#analyticphilosophy

Fun for the whole family! "'Descartes Against Humanity' and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers" @mcsweeneys.net

(Plus- Bernard Williams)

The main unstated approach in Philosophy of Mind is functionalism. The attempt to highlight causation as the main agent shows a confusion about the necessarily obscuration inherent with functionalism.

Nonreductive physicalism and Emergentism are possible because a functionalist approach necessarily loses information about its underlying system. If we adopt functionalism as the mainstay in describing how we are, physical agencies necessarily becomes an abstraction that cannot be grasped by functionalism because of the functional layer is less rich than its antecedent layer.

Functionalism reduces physical causes into a range of (non)experience so that physical causes become undecidable in terms of non-reductive approaches. Attempting to reduce consciousness and its attributed experiences to physical causes is essentially trying to reduce an already reduced field with its characteristically different nomological network to its antecedent causes. It's like trying to reduce an app on your smart phone into its binary code. It can be done, but there will inevitably be many undecidable ways of doing so because there are many ways to code the same thing. The multiplicity of coding shows that none of these ways of coding are necessary, thereby leading us to conclude that none of these physical (binary) relations can be said to "cause" any of the app's activities because it is entirely undecidable.

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She attended the New Lincoln School throughout grammar school and high school, and the Art Students’ League during high school. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls; and studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978.

Adrian introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism.

Great piece on Adrian  by Robin Cembalest via ARTnews from October of last year: