My understanding is that Buddhism teaches the doctrine of anatta — "no self." This doesn't mean that there aren't people in the ordinary sense. It means that there is no underyling metaphysical substance that amounts to the self. But I'm not aware of anything in Buddhism that would fairly be described as solipsism. So "the internet" got this one wrong (except for the thousands of places where it gets it right. as for thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., people do think, they do feel, they do have emotions. Or better, perhaps, there are thoughts, there are feelings, there are emotions. But they aren't tied together by some underyling soul or mental substance. The Scottish philosopher David Hume held a similar view. On Hume's view, a person is a "bundle of perceptions," though that's a bit too crude to get it right. In recent philosophical history, Derek Parfit developed a view that he would be the first to admit owes a great deal to Hume and to Buddhism. As for minds and consciousnesses, it...

If I really believed that you really believed that these are the only two alternatives, then I'd probably believe that you're stupid. But I don't believe any such thing. I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum that if someone else asked you the very same question, you wouldn't have any trouble pointing out a whole bunch of alternatives that they're overlooking. Since I don't know anything about your circumstances, I wouldn't presume to guess which alternative best fits your circumstances. But I do think the idea that there's a "real place" for each of us is something to be suspicious of, and I'm also pretty skeptical that even self-aware people are always reliable about what they're capable of. Of course, if you've already grasped the second horn of your dilemma (false dilemma though it is), my reaction won't count. In spite of this, I'd suggest that one kind of reaction it's often wise to ignore is the one that tries to shame you into not trying things. The approval of people who react like that isn't...

There are several questions here, and we need to distinguish them. 1) Does belief require objects? Beliefs are "about" in a very broad sense, but I believe (as should you) that there is no ratio of two integers that equals 2 when squared. There is no object that answers to my belief, but it's clear that my belief is really a belief, indeed a true one, and in some sense is about something. In this case, we could perfectly sensibly say it's about numbers, though not about some specific number. This might sound superficially paradoxical, but the paradox persists only if we insist on treating the word "about" in a way that rides roughshod over how we actually use it. 2) Is it possible to have a belief about "nothing" or about a negative, as opposed to affirmative proposition? Two different issues here. I can believe that Barack Obama is not seven feet tall. That's a negative proposition, and I clearly can believe it; any analysis of belief that claims otherwise wold be silly. But it's not a...

As it turns out, we don't get paid. One reason is that, as you may have noticed, there's no charge to ask a question and there's no tip jar. ;-) On to the question. It's an empirical question; it depends on how our minds and bodies actually work. But it's pretty safe to say that the answer is yes: sometimes you can tell things about a person by the look in their eyes. It's far from perfect and not always reliable, but there's no completely reliable way to know what a person's state of mind is, so that's not a special problem for this case. In fact, there's not much mystery here from the point of view of common sense. Most of us are at least tolerably good at reading facial expressions. And as for the eyes, they're part of the expression. A fake smile won't give you crow's feet; a genuine smile raises the cheeks and makes the corners of the eyes crinkle. We can learn to tell the difference. That's just one example. Of course, it's not always so simple. A person's facial expression (eyes especially) may...

No. At least, not if by "telepathy," you mean what most people mean. Usually when people talk about telepathy, what they have in mind is one person's thoughts influencing another person's thoughts without usual means of influence such as speaking, telephoning, etc. What you've described is a case of "common cause." It's not a matter of one person's thoughts influencing another person's. It's a matter of a common stimulus influencing each person's thoughts. To give a clearer example: suppose you and I are, as it happens, both watching the same TV program, though in different cities. An image of a mushroom cloud appears onscreen and we both think of Hiroshima. That's not telepathy. Nor would it be telepathy if the two of us had also once met and talked about the history of the atomic bomb.

A good question. Usually we can't just choose what to believe. For example, I can't decide to believe that there's an elephant in the room with me, no matter how hard I try. That's likely because we're wired in a way that won't usually let us override the evidence of our senses. But the words "believe in" are typically applied to things that we can't check on simply by looking around—things like belief in God, or belief in the trustworthiness of a friend. (It's not that the evidence of our senses is simply irrelevant to such things, but it's seldom definitive.) In matters where the senses don't just settle things, it's a genuine question whether we can decide to believe, and my sense is that we often can. A comparison might help. Suppose my friend has been accused of something, and he asks me to speak for him as a character witness. I can certainly decide whether I'm going to do that. The decision might be easy, but the more interesting cases are the ones where it doesn't just seem obvious what to do....

Good for you! You've stumbled on a central question in contemporary philosophy, and the thought experiment you offer is very similar to ones proposed by (among others) philosopher Derek Parfit, whose views on this question are much-discussed. The problem is what makes someone the same person over time. Put another way, what makes a person at one time the same person as a person at another time? The standard term for the bundle of questions here is the problem of personal identity . Usually, having the same body/brain is enough; your example points out that this might not be the only thing that matters. In particular, someone might think that continuity of consciousness is what's needed. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke held a view like this. As you'd expect, different philosophers have come to different conclusions. Parfit thinks that identity is shallow and not what we really care about. On Parfit's view, psychological continuity is what matters, and he would say that in the case you've...

Both, surely. Is there any reason to think otherwise? If I think there's a mugger around the corner, I won't go there. (What I think affects what I do.) If I'm prejudiced against midwesterners and I end up working with several smart, interesting, friendly people from that part of the country, what I think about midwesterners is likely to change; what I do affects what I think. We could multiply examples indefinitely, but this should do.

The term "soul" is a sort of a place-holder for a certain kind of something-we-know-not-what that may well not exist. That's the reason why there's not much to be said. The "definition" you cite is really just a way of fleshing out what people have in mind when they use the word "soul." It's not a stab at a theory. If there is anything fitting this "definition" of a soul, then what internal structure it might have is a further and puzzling question. Since souls are supposed to be immaterial, it's not clear what it would mean to say that they have internal structure. Internal in what sense? Structure in what sense? If someone asked me what features souls have that explain their supposed capacity for consciousness, my answer would be "How the h*ll would I know?" By insisting that souls are immaterial and yet still have physical effects, we've put ourselves in a hard spot: we can't call on any of the resources we usually use when we try to explain the goings-on of things in the world. Physics, biology...

The answer certainly seems to be yes. One example: learning to like something you didn't like at first. (Olives, beer, strong cheese…) Taste isn't the only sense modality that's subject to these shifts. Most of us, I'd guess, have found that people sometimes come to look different to us as we get to know them well, for example. As we think about our earlier reactions to some musicians and some music, we may be struck by how different the same piece sounds to us now than it once did. Obviously there are lots of interesting questions we could ask here. It seems plausible that sometimes these shifts are a matter of learning to notice things we didn't focus on at first. But as others have pointed out, this phenomenon raises more peculiarly philosophical questions. Daniel Dennett considers a pair of possibilities that seem maddeningly hard to disentangle: one might say: I used to like parsnips, but they taste different to me now. Or one might say: parsnips taste the same to me as they always did, but I...