There are two different distinctions that are of interest here. First, there is a distinction between ends and means. Going to the kitchen is a means to the end of eating food. That is one way in which your desire to go to the kitchen is derivative from your desire to eat. Given the complexities of achieving most of our ends (buying and cooking and preparing food, earning money to be able to buy food, setting the alarm in order to get to one's job in order to earn money, and so on), the majority of our desires are bound to be derivative in this sense. Second, there is a distinction between original goals and evolved goals. The original goals of a child may be few and simple (to eat, to avoid pain, to be loved, etc.) while the evolved goals of an adult are many (to travel, to learn about plants, to enjoy music, to learn other languages, to have children, to deepen friendships, etc.). It would be a mistake to assume that the adult's many goals are all just means to the original goals of a...

You ask about different areas of consciousness. If you mean different areas of the brain, that is a question that should be answered by neurologists rather than philosophers; and neurologists have tended to think that thought is more correlated with activity in the cerebral cortex while feeling is more correlated with activity in older parts of the brain. All states of consciousness depend on activity in many different parts of the brain, however, so locating any conscious state in just one area of the brain would be simplistic. Philosophers can address some of the differences between thought and feeling, however, and we can help to clarify ways in which how thoughts (of various sorts) and feelings (of various sorts) are related. Thoughts involve judgments -- about what is the case, what could be the case, what should be the case, etc. -- and judgments require the application of concepts or the categorization of experience. (There are a number of interesting and important questions about the...

Long before the advances of neurobiology, people recognized that certain mental states were correlated with certain physical states. Contemporary science has been able to discover more and more correlations, with more and more precision, but there are still many different understandings of what such correlations indicate. (1) Some think that these correlations reveal just how closely synchronized mind and body can be despite their very different nature. (2) Others think such correlations establish the identity of mental states and physical states. (3) Still others think that the relevant correlations show us the physical causes of mental states. There are scientists as well as philosophers who belong in each of these camps. It is not possible to decide between these (and various other options) without making controversial assumptions (implicitly if not explicitly) about the nature of identity, the nature of causation, and the determination of necessary versus accidental correlations; so...

If you include reflex responses such as blinking one's eyes upon the approach of a fast-moving object, then the answer is clearly 'no' -- not all behavior is learned; some behavior occurs regardless of any learning. There are many sort of behavior that combine what is given and what is learned -- certain ways of walking or waving, for example There are also behaviors that are too original to rightly describe as learned. A dancer may execute a movement that has never been seen before, or a singer may make a sound that has never been heard before.

When we deceive another person , we intentionally cause that person to hold a view that we think is mistaken. We can do this with our words, with our actions, or even with our refusal to speak or act. Deceiving ourselves seems paradoxical, though, since as deceiv er we must consider a certain view to be mistaken, yet as deceiv ed we must adopt that same view. One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to divide people into different parts or stages, with one part of a person functioning as the deceiver and another part of the same person being deceived. So, for instance, you might suppose that the unconscious part of your neighbor's mind knows that her sons' actions are wrong, and that part succeeds in deceiving the conscious part of her mind into believing that her sons' actions are right. Or you might suppose that there was an earlier stage in which your neighbor realized that her sons' behavior was wrong, and that that earlier self acted so as to produce a later self that...