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Death

If a person is not afraid of non-existance then if he is afaid of death he is actually afraid of the possible pain involved ; does this seem reasonable?

Ie he is convinced that death would bring no pain he might still be afraid. Then it would be something else he feared. I don't know what he might rationally fear in such a case.
Mind

Psychosis is often characterized as 'loss of contact with reality.' Three questions. (1) What is this 'reality' of which they speak? (2) Does anybody (even psychatrists) really know enough about this 'reality' to be able competently to deliver a diagnosis under that characterization? (3) What is this 'contact' of which they speak

It is a good question. It is possible that a sane personmight believe that the government is controlling him by means of radio signalssent to his dental filling when in fact that is far from the truth, and that apsychotic person might believe such a thing and the belief be true. Someapparently sane thinkers believe that the commonsense world as we normallythink of it, as populated with people, teeth, tables, chairs and governments isnot real. Notions like that of a government are too vague and confused to pickout genuine denizens of reality. Only science tells us what is real. Ifthat or some other skeptical hypothesis turns out to be right, then perhapsmost of us do not have contact with reality in respect of most of our beliefs.But that doesn't mean that we are all psychotic. We might be very badjudges about the justification of beliefs about empirical issues. So perhaps judgementsabout whether someone is psychotic should not require us to make judgements inrelation to other, tangential empirical...
Mind

I wonder about the notion of a masochist as somebody who enjoys suffering. Is it possible, logically, to enjoy suffering? Doesn't suffering necessarily preclude enjoyment and vice-versa? Would it be more accurate to say that a masochist enjoys something that non-masochists consider suffering?

I think that one definition of suffering is 'pain'. And someone could gain pleasure from pain, physical, or indeed psychological. So to say that a masochist enjoys suffering sees fine to me.
Consciousness

Is it considered possible to be consciously aware of an object or thought without experiencing feelings, or is "feelings" just another word for conscious awareness?. If this question can't be dismissed, which philosophers have explored it?

In cases of blindsight subjects show behavioural sensitivity to visual informatioon about an object that they seem not to be consciously aware of - e.g. they can point it it, but if you ask them whether they can see it, they say 'no'. I am not sure if that is relevant to the question. Talk in terms of unconscious thoughts and feelings is central to psychoanalysis and its many modern offshoots. Just google and you'll find stacks of stuff on it. The expressions 'conscious awareness' and 'feelings' have many different uses and under specific technical interpretations they may be interdefined.
Ethics

Is it ethical to kill someone in self-defense? My instinct was yes at first, but upon further reflection, in a situation where it's "you or them", I can't seem to think of a reason to kill someone in self-defense, other than the fact that you simply want to live. After all, you're still taking a human life. (Also if you could explain why it is or isn't ethical would help me out a lot thanks!)

I would say: it is ethical to kill someone in self defence as long as their life is not more valuable than yours. In the unlikely event that the person attacking you is a terrific assset to the universe and you are not, then you must let them kill you rather than kill them.
Freedom
Physics

Do the developments in quantum mechanics (i.e. the best we can do on a very micro level is give probability distributions), really have anything to say about free will? It might mean that determinism isn't true (although there could be a weaker "probabilistic determinism" that gives the likelihood of different possible events), but introducing chance into the equation isn't helpful to free will either.

Also agreed. Here is an argument that determinism doesn’t undermine, butenhances, free will. (1) Our actions are caused by our propositional attitudes,such as desire, hope, acceptance and belief. (2) The more deterministic the relationship between out attitudesand our actions, the more freedom of will we possess. (4) The more control we have over our own attitudes the morefreedom of will we possess. (5) Our control overown attitudes consists in the influence of some of our attitudes over others.E.g. We want to smoke. We also want not to smoke (These are called first-orderdesires) And we want not to want tosmoke and we do not want to want to smoke. (These are called second-orderdesires) We have freedom of the will toextent that our desire not to want to smoke wins out. (From ‘Freedom of theWill and the Concept of a Person’, Harry Frankfurt, The Journal of Philosophy,1971). (6) The more deterministic the relationship between oursecond-order desires and our first-order...
Language

I have a question about the the usage of words. If a word has a particular meaning in a specific context that contradicts, ignores or stretches beyond the way that word is used in more general context, is that word being used wrong? For instance, consider the term "game." I've frequently come across arguments in different spheres about what constitutes a "game" and how such-and-such use of the term is mistaken. In some contexts a "game" can be all sorts of things (consider the bewildering variety of video games that have almost nothing in common with one another), in others it must be something competitive (there are people who express hesitation at calling solitaire a true "game"), in other contexts "games" need to have a structure of some kind or another (some say that children's imaginative games are not games, but merely "play" in a vague sense). My question is, if certain contexts use a term in a certain way, one that deviates from the understanding of that term in broader contexts, are those...

I would say that there is, in any general sense, a right or wrong way to use a word. There are various generalizations about how people actually use words that are captured in dictionaries. Dictionaries tell us how people do use words, not how they should use them. There is no such thing as the correct use of the term 'game', or any other term. If a person uses a word intending to mean something by it that is not in line with the dictionary, there is nothing wrong with that per se. We do it all the time. for many reasons, many of them very good. We just need to be careful not to be misunderstood. And we might use a word thnking we are using it in line withe dcitionaries and be wrong about that. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynmann said "People often complain of the unwarranted extension of the ideas of particles, paths etc. into the atmomic realm." He responds to the complaint that the extension is unwarranted "Not so at all; there is nothing unwarranted about the extension. We...
Mind
Science

Sigmund Freud told of a Jewish women who dreamt that a stranger handed her a comb. The women desired to marry a Christian man which triggered an emotional argument with her mother on the night prior to her dream. When Freud asked her what memories she associated with the word comb the woman told him that once her mother had once told her not to use a separate comb because she would "mix the breed." Freud then revealed that the meaning of the dream was an expression of her own latent wish to "mix the breed." Examples such as this seem like very persuasive evidence of Freud's theory that dreams are a form of wish fulfilment but many scientists and philosophers of science say that Freud's theories can't be scientifically falsified or that he lacks scientific evidence. But what constitutes scientific evidence? Surely Freud is a scientist because he grounds his theories in specific empirical clinical examples that he expresses clearly in a way that even the most uneducated person can understand them? The...

I don't myself think the term 'scientific' is a scientific term, nor have philosophers, such as Grunbaum or anyone else given it a very interesting or useful interpretation. Freud had a lot of ideas. So do contemporary psychoanalysts 100 years on. Psychoanalysis is no monolith. We can ask of any of the many many claims that psychoanalysts have made (under the heading of psychoanalysis, forgetting about what they say about other things): are they well backed by evidence and argument? Do they prove clinically useful and successful. Asking those questions is useful and interesting. Asking whether psychoanalysis is scientific is not.
Biology
Mind

The idea underlying many concepts of illness is that something has gone wrong with a biological system and some part of that system which has gone awry must be restored to it's proper function. The proper function of a biological systems is usually whatever allows that entity to live, breathe, exerts it muscles freely and vigorously without pain. When it comes to mental illness we extend that idea of proper functioning to anything that causes mental distress and is presumably due to biological problems with the brain. However there seems to me that something about that way of thinking is flawed because while it seems obvious when biological systems are disrupted rather than acting their natural course it does not seem obvious that mental distress is a product of biological aberrations. It seems rather like it is plausible that that is the normal course of life for humans even if that misery has a biological explanation.. So isn't mental illness essentially a flawed concept?

Hi, Miriam. I completely agree. The concept of illness is very flimsy. It is something like: an abnormality or disorder of a mental or physiological organ or system. Attempts to give a serious scientific account of 'normal' or 'orderly' have proved unsuccessful. Illness is just a vague folk notion and probably does not correspond to anything more scientifically or philosophically solid. Questions about the true underlying nature of specific mental illnesses (psychiatric disorders as they are now called), their treatment etc. are best deal with case by case. The same applies to physical illnesses though. There is nothing special about physiology here.
Mind

What would a robot have to be able to do, or what would it have to be, for us to consider it a sentient being as opposed to a non-sentient automaton? Please note I am using the term "robot" here in a broad sense, including such obviously sentient (fictional) constructs such as C-3PO of Star Wars fame. I don't consider "robot" and "sentient being" to be mutually exclusive terms. I'm interested in what fundamentally distinguishes sentient beings from automatons that merely mimic sentience.

Somewhat in line Searle's arguments in "Minds, Brains and Programs" I would say that the key is: original intentionality. Intentionality means something like 'aboutness' or 'representation', in the way that the sentence 'Hesperus is a planet' is about Venus, or represents Venus ('Hesperus' being a name for Venus). In some sense the rings on a tree represent its age: one ring per year. In some sense the written wordforms, the mere physical shapes, 'Hesperus is a planet' represent Venus. But our minds seem to represent things in a much deeper and more fundamental way. The tree rings merely correlate with its age in years. The mere wordforms only represent because we take them to do so. The intentionality of the wordforms is derived from us, whereas the intentionality of our thought that Hesperus is a planet is not derived from anything else: it is original intentionality. I would suggest, as a crude first move, that sentience is intentionality. Searle's thought was that no matter how sophisticated a...

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