A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
Mental states are usually contrasted with physical or material aspects.
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Most of us aspire to live meaningful lives. Yet, many of us would struggle to explain what a meaningful life is. This course provides philosophical tools and frameworks useful to understand our aspira
The technical term direction of fit is used to describe the distinctions that are offered by two related pairs of opposing terms: The more general set of mind-to-world (i.e., mind-to-fit-world, not from-mind-to-world) vs. world-to-mind (i.e., world-to-fit-mind) used by philosophers of mind, and The narrower, more specific set, word-to-world (i.e., word-to-fit-world) vs. world-to-word (i.e., world-to-fit-word) used by advocates of speech act theory such as John Searle. In philosophy of mind, a belief has a mind-to-world direction of fit.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution. Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose.
The activity of neurons in the brain and the code used by these neurons is described by mathematical neuron models at different levels of detail.
This course explains the mathematical and computational models that are used in the field of theoretical neuroscience to analyze the collective dynamics of thousands of interacting neurons.
This course explains the mathematical and computational models that are used in the field of theoretical neuroscience to analyze the collective dynamics of thousands of interacting neurons.
Prism adaptation (PA) is a useful method to investigate short-term sensorimotor plasticity. Following active exposure to prisms, individuals show consistent after-effects, probing that they have adapted to the perturbation. Whether after-effects are transf ...
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Mind blanking (MB) is a waking state during which we do not report any mental con-tent. The phenomenology of MB challenges the view of a constantly thinking mind. Here, we comprehensively characterize the MB's neurobehavioral profile with the aim to deline ...
Motivation is a multifaceted phenomenon that we explore within the framework of decision-making. Through this cognitive process, actions are directed towards specific goals by performing a trade-off between the cost and benefit of an action. The dorsomedia ...