In March-April 2003 I will be presenting the Cardinal Mercier Lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain. Drafts of the six lectures are available here. Please treat these as draft manuscripts. I welcome comments on them (bill@mechanism.ucsd.edu), but please do not quote from them without permission. The drafts are subject to revision at any time, and so you might find a revised manuscript on a repeat visit to this site. In particular, none of the papers have figures included. Eventually they will be included.
Table of Contents
1. Introducing a Philosophical Stance:
Naturalism and Mechanism
2. An Exemplar Neural Mechanism: The Brain’s
Visual Processing System
3. Mechanism and Phenomenal Experience: The Heuristic
Identity Theory
4. Representations in the Brain: Building to Higher
Cognition
5. Reductionism and Higher Levels of Organization:
A Rapprochement
6. Mechanism’s Bugaboos: Freewill, Values,
and Human Dignity