You ask good and tough questions for experimental philosophers like myself. I have addressed some of them in my paper with Thomas Nadelhoffer "The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy" (which can be found at my outdated website ), and some of them have been addressed by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols in the introduction to their collection Experimental Philosophy and by Jonathan Weinberg in several papers. My own view is that "experimental philosophy" does not represent a radical departure from what "empirically informed" philosophers have been doing for some time--i.e., drawing on information from the sciences to inform philosophical discussions. The main difference is that the exp phils do their own empirical work (usually just surveys of non-philosophers' responses to scenarios and questions relevant to philosophical debates). And this methodology, of course, means it is, in one sense, "a chapter of social psychology." Indeed, several psychologists have been labeled experimental...

There's a lot of subtext in your question--you seem to be suggesting that if there are genes that influence whether one is homosexual or heterosexual, that indicates that being gay is a mental illness. That would be a very strange argument, since the fact that there are genes that influence traits or behaviors says nothing about whether that trait or behavior is good or bad in either the biological or ethical sense. Perhaps you are thinking that because homosexuals do not have the desire to mate with the opposite sex, any genes that may underlie homosexuality are "maladaptive" in the way some mental illnesses are caused by maladaptive genes. But that is also a mistake, since (a) in humans' past evolutionary environments homosexuals may have reproduced (they wouldn't be the only humans who have had sex for procreation without being particularly attracted to their mates!), (b) there are interesting data suggesting that homosexuality in some animal species (perhaps including humans and their...

Good question, and I think it has a lot of philosophical import. Here's why. What we might call a "true lie" is one where the liar knows what she is doing. She knows that she needs to do or say something to alter what her target believes in order to get him to do something the liar wants. Contrast this with a "behavioristic lie," one that has the effect of getting the target to behave a certain way but without the "liar" knowing how she is doing it. Take the case of a 3-year-old girl who has learned that saying "I'm tired" often gets her out of doing something she doesn't want to do. One night her dad says "It's time to go to bed," so she repeats her standard ploy, "I'm tired." She does not seem to know how her lie works! This difference between "true lying" and "behavioristic lying" seems to make a big difference. Behavioristic lying might not require any especially impressive cognitive abilities. Well, behavioristic learning itself is pretty impressive--and it allows more interesting and...

This is an interesting question, in fact, so interesting that I am writing a whole book about it ( Rediscovering Free Will ). As Miriam says, much depends on how you define free will. Let's not begin with the problematic assumption that free will requires a non-natural power to transcend the causal interactions in the natural world, though I think we can begin with the idea that free will involves our powers to control our actions in light of our deliberations about what to do, such that we can be properly held responsible for our actions. In that case, we should not begin with the assumption made by some scientists writing about free will: that increasingly complete scientific (naturalistic) explanations of human decision-making thereby rule out any role for free will. Rather, it may be that neuroscientific and psychological explanations of human decision-making can help to explain --rather than explain away --our capacities to deliberate about our reasons and to control our...

The brain and nervous system "combine" information from different sensory modalities, so it is quite likely that when you visually perceive that you are about to be hit, other parts of your brain respond, including perhaps sensory systems that normally perceive pain in that part of the head and/or motor systems that prepare you to react to such a blow. There is a lot of interesting research showing that the same parts of the brain are active when you imagine performing an action (but don't perform it) as are active when you perform the action--sometimes you can start to feel your body doing something even though you don't move. Your situation might be sort of the reverse of this. The key is to remember that even though "nothing has happened" on the outside, lots can be happening on the inside--that is, in the brain, which of course, is the basis of our minds' feeling things.

You are raising really interesting questions that philosophers debate under the headings of "mental causation," "theory of action," and "free will." One way the problem gets generated is by assuming, as you do, that thoughts (including decisions or intentions) are immaterial things. That's what Descartes said, and ever since, the main objection to his view is your question--how could an immaterial thing causally interact with a physical thing like the brain (and vice versa, since on his view the physical world sends information through the brain to the mind which consciously experiences it--how the heck could that happen?). The main response to this problem is by giving up your assumption of "dualism" and instead try to understand how thoughts and conscious experiences can be part of the physical world. That's no easy task. But one way to make the initial move in that direction is to see that the idea of non-physical or immaterial thoughts makes no more sense than the idea of physical...

I think there are (at least) three ways one could be an agnostic about the existence of God, though we often use the word "agnostic" to apply to someone uncommitted about the truth of other propositions, and my categories should apply to many of these types of agnosticism as well, so I will use the general formulation "A is agnostic about X": 1) A is agnostic about X because A thinks X is either true of false (e.g., either God exists or God does not exist), but A believes no human could ever know whether X is true or false (e.g., perhaps we are built such that we simply could not discover the truth of X or never be justified in believing X or ~X). Note that some philosophers think that if X is not even in principle something we could discover to be true or false, then X is meaningless or X has no truth value or something like that, in which case this sort of agnosticism could look like a form of subjectivism. But I am interpreting A in this case to believe that there is an objective...

Millie, you sound like you may have read Peter Singer's work. If not, you may find it interesting. Here's his website . Of course, his arguments will reinforce your feelings so you may also want to look for some responses to his view. Singer is a utilitarian, which means he thinks (1) that the right action is always that action that will produce the most overall happiness (or the action that will reduce the most amount of suffering). And he thinks (2) that if well-off people in developed nations gave much, much more of their money away to charity (especially for famine relief in developing countries), that would produce the most overall suffering (since the loss of happiness from the rich would be more than offset by the prevention of suffering among those in need). So, he thinks (3) that we are morally obligated to give away much, much more. I love teaching this article in intro philosophy because it is very difficult to see where the argument might go wrong (if it does)--both 1 and 2 seem...

You seem to be beginning with the assumption that romantic love must be essentially unselfish, that people must be motivated to love their lovers for the sake of their lover (only?) and not themselves (at all?). I'm not sure why we should think that's true. Perhaps it seems that way because we normally assume that people are and should be willing to sacrifice their own interests for the people they love. And that surely is true. But those unselfish feelings and behaviors that occur within the relationship are (a) entirely consistent with falling in love for more selfish reasons, some you are aware of--the other person makes you feel good in lots of way--and others you aren't aware of--your genes dispose the development of your brain so that it picks up on features of your lover that make them appear attractive to you (there's all those studies on pheremones), and (b) entirely consistent with your continuing to get satisfaction from your relationship and that being a significant motivation...

You likely have in mind something we might call "covert coercion." I might hypnotize you to vote for McCain-Palin but do it in such a way that you feel like you really want to vote for them (and if I ask you why, you'll come up with lots of reasons--they're "mavericky!" Assume you would otherwise have voted for Obama). Or maybe Professor Black gives you a sleeping pill and while you're down he does futuristic brain surgery on you to make you feel like you really want to divorce your spouse (whom Black wants to seduce) and you do it. It's very scary to think that you could be manipulated not only to leave your lover but to feel like doing so (to fall out of love), and some might argue that this is simply impossible. But we know that people change their minds (and change how they feel), so these processes just seem to be doing it faster and in a different way. The difficulty then is figuring out how these types of manipulation, which seem like they make you unfree (and not responsible for what...