James C. Blackmon

San Francisco State University | SFSU · Department of Philosophy

I argue that if minds supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of things like brains, then typical human brains host many minds at once. Support comes from science-nonfiction realities that, unlike split-brain cases, have received little direct attention from philosophers. One of these realities is that some patients are functioning (albeit i...

In addition to his famous Chinese Room argument, John Searle has posed a more radical problem for views on which minds can be understood as programs. Even his wall, he claims, implements the WordStar program according to the standard definition of implementation because there is some "pattern of molecule movements" that is isomorphic to the formal...

Eugene Mills's simple solution to the Liar Paradox is extended to Liar Pairs, showing that it avoids paradox. However, the cost appears to be some counter-intuitive semantic limitations.

Integrated information theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing's having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT's consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this...

IIT includes commitments about the very nature of physical reality, a fact both highly unusual for an empirical theory within neuroscience, and surprisingly underappreciated within the literature. These commitments are intimately tied to the theory; they are not incidental. This paper demonstrates as much by raising certain objections in a “naive”...

A ghost is a supernatural being that is typically described as capable of appearing to, speaking to, and even doing harm to a person. But it is also described as a being that you cannot touch or affect in the usual ways. Lots of things seem weird at first, but humans don't think of them as supernatural. It's easy to see how material things interact...

In addition to his famous Chinese Room argument, John Searle has posed a more radical problem for views on which minds can be understood as programs. Even his wall, he claims, implements the WordStar program according to the standard definition of implementation because there is some “pattern of molecule movements” that is isomorphic to the formal...

We argue that atomistic learning, learning that requires training only on a novel item to be learned, is problematic for networks in which every weight is available for change in every learning situation. This is potentially significant because atomistic learning appears to be commonplace in humans and most non-human animals. We briefly review vari...

In "On Begging the Systematicity Question," Wayne Davis criticizes the suggestion of Cummins et al. that the alleged systematicity of thought is not as obvious as is sometimes supposed, and hence not reliable evidence for the language of thought hypothesis. We offer a brief reply.