philosophy-of-mind - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "philosophy-of-mind"

Total concepts: 18

Concepts

Philosophical Zombies - Hypothetical beings physically and behaviorally identical to conscious humans but entirely lacking subjective experience, used to argue that consciousness is non-physical.
Hard Problem of Consciousness - The challenge of explaining why and how physical brain processes give rise to subjective conscious experience, as distinguished from the 'easy problems' of explaining cognitive functions.
Epiphenomenalism - The view that mental states are caused by physical brain processes but have no causal influence on the physical world, making consciousness a byproduct without function.
Mind-Body Problem - The philosophical question of how mental states, experiences, and consciousness relate to the physical states of the brain and body.
Cognitive Revolution - The 1950s-1960s intellectual movement that shifted psychology from behaviorism to the scientific study of internal mental processes like attention, memory, reasoning, and language.
Panpsychism - The philosophical view that consciousness or mind-like qualities are a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, present to some degree in all matter.
Folk Psychology - The everyday framework for understanding and predicting behavior in terms of mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions.
Connectionism - Connectionism is a cognitive science approach that models mental processes using artificial neural networks of simple interconnected units processing information in parallel through weighted connections.
Mary's Room - A thought experiment arguing that knowing all the physical facts about color vision would not prepare someone for the subjective experience of actually seeing color.
Physicalism - The philosophical position that everything that exists is physical or supervenes on the physical, and that all facts are ultimately physical facts.
Eliminative Materialism - A philosophical position arguing that common-sense mental concepts like beliefs and desires are fundamentally flawed and will be eliminated by neuroscience.
Intentionality - The property of mental states by which they are 'about' or 'directed toward' something, considered by some philosophers to be the defining mark of the mental.
Neurophilosophy - The interdisciplinary field that brings neuroscience to bear on traditional philosophical questions about mind, knowledge, and consciousness.
Qualia - The subjective, qualitative aspects of conscious experience - the 'what it is like' quality of sensations such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain.
Enactivism - Cognition arises through dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, not through internal mental representations.
Dualism - The philosophical view that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substances or possess fundamentally different properties.
Functionalism - A philosophy of mind theory that defines mental states by their functional roles - what they do rather than what they are made of.
Phenomenology - The philosophical study of the structures of subjective experience and consciousness as lived from the first-person perspective.

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