Someone might reasonably think that the question what personal identity consists of is to be answered by psychology. So we can imagine looking at the formation of individuality over time, through childhood and on, and think we were answering the philosophical question what identity consists of. Clearly psychology cannot pre-empt the answer to the question whether, for example, the bodily criterion of identity is correct. There are a lot of other examples to choose from. The one I am most interested in at the moment is perception. Perceiving, as Ryle points out, is not a process, but the termination of one, like scoring a goal, to use Ryle's example. You can't ask how long it took to perceive a goat, and you ask how long the scoring of a goal took. You can ask of course in a different way how long it took Aston Villa to score a goal - the whole of the first half, say. It took them forty-five minutes. But what about the actual scoring? That is as you might say instantaneous. It happens when the ball...

You should study Wittgenstein's arguments against a private language more closely, because I don't think that his view is quite that language "cannot be with one person", although that is really a wonderful way of putting it. It seems to suggest merely the view that the nature of language is that of a interpersonal communication, which is a bit uninteresting, and yet your phrasing is profoundly interesting. I also didn't quite follow why thinking that there can be a private language goes against psychophysical dualism. Surely it's the other way round. Descartes, for example, has to think he can give sense to his words privately, because he can intelligibly doubt the existence of everyone else. And Wittgenstein himself has been thought to be a behaviourist, or closer to behaviourism than to psychophysical dualism. I am very sorry about Croatia too. I imagine you had some more beers. I did.

It is very sad to hear your story. I can give a guess about the awfulness of what you are going through, but I am more certain that I cannot appreciate the full daily horror for you. Your question is a most reasonable one. Is your mother "alive"? It is interesting that you feel obliged to put this word in scare quotes. It is something that "you can't stop asking yourself". So there is something very important here, an important issue. But you have also answered your own question, or part of it. Let us distinguish between the mental and the physical. Is your mother alive physically? Her body is not dead, if we can put it that way. Is she alive "as a conscious being"? Here you give your own answer: ' . . . she is unconscious about anything [that] is happening around her.' I think perhaps you should say that she is conscious only of the most immediate and restricted domain. That perhaps is part of the reason the question is difficult. She is conscious, but not in a full sense. The whole difficulty about...

Do the perceptual systems work from the environment in, or from the perceiver out? In English there are famously two very different groups of perceptual words, one active and one passive: look/see, listen/hear, touch/#feel, smell/smell (i.e. "smell" has two meanings, one for the activity of sniffing out - ('The dog was smelling my shoes'), and the other for a more passive kind of reception of some smell.) In his celebrated 1966 The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems J.J. Gibson argued that the active seeking out of "information" is more fundamental than passive sensing, and his famous cookie-cutter experiment showed this. If you actively move your hands relative to the object of perception, the percentage of correct identifications is very high. If the stimuli are given to you passively, the percentage drops to under half of what it was. The senses have to be active, and without activity even the passive sensation degrades. This was also shown by some early phenomenological experiments by Katz on...

Isn't the more interesting question how it is possible how and that we can know what someone else is thinking or feeling?

The difference between the cognitive biases and the logical fallacies is that the biases can be taken to be common built-in tendencies to error of individual judgements , whereas the fallacies, both formal and non-formal (so-called "informal", badly named because "informal" actually means "casual" or "unofficial" or "relaxed") are types of argument . The point is that the biases can be said to have causes, and are hence of psychological but not logical interest, whereas the fallacies do not have causes (though the making of a fallacy on a particular occasion may have) and the reverse is true. There is more to be said, of course, because a psychologist might take an interest in the fallacies.

Often with questions that are composed of multiple further questions ("Here is a question", you write . . . - it's not - I count four question marks!) it helps to take just one, and deal with it carefully, before moving on to the next. Of course some of the sub-questions will generate further questions, but that simply means that some patience is required. For example, 'I move my brain from one body to another, so I never age.' Why does it follow that you never age? If you retain your memories (line 3) and add to them, then you are changing and aging, psychologically. So you must mean that you don't physically age. But the brain does age. And why is it that 'I never age' follows from 'I move my brain from one body to another'? That seems to assume that who you are is a matter of having the same brain. Is that right? And if it is, then if as you say 'after living for a long time my brain is no longer anything like the original' then you are not after all the same person, so the question goes away. A...

I'm not sure I'm getting your second question. Why should the I that says 'I feel pain' be the mind and not the I? Unlike Descartes, who thinks that both of these things are the same as consciousness, and as himself, not to mention his soul (Berkeley makes these equations too) I would prefer to reserve the words "mind" and "mental" to describe two things that are not me. (i) The intellect. We say, 'He has a good mind' and things like that. (2) The imagination. We say, 'It's all in your mind; you're just imagining it. Snap out of it.' The mind and the imagination are two different things, obviously. But neither of them is me. What is meant by "I" and "me" and so on? It certainly is not the same thing as "mind", and nor could my mind, in my two senses, be me. I have a healthy appetite, especially for Italian food, but the same is not true of my mind or imagination. I have just had lunch. But my mind and my imagination, poor things, never eat. So neither of them is me. They are things or whatever that I ...

It seems that you have answered your own question. You write, "If Person A commits a crime . . . who is guilty of the crime?" Person A, certainly, since you write on the supposition that "Person A commits a crime . . ." Of course A isn't legally guilty until he's found guilty by a court. But I think you mean, 'Who committed the crime?' That was A. Should A be tried? He is suffering some kind of memory loss, so there are issues of competence. On the whole, if I have forgotten about a crime I have committed, it doesn't seem enough to make me innocent. A faulty memory is hardly a good defence.

I don't think much depends here on whether psychology or psychiatry is a science. What matters is whether they are doing good or not for patients. Supposing we think they are, a commonsense criterion seems to be that even if patients do not accept the diagnosis or the treatment, things change if they are contemplating harm to themselves or others, as the jargon has it. The jargon persists and is more than jargon because it has a real role; it is a criterion. A second criterion or perhaps test might be this. Can the patients get through the day or week to their own satisfaction, or look after themselves OK? If I have a friend who never gets up, doesn't bathe, won't look me in the eye, can't work and doesn't eat, and has gone down to eighty pounds, then I feel justified in intervening, because of this second criterion, over the stated wishes of the patient. Something is wrong, and I have an obligation, or some responsibility anyway, to help, especially if I am a psychiatrist. Most people in trouble do want...