Bernardo Kastrup’s Attempt to Bootstrap Idealism
It astonishes me that anyone can still get articles through peer review defending the dead philosophy of Idealism. As I documented before in my series testing the standards in academic philosophy, the field’s reliability is not that great. Which is inexcusable....Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination
Today I am going to offer a naturalist theory of qualia—the particulars of “what it is like” of conscious experience, like the redness of red or the floweriness of a flower’s scent or the twanginess of a guitar, or even what love or fear, or...Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways?
The great cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett passed away this year. And shortly after, Cameron Bertuzzi interviewed a Christian apologist, Bob Stewart, on his channel Capturing Christianity, regarding “Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical...Quantum Consciousness Is Bullshit (But Quantum Cognition Is Not)
You may have heard a lot about a thing called “quantum consciousness.” Most of what you’ve heard is bullshit. The Not Bullshit First let’s discuss the bit that isn’t bullshit. Many papers in various sciences that have words in their...Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio
I was hired recently to look into the claims of the German philosopher (really, now, theologian) Holm Tetens regarding why Naturalism has to be false because it can’t explain conscious experience. There’s nothing new about the idea. The Argument from...Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed
Imagine you just became a god. No, really. One second from now you become all powerful—for no reason at all; no one did this to you, you didn’t earn it, it literally just randomly happens. And by having all powers logically possible, you immediately also...Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism
Last month I launched my three-part series on analyzing peer-reviewed philosophy papers with my Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency, where I explain my process and how I selected the articles for review. I followed that with my Bayesian...The Argument from Reason
In 2004 I composed for The Secular Web a detailed Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason. I still reference it whenever the “Argument from Reason” comes up. But anyone who visits it will notice it’s quite long....Why Google’s LaMDA Chatbot Isn’t Sentient
Claire Hall summarizes the case with beautiful succinctness: “Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul,” because “AI experts have...Another Failed Thought Experiment: Nozick’s Experience Machine and How It Exemplifies What Bad Philosophy Looks Like
I will be answering in my next article the new questions posed in the 2020 iteration of the PhilPapers survey (a new development I just wrote about). But one of those new questions requires a separate article on its own: the one written, “Experience machine...What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?
A question is being asked a lot lately: how can the most prominent position held by scientists and philosophers be that consciousness doesn’t exist? Obviously consciousness exists. It’s literally the only thing you can know with absolute 100% certainty....Thomism: The Bogus Science
I have pretty thoroughly embarrassed Edward Feser already, the preeminent advocate for Thomism today, the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and...The Blondé-Jansen Argument from Consciousness
I’ve been asked to assess a bizarre argument for God published recently in Metaphysica (“Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness,” by Ward Blondé and Ludger Jansen, March 2021). I have already rather...The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness
I’ve been asked to comment on Peter Hacker’s bizarre claim that qualia don’t exist in his arrogantly braggish essay “The Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness.” So here goes. Say What Now? First, what are qualia? If you’re new to the...How My Philosophy Would Solve the Unsolved Problems
Tooling around looking for lists of “unsolved problems” in philosophy I must admit the best list that’s most easily found online is Wikipedia’s. I realized for general benefit I should write up how my worldview addresses these. I’ve...Get Dr. Carrier’s Latest!
About the Author
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
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