Philosophy of mind postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in the philosophy of mind began with a second-year seminar on consciousness, where I expected the hard problem to be the most interesting question and found instead that I could not get past a more basic one: what makes something a mental state at all, rather than a physical process we happen to describe in mental terms. Functionalism seemed to answer this neatly until I read Ned Block's Chinese nation argument and could not decide whether my resistance to it was an argument or a prejudice. That discomfort has shaped most of my reading since, and it is the reason I want to spend a further year studying the subject properly rather than treating it as one option among several.

My degree combined philosophy with psychology, which meant I was reading Dennett and Searle in one building and learning about signal detection theory and experimental design in another. The combination was sometimes awkward and always useful. In my final year I wrote a dissertation on predictive processing and the phenomenology of perception, asking whether treating perception as inference genuinely explains perceptual presence or simply relocates the puzzle. I worked mainly from Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty and Jakob Hohwy's writing on the predictive mind, alongside critical responses arguing that prediction-error minimisation underdetermines conscious experience. My conclusion was modest: predictive processing is a strong account of perceptual processing and a weaker one of perceptual character, and the two are often run together in the literature. Writing it taught me to be more careful about when a computational story is doing explanatory work and when it is supplying vocabulary.

Alongside my reading I have tried to keep in contact with mind as it is actually studied and actually lived. During my final year I spent a week observing data collection in my department's cognitive psychology lab, under a postgraduate researcher's supervision. My role was limited: I read the participant instructions, timed breaks, logged trial numbers and tidied the testing room between sessions. It was not glamorous, but watching participants misreport what they had seen in a change-detection task made the gap between introspective report and underlying processing much less abstract than it had been in seminars, and it made me more cautious about arguments that lean heavily on what experience seems to be like from the inside.

For the past eighteen months I have volunteered on Saturday mornings at a day centre for people living with dementia, helping with music sessions, setting out materials and sitting with people during activities. I am careful not to draw philosophical conclusions from a volunteer's vantage point, but the experience has made questions about personal identity and narrative selfhood feel less like puzzle cases. Someone can be recognisably themselves in gesture, humour and taste while much of the autobiographical story has gone, which sits uneasily with accounts that tie identity closely to psychological continuity of memory. I would like to read Marya Schechtman and the literature on narrative identity more seriously than my undergraduate reading list allowed.

My work as a library assistant has been unexpectedly good preparation: shelving, enquiries and cataloguing demand patience and accuracy, and helping students locate material taught me how much of research is persistence. I intend to use a master's to strengthen my grounding in the metaphysics of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, improve my handling of formal arguments, and produce a dissertation that could support an application for doctoral study. If that route proves unsuitable, the analytical and writing skills involved would serve me well in policy or editorial work.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews