Philosophy of Mind 101

What sort of thing is the mind? And what’s the relationship between the mind and the body, between mental things and physical things? Is the mind composed of some sort of non-physical substance? Or is the mind just a particular sort of physical substance, perhaps organized in a distinctive way? Is there some other way of understanding the relationship between mind and body? Are minds merely brains? Are mental states just identical to certain kinds of brain states? Are mental states nothing more than certain dispositions to behave in certain ways? What is the nature of consciousness? Is it possible for a purely physical object to be conscious? Could a sophisticated machine be conscious? What is the nature of thought? How does the mind represent the world? Are the content of our thoughts determined by the brain or by the environment? What’s the relation between the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and other fields with interest in human minds?

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