Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.
David PapineauI realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.
David PapineauOf course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.
David PapineauThe use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella?
David PapineauI say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive.
David PapineauI don't think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception.
David Papineau