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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
G.E.M.Anscombe
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
A.J.Ayer
Mark Balaguer
Isaiah Berlin
Susanne Bobzien
George Boole
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Ernst Cassirer
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Carl Ginet
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
David Hume
William James
Robert Kane
Tomis Kapitan
Immanuel Kant
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
David Lewis
John Locke
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
Willard van Orman Quine
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
G.H. von Wright
R. Jay Wallace
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Neils Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Max Born
Stephen Brush
Arthur Holly Compton
Abraham de Moivre
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Albert Einstein
Richard Feynman
A.O.Gomes
Joshua Greene
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Steven Pinker
Max Planck
Henri Poincaré
Erwin Schrödinger
William Thomson (Kelvin)
John von Neumann
Daniel Wegner
 
Mind-Body Problem
The Mind-Body problem is generally traced to René Descartes, who asked how the immaterial mind (or soul) could influence the material body. Would not the interaction between the two have to partake of the character of both? Descartes famously identified the tiny pineal gland as the point of contact between mind and body.

In modern times some philosophers and scientists have proposed interactionist models and have also attempted to locate specific parts of the brain, for example at the synapses between neurons, where quantum effects might be important. The neuroscientist John Eccles and philosopher Karl Popper considered such models in articles and books over many years.

All the attempts to use the mysterious properties of quantum mechanics to explain the mysterious problems of consciousness and psycho-physical relations between mind and body have been just that, explaining one mystery with another mystery.

Information Philosophy sees the Mind as an information processing system that operates on two levels.

At the Macro level, the mind/brain is adequately determined to make its decisions and resulting actions in ways that are causally connected with the agent's character and values. It is everything that determinist and compatibilist philosophers expect it to be.

At the Micro level, the mind/brain leaves itself open to significant thermal and quantal noise in its retrieval of past experiences. This generates creative and unpredictable alternative possibilities for thought and action. It is our best hope for a measure of libertarianism.

Our mind/brain model emphasizes the abstract information content of the mind. Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine.

Because it is embodied in the brain, this mind can control the actions of a body that is macroscopic and thus unaffected by its own quantum level uncertainty.

Thus our mind/body model explains how a relatively immaterial "free," unpredicatable, and creative mind can control the adequately determined material body through the determinate and responsible actions selected by the will from an agenda of alternative possibilities.

For Teachers
For Scholars

Chapter 4.9 - The Arrow of Time Chapter 5.2 - Consciousness
Part Four - Knowledge Part Six - Solutions
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