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Naturalism, Mind-Brain Dualism, and Consciousness w/ David Papineau
Hi, everybody! Today, I have the immense pleasure of bringing you an interview with Dr. David Papineau. He is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London and at the City University of New York Graduate Center, having previously taught for several years at Cambridge University where he was a fellow of Robinson College. He was President of the British Society for Philosophy of Science for 1993-5, President of the Mind Association for 2009-10, and President of the Aristotelian Society for 2013-14. He’s also the author of 9 books, including Philosophical Naturalism, Thinking About Consciousness, and Knowing the Score.
In this episode, we talk about naturalism, and consciousness and mental phenomena. We start by discussing what naturalism is; if there are problems that science can’t deal with; and how philosophy can contribute to science and the scientific method. Then, we move on to talking about consciousness. We first tackle the issues with mind-brain dualism, and then we discuss consciousness and action, and the Libet experiments in the 1980’s; we also deal with the hard problem of consciousness, and the issues with emergentism. Finally, we debate the possibility of mental phenomena being nothing more than illusions, and what is real in how we experience the world, with a focus on our perceptual systems.
