A-consciousness may be regarded as the visibility of information that is the output of a process within a community of other processes. The most prominent function of “public” dissemination of information is giving access to it to processes whose relevance is not clear at the moment of dissemination. The function of P-consciousness may be outside the realm of cognition.

In response to the objection that his “access-consciousness” is not really consciousness but a matter of the availability of certain information for certain kinds of processing, Block will probably have to argue that consciousness in a more basic, familiar, traditional sense is an essential component of any instance of access-consciousness and thus justifies the name.

In common sense consciousness has a fairly determinate content – the (single) way an experience feels, the (single) line of thought being consciously followed. The determinacy of the object may be achieved by linking Block's two concepts, so that as long as we hold on to the determinacy of content we are unable to separate P and A.

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

Research Articles Michael S. Moore, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

A version of the inverted spectrum thought experiment that disconfirms functionalism for the case of humans’ color experiences has typically been thought to require a certain kind of balancing act. What one needs, it has typically been thought, is a mapping of color experiences onto other color experiences that preserves the similarity and difference relationships among those experiences and the aspects of perceived colors underlying those similarities and differences. However, there are good reasons for being suspicious about whether that is (...) possible when the palette of color experiences is that available to humans with normal vision. The new version of the thought experiment constructed here doesn’t depend on preserving those relationships. I argue that there is a coherent, metaphysically possible scenario in which two human color experiences—any two—can be seen to be functionally equivalent. The upshot is that functionalism fails for all human color experiences. (shrink)

Understanding the role of ‘‘representations’’ in cognitive science is a fundamental problem facing the emerging framework of embodied, situated, dynamical cognition. To make progress, I follow the approach proposed by an influential representational skeptic, Randall Beer: building artificial agents capable of minimally cognitive behaviors and assessing whether their internal states can be considered to involve representations. Hence, I operationalize the concept of representing as ‘‘standing in,’’ and I look for representations in embodied agents involved in simple categorization tasks. In a (...) first experiment, no representation can be found, but the relevance of the task is undermined by the fact that agents with no internal states can reach high performance. A simple modification makes the task more “representationally hungry,” and in this case, agents’ internal states are found to qualify as representations. I conclude by discussing the benefits of reconciling the embodied-dynamical approach with the notion of representation. (shrink)

The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)

In this interview Dennett is asked to clarify some of the most fundamental and controversial aspects of his theory of Intentionality, and of his philosophy in general, including his mild ontological realism, the relationships between ontology and science, naturalized epistemology, normativity, rationality, and the relation between science and philosophy. At the end of the interview, a critical bibliography points to the most important publications of Dennett up to 2000.

According to the rationality thesis , the possession of propositional attitudes is inextricably tied to rationality. How in this context should we conceive of rationality? In one sense, being rational is contrasted with being non-rational, as when human beings are described as rational animals. In another sense, being rational is contrasted with being irrational. I shall call rationality in this latter sense evaluative rationality . Whatever else it might involve, evaluative rationality surely has to do with satisfying requirements of rationality (...) such as, presumably, the following: That one avoid inconsistency in beliefs. That one not adopt new beliefs unless what one knows entails or is evidence for the truth of those beliefs. That one not have φing as a goal yet do nothing necessary for one to φ. (shrink)

Résumé Dans cet article, nous discuterons de l’intégration du numérique à la sémiotique et proposerons qu’une modélisation conceptuelle puisse offrir un pont de dialogue entre ces deux domaines classiquement cloisonnés. Plus précisément, nous avancerons l’hypothèse que tout projet de recherche qui en appellera à l’informatique soit une démarche scientifique que s’il construit une théorie qui contient, en plus des modèles classiques que sont les modèles formel, computationnel et physique, un modèle conceptuel. Ce lieu, où les chercheur-es conceptualisent les multiples dimensions (...) de leur objet de recherche, sera alors défini en tant que socle d’une relation solide entre la sémiotique et l’informatique. Nous verrons que les différentes définitions du modèle conceptuel convergent vers la thèse soutenant que la connaissance scientifique met en œuvre une instance de conceptualisation qui doit identifier les diverses dimensions du problème en plus de devoir s’exprimer de manière à ce qu’elle soit communicable entre les membres des communautés épistémiques. Nous verrons, enfin, qu’un projet de recherché sémiotique exige la construction d’un tel modèle afin de décrire, généraliser et sélectionner des problèmes et que ce même modèle, conceptuel, sera aussi nécessaire si le ou la sémioticien-ne utilise l’informatique dans le cadre de sa recherche.fr. (shrink)

Some scientists have reported what they regard as evidence of indeterministic brain processes that influence behavior (Brembs 2011, Maye et al. 2007). How do these reports bear on the positive side of libertarianism about free will? That is an approximation of my guiding question in this article. I make the question more precise in section 1, in light of some conceptual and scientific background. In the remainder of the article, I seek—and eventually offer—an answer. Topics dis-cussed along the way include (...) control, Frankfurt-style cases, and whether event-causal libertarianism is an uninhabitable half-way house between compatibilism and agent-causal libertarianism. (shrink)