Can a person imagine doing something while doing the thing imagined? For example, can I imagine touching a key on my keyboard while touching it?

I think you can. You clearly could dream you were walking naked through your local supermarket while you are walking naked through your local supermarket, and I think the same could be said for imagining, though you would have to be an exceptionally absent-minded philosopher for this actually to happen. To take a less extreme example, you might imagine that you were traveling through Luxembourg at a time when, although you didn't realise it (because it was dark and Luxembourg is such a small country that it is easy to miss), you actually were driving through Luxembourg.

What do philosophers mean by the term 'mental content'? My initial reaction to the phrase was to take it to mean something like 'the meaning of a thought, belief, etc.' But this interpretation seems...unexplanatory. It seems to me that things don't just MEAN; rather they mean TO some individual/group. (X doesn't just mean Y; X means Y to Z.) For any given thought/belief/whatever (X), we could imagine infinite different Zs, and through these Zs, infinite different Ys. Which Zs are the relevant ones? Why is whatever distinction is drawn between relevant and irrelevant Zs drawn as it is? Or is my vague conception of mental content as the meaning of a thought, belief, etc. not in line with how philosophers use the term? If so...what do they mean by it?

Carrying on from Joseph's answer, part of your question is whether content is relative to the person entertaining that content. One sense in which this is right concerns representations involving ingredients like 'I', 'here', or 'now'. These so-called indexical terms have the interesting feature that what they refer to depends on who is thinking them. So we could both entertain the content 'I am an avid squash player': when I entertain this thought it is about me and when you entertain the thought it is about you (and maybe it is true when I think it and false when you think it). So that is one way in which what a thought or a thought's content is about can depend on who is thinking it.

Why are philosophers these days so concerned with fleshing out possible rules for concepts (e.g., Crispin Wright's analysis of intentions)? Do they believe that people actually follow these rules? But how can that be if most (if not all) people can't even say what these rules are precisely? And wouldn't a more plausible answer be found in our being conditioned to behave in certain (imprecise) manners with certain words or phrases, much like, e.g., learning to use our legs to walk? If so, shouldn't this be more a matter of empirical investigation (on the level of science) than this sort of conceptual analysis?

I'm with Mitch: we could be using rules but they are unconscious so we have trouble identifying them. But it may also be that we don't do it with rules. Thus Thomas Kuhn in his important book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that although scientific research often seems to run as if it was governed by rules, in fact the mechanism is different: scientists have exemplars. (This is the central notion covered by his notorious umbrella term 'paradigm'.) Exemplars are concrete problem solutions in the scientists' speciality, so in form they are different from rules. But they act like rules, because they create what Kuhn called 'perceived similarity relations'. Scientists choose new problems that seem similar to the exemplar problems, they try solutions that seem similar to those that worked in the exemplar, and they judge the success of new solutions by reference to the standards that the exemplar exemplifies. The exemplar mechanism is an interesting alternative to the rule mechanism as...

When a person says "I would like to get to know you." What exactly do they mean? In my opinion, you can't really get to "know" anyone. Because to "know" something it takes looking at it from all angles, seeing it react in different situations and examine it inside and out. So, given this definition, does "I want to get to know you" mean that a person would like to look at the other from all angles? To see him/her react in different situations? To examine him/her inside & out? Of course, this can be done physically. Through sexual relations. But how would you go about knowing someone personally & mentally? You never know what they are thinking. This, in return, makes everyone become untrustworthy. Alas, to say "I would like to get to know you" means "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" ... Or does it?

Philosophers who talk about knowledge usually focus on knowing a fact ('knowing-that') or having an ability ('knowing-how'); but 'knowing-a-person' different from either of these types of knowledge. One one level, it is not very difficult: you could truthfully answer 'yes' to the question of whether you know Alexander George if you had say met him and had a few good conversations. And 'Know-who', as in 'Do you know who Alexander George is?' is even easier: you don't have even to have met him. At the other extreme, if 'getting to know Alexander George' required a kind of comprehensive knowledge-that of all the facts relating to him, you will never make it. Fortunately, you can make progress on getting t0 know someone without impossibly having the full story about them, if you can find out more about their personality and about what they think. And I am more optimistic about the possibility of that than you seem to be.

Do philosophers and other popular thinkers now mistake automaticity for the unconscious? Do we now say that water upon a river flowing down the path of least resistance is behaving unconsciously? So, too, is it now correct to describe neural pathways of least resistance as exhibiting an “unconscious”?

One way one might try to distinguish automaticity from the unconscious would be to say that of these two types of state, only unconsious states are representations, are about anything. For example, my unconscious desire to be reunited with my childhood sled (cf. Rosebud in the great movie Citizen Kane ) is about something -- a sled -- while all that neural processing involved in controling my breathing is not a representation of anything, though my life depends on it.

Why is stupidity not painful?

Why should stupidity be painful? Perhaps because stupidity is an evolutionary disadvantage, and evolutionary pressures should have led us to find evolutionary disadvantages painful so we would avoid them. There are lots of problems with this argument. Ill mention just two. First, the mystery seems supposed to be that we have an evolutionary disadvantage -- the non-painfulness of stupidity. But if you are going to be surprised at the existence of an evolutionary disadvantage, why not just be surprised at the existence of stupidity in the first place? Second, there are many disadvantages that are not painful, such as a genetic predisposition to have a fatal but not painful disease. Not everything that is bad for us hurts.

How would you explain the color green to a blind child?

It might also be useful to distinguish the color green from the experience of that colour. Some philosophers (and scientistists, e.g. Galileo) have held that the color just is the experience, but it is m0re common and more plausible to distinguish them. Some would identify the colour with a disposition to produce the experience (which is distinct from experience itself, since it may be present in the dark), some would identify the colour with physical properties of the surfaces of objects, and there are other views as well. Anyway, if colour is say a property of surfaces to reflect light at certain frequencies, then this is something that can be explained to a blind person. But when it comes to the experience itself, it may well be that someone who has not had any visual experience is not in a position to have the full concept of color that the sighted have, and so not in a position to understand the experience as fully as the sighted can.

Throughout my normal, daily activities, I sometimes incur a feeling of Deja-Vu; almost as if I've lived this particular moment before in my lifetime. It's as if this memory was stored away in my brain for some reason, but if that's the case, how did the memory come to be if the moment hadn't yet occurred? Also, how can our brain recognize a moment such as this, having never lived the particular moment? Alec and Ben Long Island, New York

I am innocent of the psychological literature on deja-vu , but one natural hypothesis is that what is happening is that you you have an experience which at the same time gets mis-classified as a memory: the 'memory' isn't actually old, it just seems that way. It's a bit like a forgery, something new made to seem old.

Would/could pleasure be possible without pain, or pain without pleasure?

Consider an intense (e.g. sexual) pleasure. I see no reason why some lucky person who had never experiences pain couldn't experience such a pleasure. Even if a person can only enjoy a pleasure by means of some contrast (itself a debatable point), mundane 'neutral' experience is enough of a contrast with intense pleasure: pain is not required. And I would take this one step further: not only could you experience pleasure without having experienced pain, you could experience pleasure even if nobody ever experienced pain.

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