direct nature of God’s intuition-based knowledge and the empathetic nature of understanding others.