How does the brain represent the world?

A brain that gets brushed! A baby looks at a brush. The object has no meaning for her. She sketches one when her mother grabs it to straighten her hair. Years later, the brush is part of a rich mental universe of utensils with well-defined functions. It proposes itself to the consciousness of the baby … Read more

Is a place a framework or a mental agent?

This article will be of interest to philosophers of the mind. It develops the principle of mental inner scene and explains it neurologically. It connects the notions of reactive and cognitive agent, in other words our automatisms of perception and our decision generators. Is a place a framework or an agent? Perhaps the question seems … Read more

Do words create the idea?

It’s clear! Bertrand Perier, lawyer: “It is quite clear to me that words create the idea and not the other way around.” Amazing divinization of communication, words that would be there before their constituent abstractions. It is the transposition to the language of creationism; a God formed of all possible words is at the origin … Read more

Explaining consciousness as a phenomenon

Abstract: Can we explain consciousness as a phenomenon today? The problem is already rooted in matter: why do unexpected properties arise from certain physical organizations? Important subsidiary remark: these properties only appear at something at least as complex. It is therefore impossible to reduce the points of view of the constitution and the emergence to each other. It is in this opposition that a fragment of consciousness is born, whose planes are surimposed as reality becomes more complex, first in the material levels of information, then virtual in the depth of neural networks. Each level of reality constructs its own bidirectional interaction, the one that constitutes and the one that experiences its constitution. The higher the complexity, the richer and deeper the experienced phenomenon.

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The interest of pain

Pain is an exciting topic for the philosophy of mind. Its reality and meaning are redefined in this article on the frequent confusion between pain-injury and pain-repair: Abstract: Pain-repair is often confused with pain-injury. However, the attitudes to follow are very different. In search of the meaning of our feelings, let us not forget that … Read more

What is the difference between real and virtual?

Abstract: Virtualism is a wave that overwhelms the real. There is no other reality than the personal one of our mental universe. The metaverse is riding this wave, promising to extend our pseudo-reality rather than replace it. Wouldn’t there be any point in separating the real from the virtual? The article shows that we are intimately designed to make this distinction and that to lose it would be an impoverishment of identity. Virtualism is only the great return of solipsism, in a world never sufficiently controlled so that the independence of the real can be forgotten.

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Can I freely put the ball in the hole?

Should I have or could I have? A golfer, his feet well camped on the green, tries to put his ball in the hole. He completely misses this putt, usually easy for a player of his level. Which brings us to the question of his free will. If he has one, was it on vacation … Read more

Controversy between Hobbes and Descartes over consciousness

The origins of the monism/dualism conflict For Hobbes, physiological processes and mental subjectivity are two sides of the same reality. Subjectivity is the brain’s reaction to pressure transmitted by nerves. On the other hand, for Descartes, it cannot be explained as an effect of the bodily process. By virtue of what magic would this physical … Read more

Contemporary information flows, a paradoxical reduction in exchanges

An upheaval, really? Reading the article The Great Inversion, supposed to reveal a major upheaval in our society, many of you will have pouted. “What does he announce? Media dominance is a truism. Propaganda has been around for centuries. Debord has already taken care of denouncing the society of the spectacle. Information flows come and … Read more