István Aranyosi
István Aranyosi was born in Sighet/Máramarossziget, in the north of Transylvania, in 1975. He studied philosophy in Budapest, at the Central European University, where he obtained his PhD in 2005. In 2006-2007 he was a fellow at the Centre for Consciousness, The Australian National University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University, Ankara. In 2012 he obtained Honorable Mention for his essay "A new argument for mind-brain identity" at the American Philosophical Association's prestigious Article Prize. He published widely in the fields of philosophy of mind and metaphysics, including two books: The Peripheral Mind (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013) and God, Mind, and Logical Space (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2013).
“(...) to think that worms and slugs are neurologically simple is another blunder of contemporary, scientifically uninformed philosophy. To take as an example the current “superstar” nematode worm --superstar, because it was the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced, by 1998, and is widely used as a model organism-- the 1 mm long Caenorhabditis elegans, it exhibits a nervous system of 302 neurons and a sensorimotor system with very complex connectivity patterns.”
“Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon.”
“In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.”
“The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.”