The relationship between mental and physical.
11 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
How do you explain consciousness?
David Chalmers (TED) · 2014
Sets out the hard problem — why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all — and argues it is not answered by any account of which brain…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History
Thomas Henry Huxley · 1874
Argues that consciousness is a mere by-product of the brain's physical workings with no causal power of its own, so that animals, and by extension…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
Franz Brentano · 1874
Every mental phenomenon is directed at an object — intentionality — and this 'aboutness' is what distinguishes the mental from the physical, which…
+11 more at this level
12 of 16 works
David Chalmers (TED)
Sets out the hard problem — why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all — and argues it is not answered by any account of which brain functions do what.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Henry Huxley
Argues that consciousness is a mere by-product of the brain's physical workings with no causal power of its own, so that animals, and by extension humans, are conscious automata.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Nagel
Argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, there being something it is like to have an experience, that no amount of objective physical description can capture, using bat echolocation as the test case.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Andy Clark & David Chalmers
When an external tool like a notebook plays exactly the functional role that memory would play internally, the boundary of the mind should be drawn around the tool too, not just the skull.
10 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Franz Brentano
Every mental phenomenon is directed at an object — intentionality — and this 'aboutness' is what distinguishes the mental from the physical, which has none.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gilbert Ryle
Attacks the Cartesian picture of the mind as a ghost in the machine, arguing that talk of belief, will and emotion describes dispositions to behave rather than reports on a private inner theatre.
U. T. Place
Argues that identifying consciousness with a brain process is not a logical absurdity but an empirical hypothesis, defensible once the 'is' of composition is separated from the 'is' of definition.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. J. C. Smart
Argues that a sensation just is a brain process, in the way the morning star just is the evening star, and that this identity is a contingent scientific discovery rather than something meanings could settle.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hilary Putnam
Argues mental states should be defined by the causal role they play between inputs, outputs and other mental states rather than by what they are physically made of, since the same mental state could be realised in different kinds of matter.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Donald Davidson
Argues for anomalous monism: every mental event is identical with some physical event, yet there are no strict psychophysical laws linking mental and physical descriptions, so the mental is real but not reducible to law-governed physics.
Daniel Dennett
Proposes treating a system as having beliefs and desires whenever adopting that stance reliably predicts its behaviour, making intentionality a matter of a useful predictive strategy rather than an intrinsic inner property.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ned Block
Constructs cases, including a nation-sized population wired to reproduce a mind's functional organisation, to argue that something can satisfy every functional description of a mental state while plausibly lacking the experience itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.