Is it possible to establish that dogs dream? If not, are there any possible future developments that could?

Sure, it's possible. And here's how it could be established. Suppose it were found that, when and only when people dream, certain things happen in their brains. And suppose that dogs' brains are similar in relevant respects to people's brains and that, lo and behold, their brains exhibit similar behavior when they sleep. That, it seems to me, is excellent reason to suppose that dogs dream. It's not "proof", but, as has often been said here, we don't have "proof" of very much: I don't have any proof that you dream, or even that you exist, but I nonetheless know that you do.

What is the philosophical take on the subconscious and who came up with the idea? It seems highly problematic to me in that its existence can never be established because of its very nature. It is rather like positing Pluto to account for wobbles in other known planets' orbits except that Pluto can be demonstrably found! This is different from the unconscious mind which keeps you breathing, etc. which works rather like the programmes running in the background on your PC. No mystery here. And where do dreams enter into this debate? I can't ever recall having had a 'symbolic' dream, just ones dramatising traits and memories I am well aware of. A statement like 'I hated her but I now realise I subconsciously loved her' is surely just hindsight. Knowing and not knowing something at the same time has to be impossible?

I'm not sure why it seems to you that the existence of the sub-conscious could never be established. The idea is simply that our behavior is in part caused by mental states of which we are not consciously aware. Perhaps a better example would be anger: I might come to realize at some point that I have long been angry with X for something he did, and that this anger, of which I'd not previously been consciously aware as such, has been causing me to behave badly towards X. That seems pretty unproblematic to me. It also isn't obvious there is any real difference with the case of Pluto. Suppose you think that mental states are, ultimately, physical states, states of the brain. Then if we knew more about the brain, perhaps we could verify the existence of sub-conscious states like that one.

Before a computer is assembled, it's a pile of useless wires and hardware. Put it all together and the whole is much greater than its parts, in that it can do things like beat the best chess player in the world. Conversely with the human brain, severe enough head injuries can cause profound changes in personality. Doesn't this "whole much greater than the sum of parts" not prove that dualism fails Occam's razor? I mean, if there was a soul independent of brain matter, where does it go after severe head injuries? By all accounts, people are not who they used to be after such unfortunate losses. Thanks Jeff

Most dualists hold that the mind acts through the brain somehow (assuming they hold that the mind "acts"). Hence brain damage would diminish the mind's ability to act, much as damage to other parts of one's body might. Most dualists (but not epiphenomenalists) would also hold that changes in the body (mostly, the brain) can have effects upon the mind. For example, eating a strawberry causes certain conscious sensations. Perhaps damage to the brain might also be held to cause damage to the mind. The issues here thus seem, broadly, to concern mind-body interaction, which is a big issue for dualism anyway.

It's safe to say that Electricity has no feeling. and that a dead body has no feeling. And that a live body that's in a coma has no feeling. Therefore is it not also safe to say that a soul must exist? There has to be something to make a person a person. We cannot have "minds" and "thought" if we are only electricity and cells. Correct?

I'm not sure I follow this argument. People who think there are no such things as "souls" think human beings are living creatures, and to be a living creature is not just to be "electricity and cells" in the sense that I,for example, am not a dead body over here plus a generator over there. Now, as you note, a living person who is in a coma also, presumably, feels nothing. Someone who thinks people do not have souls should, however, say that this is because a certain part of the person's brain is not active, or is not active in the right kind of way. Its not being active means, to be sure, that there is no the right kind of electrical activity in that part of the person's brain. But this is not to say that it is the electricity that would have feeling, if only it were there. It means that the person does not feel anything because that kind of electrical activity is not then present. Indeed, there is a classic challenge here to the conception of people as embodied souls: If people are...

If I read something I wrote long ago, am I engaged in a different sort of activity than reading something someone else wrote? What if I don't remember writing it?

Perhaps the best way to approach this question would be to ask: Inwhat ways is your epistemic situation different when you are readingsomething you wrote yesterday? We writers are in thissituation all the time. One of its dangers is that one can fail to recognizepotential ambiguities. Suppose I were to write: Fighting administrators can be distracting. I may know that what I meant was that administrators who are fighting can be distracting, and so the sentence just reads that way to me. But it is ambiguous: It could also mean that fighting with administrators can be distracting. What the example shows is that, when one is reading something one wrote oneself, one has access to more (or at least different) information that someone elsewould, but it's not obvious that one has access to better informationthan others do. Now, if you don't remember writing something, then presumably it is, to you, as if you didn't write it, though I suppose you might find yourself just understanding...

I recently read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , and it claimed that the universe is so big that any thing you can imagine is true somewhere. If that is true, does it mean that as I or someone else imagines a place that it blinks into existence right then or was it there all along? In a way are we all collectivly creating the world we inhabit now? I apologize for my spelling and grammar. I've never studied philosophy so sorry if that was a bad question.

I think the idea in the book was that anything that is possible is actually true somewhere: It is not that anything one does imagine becomes true, but that anything one can imagine is true, somewhere or other, the assumption being made that, if one can imagine it, it must be possible. (Whether that is true, whether "conceivability implies possibility", is a much contested issue.) It seems unlikely that the Universe is actually as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide ,if only because the universe is finite and it would seem that there areinfinitely things that are possible. But David Lewis has held a view that is in some ways similar: Reality consists of ever so many universes, all of which are spatio-temporally disconnected from one another, and anything that might have been true is actually true in one of those universes. So, for example, since it is possible that I should explode, leaving nothing but a pile of gold in my chair, there is a universe somewhere in which not I, since I...

Do animals know they are mortal? Bill Reay

Here's a more basic question: Do (non-human) animals know that they are ? Do (non-human) animals have a conception of themselves ? Are they, as it is put, "self-conscious"? Self-consciosuness seems to be a necessary precondition of knowledge of one's own mortality. Obviously, one need not give a single answer for all (non-human) animals. Perhaps birds are not self-conscious, but chimpanzees are. If one thought, as some philosophers have, that one cannot be self-conscious unless one is a user of language, then of course that would answer the question. But I don't find that view terribly appealing or well-argued. The question which animals are self-conscious is, presumably, an empirical one. I'm reasonably sure that flies are not self-conscious, but would be prepared to believe that cats are, and I've encountered some evidence that chimpanzees are. But there is a philosophical question here, as well, namely: What exactly is self-consciousness? What is involved in having a conception of...

Why are philosophers these days so concerned with fleshing out possible rules for concepts (e.g., Crispin Wright's analysis of intentions)? Do they believe that people actually follow these rules? But how can that be if most (if not all) people can't even say what these rules are precisely? And wouldn't a more plausible answer be found in our being conditioned to behave in certain (imprecise) manners with certain words or phrases, much like, e.g., learning to use our legs to walk? If so, shouldn't this be more a matter of empirical investigation (on the level of science) than this sort of conceptual analysis?

I'm with Mitch and Peter, so far as what they've said goes. But neither of them answered your first question: Why do philosophers go in for this kind of thing in the first place? The answer is that philosophers who do go in for this kind of thing think that, if we could articulate the rules we tacitly follow in using the concept of intention, say, then that would be a way of saying what the concept of intention is , that is, of characterizing that concept. It is a much debated question whether this way of proceeding is best. Jerry Fodor, for example, has been arguing for some time that concepts simply don't have "rules" associated with them in the way Wright's project presumes. See his book Concepts for his most complete presentation of this idea.

Are "we" our brains controlling a "shell"? Or are our brains more like independent beings, and we ourselves are the shells?

Even the Great Dualist, Descartes, who regarded mind and body as two completely different kinds of substances, did not want to regard the relation between the mind and the body as like that (his analogy) between a captain and a ship. A person, according to Descartes, is a "union" of mind and body, where a "union" is supposed to be something more than just a body and a mind. In what way precisely the "union" is more than a body and a mind, in what way the mind and body are "bound together" in the union, is a question with which Descartes struggled throughout his career, and I don't know that anyone thinks they really understand what he meant or, for that matter, that Descartes really understood what he meant. Nowadays, dualism isn't very popular, but your question shows that similar questions can arise about the relationship between a brain and a person. It doesn't seem happy to identify a person with his or her brain and then to regard the relation between the brain and the body as like that between...

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