Me, researcher, dishonest?

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Morals Test Bench Philomag’s newsletter is back in force after the summer break with a study of 1098 students in 10 countries comparing utilitarian and deontological morals. By testing students’ behavior through games of dice and sums to be won, researchers come across a counterintuitive result: those who proclaim their attachment to an intangible moral … Read more

Can we be lucid and happy?

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The nature of mental objects Before answering this question, let us judge its relevance. Are lucidity and happiness comparable, opposable, associable? Certainly lucidity seems a brake on happiness, pointing to all the reasons to lack it. But are these concepts of the same nature? What is a mental “nature”? We admit that an emotion and … Read more

Brush clearing ontological classifications

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Warning The very idea of “ontological” classification is suspect. What is the being of a thing by reference to the thing alone? By definition it is the only one to experience it. A hook for knowledge: being results from a constitution. But if we think we know the constitution per se —the being of the … Read more

Is a place a framework or a mental agent?

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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?

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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

Neuroscience and justice

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The philosopher’s outstretched hand I have not found a better synthesis on this subject than a remarkable issue (60) of Cités published in 2014 (french): “What do cognitive neuroscience think and want?”. The theme allows the confrontation between philosophers and neuroscientists about the mind/body problem. Yves Charles Zarka, for philosophers, begins by giving a hand: … Read more

Explaining consciousness as a phenomenon

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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

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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