Given the opportunity, would I allow myself to be hooked up to a machine that makes me feel as though I am authentically living out my wildest dreams? If this were the case given the choice, considering that I would be basing my decision on personal and psychological factors, I would not go into the machine. I am too attached to this life to follow through with this decision, even if I were to reason out that it was in my best interest, even with the knowledge that my decision would be irrelevant once in the machine. However, while my philosophical reasoning would be largely irrelevant in my actual decision-making process, I will argue that, philosophically, based on my conception of the ‘good life’, I would still not enter.

By Lee J. Elkin
In a scientific and philosophical context, I believe that inference can fall under the category of computation. Essentially, humans have evolved to be able to infer through computing and processing information at a complex level – more than any other biological being. This feature most likely occurred through the process of natural selection according to the theory of evolution, and thus human beings have adapted to such feature. Although it took sometime to develop computational skills, it is proven that humans have adapted adequately tracing back to antiquity based on our evidence provided by historical and anthropological records.

By JULIAN GROVE
In the late nineteenth century, psychologist and philosopher William James wrote in his Principles of Psychology, “So far as I know, the existence of such states [of consciousness] has never been doubted by any critic, however skeptical in other respects he may have been…. All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking… I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology…” (185). James might have felt a bit naïve had he lived eighty years later and read the work of B.F. Skinner. …

By Julian Grove
Though people use the term regularly, “believing” is a somewhat foggy notion in philosophy. It’s easy for a person to say that he or she has a belief, but saying what that even means is a completely different story; having a belief seems to be a very complicated endeavor from the analyst’s point of view. Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett are two contemporary philosophers who propose different accounts of what constitutes belief. This paper compares and contrasts the two, in the end coming up with a slightly different conception of beliefs in the brain than either.