Animal consciousnessAnimal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Neuroscience of free willNeuroscience of free will, a part of neurophilosophy, is the study of topics related to free will (volition and sense of agency) using neuroscience and the analysis of how findings from such studies may impact the free will debate. As it has become possible to study the living human brain, researchers have begun to observe decision-making processes. Studies have revealed unexpected things about human agency, moral responsibility, and consciousness in general.
Libertarianism (metaphysics)Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false and vice versa. One of the first clear formulations of libertarianism is found in John Duns Scotus.
Mind–body problemThe mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body. The issue is this. Though it is obvious that mental events and physical events are somehow related, it is not obvious what the nature of this relation is. For example, it is obvious that feelings of sadness (which are mental events) will cause people to cry (which is a physical state of the body), or that finding a joke funny (a mental event) will cause one to laugh (another bodily state), or that feelings of pain (in the mind) will cause avoidance behaviours (in the body), and so on.
OccasionalismOccasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. (A related concept, which has been called "occasional causation", also denies a link of efficient causation between mundane events, but may differ as to the identity of the true cause that replaces them.) The doctrine states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God's causing of one event after another.
Biological naturalismBiological naturalism is a theory about, among other things, the relationship between consciousness and body (i.e. brain), and hence an approach to the mind–body problem. It was first proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 and is defined by two main theses: 1) all mental phenomena, ranging from pains, tickles, and itches to the most abstruse thoughts, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; and 2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.
Psychophysical parallelismIn the philosophy of mind, psychophysical parallelism (or simply parallelism) is the theory that mental and bodily events are perfectly coordinated, without any causal interaction between them. As such, it affirms the correlation of mental and bodily events (since it accepts that when a mental event occurs, a corresponding physical effect occurs as well), but denies a direct cause and effect relation between mind and body.
Problem of mental causationThe problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions. The problem divides into several distinct sub-problems, including the problem of causal exclusion, the problem of anomalism, and the problem of externalism. However, the sub-problem which has attracted most attention in the philosophical literature is arguably the exclusion problem.
EmergentismEmergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. Emergentism can be compatible with physicalism, the theory that the universe is composed exclusively of physical entities, and in particular with the evidence relating changes in the brain with changes in mental functioning.
DeterminismDeterminism is the philosophical view that events are completely determined by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and considerations. Like eternalism, determinism focuses on particular events rather than the future as a concept. The opposite of determinism is indeterminism, or the view that events are not deterministically caused but rather occur due to chance.
