Abstract
While the daily practice of science is clearly swayed by rhetorical skills, special interests and power politics, it works so well because at base it strives for empirical objectivity, reliable replication, and honest reporting. But can this be extended to the study of consciousness?
How can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world? How can we reconcile our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, speech-act performing, rational agents in a world that we believe consists entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? How, in short, can we make our conception of ourselves consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and biology?… I think this problem—or set of problems—is the most important problem in philosophy, and indeed there is a sense in which, in our particular epoch, it is the only major problem in philosophy.
John R. Searle , Consciousness and Language , p. 1
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Notes
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My rocket-science friend Spike Jones informs me: “If we assume a really high-velocity round, such as the AR-15… I find muzzle velocity of about 1000 meters per second, assuming the bullet is fired from about 2 m above the ground, takes about 0.6 s, so it goes about 600 m, difference in height due to earth’s curvature is about 2.9 cm, which is small enough that we are splitting hairs if we argue (correctly) that the dropped bullet hits first, assuming no irregularities in the surface which of course we do have. If you could arrange a piece of ground which was perfectly planar with no irregularities, the two should hit about the same time, but aerodynamic effects could make it go either way. The difference in time is about 5 ms if we assume away the atmosphere, 5 ms being the time it takes for the bullet to travel the extra 3 cm due to curvature.”
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Broderick, D. (2018). The Language of the Mind. In: Consciousness and Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00599-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00599-3_2
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