A taped conversational interview with Daniel Dennett and Bill Uzgalis covers a wide range of topics arising from Dennett’s thoughts about computing and human beings. The background of Dennett’s work is explored as are his views about mind-brain identity theory, artificial intelligence, functionalism, human exceptionalism, animal culture, language, pain, freedom and determinism, and quality of life.

When are psychologists entitled to call a certain theoretical construct "consciousness?" Over the past few decades cognitive psychologists have reintroduced almost the entire conceptual vocabulary of common sense psychology, but now in a way that is tied explicitly to reliable empirical observations, and to compelling and increasingly adequate theoretical models. Nevertheless, until the past few years most cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists avoided dealing with consciousness. Today there is an increasing willingness to do so. But is "consciousness" different from other theoretical (...) entities like "working memory" or "mental imagery"? Some argue that under no circumstances can empirical science speak of consciousness as such, while others claim that the scientific goal is "knowing what it is like to be a bat" --- to share an organism's conscious experience . The Bat Criterion is ominously reminiscent of the protracted debate on the consciousness of ants and amoebas that caused so much uneasiness in psychology around 1900. It seems to demand that we first solve the mind-body problem as a condition of doing sensible science, and thereby creates the risk of endless, fruitless controversy. The endless philosophical debate about consciousness helped trigger the Behaviorist revolution about 1913, which threw out the baby of consciousness with the bathwater of perennial, circular debate. We've been that way; let's not go back to it. This paper maintains that the position of behavioristic denial is far too restrictive, but that the Bat Criterion is far too demanding --- that in fact, we only need to specify comparable pairs of psychological phenomena that differ only in the fact that one member of any pair is conscious, while the other is not. This "method of contrastive analysis" is a generalization of the experimental method, with consciousness as a variable whose interaction with other psychological and biological phenomena can be assessed in standard ways. As usual in science, this strategy is pragmatic: If it appears to yield sensible results, it can be a stepping-stone toward further understanding . This paper describes five sets of well-established pairs of phenomena that meet these criteria. Others are presented elsewhere, with more of a theoretical interpretation . Here I simply want to show that any adequate theory of conscious experience must satisfy these demanding but achievable empirical constraints. (shrink)

Past research has repeatedly documented the close relationship between visual attention and awareness. Most recently, research exploring change blindness, inattentional blindness, repetition blindness, and the attentional blink has converged on the conclusion that attention to one aspect of a scene or event may lead to a highly circumscribed awareness of only the specific information attended, while other information, even that which is spatially or temporally nearby can go completely unnoticed. In the present report, we extend these observations to the dynamic (...) allocation of attention during a well-structured meaningful event. In two experiments, subjects viewed brief videos of simple events and were told to pay close attention to them. During the events, an unexpected disruption consisting of a brief low spatial frequency motion field occurred. Despite intensive questioning and opportunities for recognition, the majority of subjects reported no awareness of 200, 400, or 600 ms disruptions. In a second experiment, blank-screen disruptions were added, and these resulted in no increase in detection. We conclude that visual attention may result in far more transitory awareness of visual information than previously appreciated. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new argument for the view that language has a cognitive role. I suggest that humans exhibit two distinct kinds of belief state, one passively formed, the other actively formed. I argue that actively formed beliefs (_virtual beliefs_, as I call them) can be identified with _premising policies_, and that forming them typically involves certain linguistic operations. I conclude that natural language has at least a limited cognitive role in the formation and manipulation of virtual beliefs.

There are three main positions on animalthought: lingualism denies that non-linguistic animalshave any thoughts; mentalism maintains that theirthoughts differ from ours only in degree, due totheir different perceptual inputs; an intermediateposition, occupied by common sense and Wittgenstein,maintains that animals can have thoughts of a simplekind. This paper argues in favor of an intermediateposition. It considers the most important arguments infavor of lingualism, namely those inspired byDavidson: the argument from the intensional nature ofthought (Section 1); the idea that thoughts involveconcepts (Sections (...) 2–3); the argument from the holisticnature of thought (Section 4); and the claim that beliefrequires the concept of belief (Sections 5–6). The lastargument (which Davidson favors) is uncompelling, butthe first three shed valuable light on the extent towhich thought requires language. However, none of themprecludes animals from having simple thoughts. Even ifone adopts the kind of third-person perspective onthought Davidson shares with Wittgenstein, the resultis a version of the intermediate position, albeit oneenriched by Davidson''s insights concerningintensionality, concepts and holism (Section 7). We canonly ascribe simple thoughts to animals, and even thatascription is incongruous in that the rich idiom weemploy has conceptual connections that go beyond thephenomena to which it is applied. (shrink)

What type of artificial systems will claim to be conscious and will claim to experience qualia? The ability to comment upon physical states of a brain-like dynamical system coupled with its environment seems to be sufficient to make claims. The flow of internal states in such system, guided and limited by associative memory, is similar to the stream of consciousness. Minimal requirements for an artificial system that will claim to be conscious were given in form of specific architecture named articon. (...) Nonverbal discrimination of the working memory states of the articon gives it the ability to experience different qualities of internal states. Analysis of the inner state flows of such a system during typical behavioral process shows that qualia are inseparable from perception and action. The role of consciousness in learning of skills, when conscious information processing is replaced by subconscious, is elucidated. Arguments confirming that phenomenal experience is a result of cognitive processes are presented. Possible philosophical objections based on the Chinese room and other arguments are discussed, but they are insufficient to refute claims articon’s claims. Conditions for genuine understanding that go beyond the Turing test are presented. Articons may fulfill such conditions and in principle the structure of their experiences may be arbitrarily close to human. (shrink)

Alan Turing devised his famous test (TT) through a slight modificationof the parlor game in which a judge tries to ascertain the gender of twopeople who are only linguistically accessible. Stevan Harnad hasintroduced the Total TT, in which the judge can look at thecontestants in an attempt to determine which is a robot and which aperson. But what if we confront the judge with an animal, and arobot striving to pass for one, and then challenge him to peg which iswhich? (...) Now we can index TTT to a particular animal and its syntheticcorrelate. We might therefore have TTTrat, TTTcat,TTTdog, and so on. These tests, as we explain herein, are abetter barometer of artificial intelligence (AI) than Turing's originalTT, because AI seems to have ammunition sufficient only to reach thelevel of artificial animal, not artificial person. (shrink)

In this paper I review some leading developments in the empirical theory of affect. I argue that (1) affect is a distinct perceptual representation governed system, and (2) that there are significant modular factors in affect. The paper concludes with the observation thatfeeler (affective perceptual system) may be a natural kind within cognitive science. The main purpose of the paper is to explore some hitherto unappreciated connections between the theory of affect and the computational theory of mind.

Robert Cummins [(1996) Representations, targets and attitudes, Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT, p. 1] has characterized the vexed problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now." This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the 17th century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Kant. However, the scholarly, (...) exegetical literature has almost no overlap with that of contemporary cognitive science. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern arising not only throughout history, but also in a number of independent domains today such as debates over visual imagery, symbolic systems and others. Such historical and contemporary convergences suggest that the fundamental issues cannot arise essentially from the theoretical guise they take in any particular case. (shrink)

The notion of the cyborg has exercised the popular imagination for almost two hundred years. In very general terms the idea that a living entity can be a hybrid of both organic matter and mechanical parts, and for all intents and purposes be seamlessly functional and self-regulating, was prefigured in literary works such as Shelly
s Frankenstein and Samuel Butler
s Erewhon . This notion of hybridism has been a staple theme of 20th century science fiction writing, television programmes and the cinema. (...) For the most part, these works trade on a deep sense of unease we have about our personal identity – how could some non-organic matter to which I have so little conscious access count as a bona fide part of me? Cognitive scientist and philosopher, Andy Clark, picks up this general theme and presents an empirical and philosophical case for the following inextricably linked theses. (shrink)

This paper develops a response to the knowledge argument against physicalism. The response is both austere, in that it does not concede the existence of non-physical information , and natural, in that it acknowledges the alethic character of phenomenal knowledge and learning. I argue that such a response has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of existing objections to the knowledge argument. Throughout, the goal is to develop a response that is polemically effective in addition to theoretically sound.

Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an.

Consciousness and intelligence are properties that can be misunderstood as necessarily dependent. The term artificial intelligence and the kind of problems it managed to solve in recent years has been shown as an argument to establish that machines experience some sort of consciousness. Following Russell’s analogy, if a machine can do what a conscious human being does, the likelihood that the machine is conscious increases. However, the social implications of this analogy are catastrophic. Concretely, if rights are given to entities (...) that can solve the kind of problems that a neurotypical person can, does the machine have potentially more rights than a person that has a disability? For example, the autistic syndrome disorder spectrum can make a person unable to solve the kind of problems that a machine solves. We believe the obvious answer is no, as problem-solving does not imply consciousness. Consequently, we will argue in this paper how phenomenal consciousness, at least, cannot be modeled by computational intelligence and why machines do not possess phenomenal consciousness, although they can potentially develop a higher computational intelligence than human beings. In order to do so, we try to formulate an objective measure of computational intelligence and study how it presents in human beings, animals, and machines. Analogously, we study phenomenal consciousness as a dichotomous variable and how it is distributed in humans, animals, and machines. (shrink)

In this paper, we first extract from Susan Carey’s seminal account of the origin of concepts a notion of rationality, which is applicable to human infants and non-human animals; significantly different from the notions of rationality prevalent in behavioral ecology and yet, like these notions, amenable to empirical testing; conceptually more fundamental than the latter notions. Relatedly, this notion underlies a proto-conceptuality ascribable, by a key component of Carey’s account, to human infants and non-human animals. Based on a Kantian-inspired analysis (...) of fully-fledged conceptuality and the type of rationality underlying it, we then show the profound difference between the type of rationality extracted from Carey’s account and the rationality of human adults; related fundamental differences between the types of conceptual representation that these types of rationality respectively ground. By showing this, we highlight fundamental aspects of conceptual representations that are missing from Carey’s account of the origin of concepts. Based on this, we finally argue that, as ingenious and explanatorily valuable as Carey’s account of the origin of concepts is, it is only a partial account of this origin. (shrink)

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that ‘disbelief’ may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key ‘existentialist’ text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, (...) economic and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’. Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ It is this human ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and J.L, Austin and John Searle’s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction. (shrink)

Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories including the intimate experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate and control actions and psychological contents. This compelling, intuitive consciousness-centric account has, and continues to shape folk and scientific accounts of psychology and human behavior. Over the last 30 years, research from the cognitive neurosciences has challenged this intuitive social construct account when providing a neurocognitive architecture for (...) a human psychology. Growing evidence suggests that the executive functions typically attributed to the experience of consciousness are carried out competently, backstage and outside subjective awareness by a myriad of fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems. While it remains unclear how and where the experience of consciousness is generated in the brain, we suggested that the traditional intuitive explanation that consciousness is causally efficacious is wrong-headed when providing a cognitive neuroscientific account of human psychology. Notwithstanding the compelling 1st-person experience that convinces us that subjective awareness is the mental curator of our actions and thoughts, we argue that the best framework for building a scientific account is to be consistent with the biophysical causal dependency of prior neural processes. From a 3rd person perspective,, we propose that subjective awareness lacking causal influence, is than our experience of being aware, our awareness of our psychological content, knowing that we are aware, and the belief that that such experiences are evidence of an agentive capacity shared by others. While the human mind can be described as comprising both conscious and nonconscious aspects, both ultimately depend on neural process in the brain. In arguing for the counter-intuitive epiphenomenal perspective, we suggest that a scientific approach considers all mental aspects of mind including consciousness in terms of their underlying, preceding biological changes, in the realization that most brain processes are not accompanied by any discernible change in subjective awareness. (shrink)

In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume asked how people succeed in constructing edifices of belief from their limited store of sensory impressions and derived ideas. Hume could adduce no evidence to support the existence of an inner self that intelligently manipulates impressions and ideas. At the same time, he recognized in himself the conviction that there is inner self. Today, there is a growing conviction among cognitive neuro-scientists, behavioral scientists, science journalists, and their publics that neuroscience is on (...) the verge of providing us with the ultimate solution to ‘‘Hume’s problem.’’ This article describes two approaches to this solution. (shrink)

This paper sketches a new version of the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, the clustered-minds multiverse, that has been presented in detail elsewhere. It briefly shows why it grants us with free will and reflects upon the possibilty of singular-universe explanations of free will. It also critically comments upon S. Sarasvathy's 'choice matters,' one of the other contributions to this mini symposium.

Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars. This study aims to compare the genealogy of memetics with the historically more successful gene-culture coevolution theory. This comparison is made in order to determine the constraints that emerged during the internal development of the memetics theory that could bias memeticists to work on the ontology of meme units as opposed to hypotheses testing, which was adopted by (...) the gene-culture scholars. I trace this problem back to the diachronic development of memetics to its origin in the gene-centered anti-group-selectionist argument of George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The strict adoption of this argument predisposed memeticists with the a priori idea that there is no evolution without discrete units of selection, which in turn, made them dependent on the principal separation of biological and memetic fitness. This separation thus prevented memeticists from accepting an adaptationist view of culture which, on the contrary, allowed gene-culture theorists to attract more scientists to test the hypotheses, creating the historical success of the gene-culture coevolution theory. (shrink)

Tyler Burge claims in a recent high-profile publication that none of the existing evidence for mental-state attribution by children prior to the age of four or five really supports such a conclusion; and he makes this claim, not just for beliefs, but for mental states of all sorts. In its place, he offers an explanatory framework according to which infants and young children attribute mere information-registering states and teleologically-characterized motivational states, which are said to lack the defining properties of the (...) mental. I argue that Burge’s claims are poorly motivated and irrelevant to the goals of developmental psychology. (shrink)

Recent work on enculturation suggests that our cognitive capacities are significantly transformed in the course of the scaffolded acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading and writing. Phylogenetically, enculturation is the result of the co-evolution of human organisms and their socio-culturally structured cognitive niche. It is rendered possible by evolved cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily learning mechanisms that make human organisms apt to acquire culturally inherited cognitive practices. In addition, cultural learning allows for the intergenerational transmission of relevant knowledge and skills. (...) Ontogenetically, enculturation is associated with neural plasticity and the development of new motor routines and action schemas. It relies on scaffolded learning that structures novice-teacher interactions. The acquisition of reading and writing are paradigm examples of enculturation. Based on an empirically informed analysis of the components of enculturation, I will apply the emerging account of enculturated cognition to narrative practices. To date, research on the impact of narratives on the constitution of the self and our understanding of folk psychology has not paid much attention to the question how narratives are influenced by cumulative cultural evolution and our capacity to acquire reading and writing during ontogeny. I will argue that textual narratives, above and beyond oral narratives, provide genuinely new ways of narration. Therefore, the enculturated interaction with textual narratives has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of ourselves and other cognitive agents. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel’ın “Hiçbir-Yerden Bakış Açısı” adlı kitabı çok alıntılanmış bir eserdir. Buradaki argümanlar sıklıkla bilincin nesnel-bilimsel bir açıklamasının yapılabilmesinin, en iyi ihtimalle, önündeki büyük ve yapısal sorunların dile getirilişi veya tümüyle imkansız olduğunu gösteren akıl yürütmeler olarak algılanır. Bu iki yanlış algıyı özetlememin ardından her ikisinin de neden hatalı olduğunu gösteriyorum. Bunu yaptıktan sonra her iki hatanın nedenlerini birden yaratan ortak bir neden daha olduğunu gösteriyorum. Bu nedenin Thomas Nagel’ın nesnel fenomenoloji önerisinin ya belirsiz veya saçma bulunarak bir kenara bırakılması (...) ya da hepten reddedilmesi olduğunu savunuyorum. Böylelikle nesnel fenomenoloji projesinin özünde deneyimin öznel boyutunun, nesnel bir açıklamasının verilebilmesini sağlayabilmek için bilinci açıklamakta halihazırda kullandığımız zihinselci terimler setinde kavramsal ve kuramsal yenilenme yapılması yönünde bir çağrı olduğunu gösterebileceğimi düşünüyorum: Nesnel fenomenoloji, öznel fenomenin kavramsal yenilenme aracılığıyla özneler-arası ulaşılabilirliğini sağlama projesidir. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to examine Nāgārjuna’s idea of the self and its contemporaneity interpretations in philosophy. As we know, Nāgārjuna examines the emptiness of various things in which the emptiness of the self occupies an important position in the Buddhist philosophical tradition. The main aim of this paper is to understand the meaning of emptiness to explain the nature of the self and to show how it is different from the substantial notion of self. However, Nāgārjuna’s idea (...) of the self is not identical with the contemporary materialistic notion of self. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first section, I would like to explain the nature of emptiness in relation to self and how it is different from the substantial self. The second section will focus on the constituents of the self. The third section will bring out the nature of self. In the fourth section and last section, I would like to bring out Nāgārjuna’s idea of the emptiness of the self with respect to the contemporary debates on the nature of self. (shrink)

This article presents and analyses a social-practice contextualist version of meaning holism, whose main root lies in American pragmatism. Proposing that beliefs depend on systems of language-use in social practices, which involve communities of people and worldly objects, such meaning holism effectively breaks down the Enlightenment tradition’s philosophical subject–object dualism (and scepticism). It also opens the human mind up for empirical research – in a ‘sociologizing’, ‘anthropologizing’ and ‘historicizing’ vein. The article discusses the implications of this approach for the human (...) sciences, for instance certain parallel developments in anthropology and archaeology. (shrink)

I argue that there are cases in which ecumenical expressivism cannot distinguish between endorsement of certain trivial and substantive normative judgments. I consider the extent to which this problem generalizes across different formulations of the ecumenical view. I suggest that we may not be able to escape the problem if we hope to retain the ability to solve the Frege-Geach problem in the way promised by ecumenical expressivism.

Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.

The connection between early yogācāras, or practitioners of yoga, and later Yogācāra-vijñānavāda philosophy has long preoccupied scholars. But these connections remain obscure. This article suggests that a text that has received little attention in modern scholarship, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, may shed light on aspects of early yogācāra contemplative cultures that gave rise to some of the formative dynamics of Yogācāra-vijñānavāda thought. I show how traditional Buddhist meditative practice and engagement with Abhidharma theoretics come together in the Saddharmasmṛtyuasthānasūtra to produce a novel (...) theory of mind that mirrors many of the philosophical problematics that early and late Yogācāra-vijñānavādins confronted and attempted to work out in śāstric detail. (shrink)

In English we use the word “invention” in two ways. First, to mean a new device or process developed by experimentation, and designed to fulfill a practical goal. Second, to mean a mental fabrication, especially a falsehood, designed to please or persuade. In this paper I argue that human consciousness is an invention in both respects. First, it is a cognitive faculty, evolved by natural selection, designed to help us make sense of ourselves and our surroundings. But then, second, it (...) is a fantasy, conjured up by the brain, designed to change the value we place on our existence. (shrink)

Most versions of utilitarianism depend on the plausibility and coherence of some conceptionof maximizing well-being, but these conceptions have been attacked on various grounds. This paper considers two such contentions. First, it addresses the argument that because goods are plural and incommensurable, maximization is incoherent. It is shown that any conception of incommensurability strong enough to show the incoherence of maximization leads to an intolerable paradox. Several misunderstandings of what maximization requires are also addressed. Second, this paper responds to the (...) argument that rationality is not a matter of maximizing, but of expressing proper attitudes. This ‘expressivist’ position is first explicated through the elaboration of several paradoxes. It is then shown how, through an application of economic and strategic thinking, these paradoxes can be dissolved. The paper then concludes with some reflections on the indispensability of calculation for moral and prudential reasoning. (shrink)

Rapid advances in the field of neuroimaging techniques including magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), functional MRI (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), voxel based morphomentry (VBM), and optical imaging, have allowed neuroscientists to investigate neural processes in ways that have not been possible until recently. Combining these techniques with advanced analysis procedures during different conditions such as hypnosis, psychiatric and neurological conditions, subliminal stimulation, and psychotropic drugs began transforming the study of neuroscience, ushering a new paradigm that may allow neuroscientists to tackle (...) the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

We present a new account of perceptual consciousness, one which gives due weight to the epistemic commitment of normal perception in familiar circumstances. The account is given in terms of a higher-order attitude for which the subject has an immediate perceptual epistemic warrant in the form of an appropriate first-order perception. We develop our account in contrast to Rosenthal's higher-order account, rejecting his view of consciousness in virtue of so-called ‘targetless’ higher-order states. We explain the key notion of an immediate (...) perceptual warrant and show both that it requires the content of the higher-order attitude to match that of the first-order perception, and also that it gives a new perspective on the intimate relationship, rightly emphasised by Rosenthal, between consciousness and a subject's testimony as to ‘how it is with her’. (shrink)

Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-PontyIntroductionMerleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close (...) relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent”, and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors... (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault's sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive discourses (the (...) recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom‐induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research. (shrink)

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges (...) to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates. (shrink)

Both a priori physicalism and a posteriori physicalism combine a metaphysical and an epistemological thesis. They agree about the metaphysical thesis: our world is wholly physical. Most agree that this requires everything that there is must be necessitated by the sort of truths described by physics. If we call the conjunction of the basic truths of physics P, all physicalists agree that P entails for any truth Q. Where they disagree is whether or not this entailment can be known a (...) priori. The a priori physicalist says it can, the a posteriori physicalist says it cannot. Though a posteriori physicalism is probably the dominant view, it is really a surprising and somewhat unlikely stance. In this article, the nature of the view is discussed, and two arguments are presented that should cause us to look again at the potential of a priori physicalism. (shrink)

I briefly review the three basic strategies for naturalizing intentionality discussed by Haugeland 4:383–427, 1990, and Hutto and Satne, recounting their deficits. Then, I focus on Dennett’s version of what Haugeland calls the “second-base … neo-behaviorist” strategy. After briefly explaining Dennett’s proposal, I defend it against four common objections: circularity, relativity, under-specified rationality, and failure to track robustly natural facts. I conclude by recounting the advantages of Dennettian neo-behaviorism over the neo-Cartesian and neo-pragmatist alternatives, as well as Hutto and Satne’s (...) proposal that intentionality comes in two distinct kinds. (shrink)

There have been monumental advances in the study of the social dimensions of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it has been common within a wide variety of fields--including social philosophy, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of science--to approach the social dimensions of knowledge as simply another resource to be utilized or controlled. I call this view, in which other people's epistemic significance are only of instrumental value, manipulationism. I identify manipulationism, trace its manifestations in (...) the aforementioned fields, and explain how to move beyond it. The principal strategy that I employ for moving beyond manipulationism consists of synthesizing enactivism and neo-Kuhnian social epistemology. Specifically, I expand the enactivist concept of participatory sense-making by linking it to recent conceptual innovations in social epistemology, such as the concept of immanent cogent argumentation. (shrink)

Modelos neurocognitivos têm sido propostos para investigar a consciência. O objetivo é responder à pergunta sobre como o cérebro é capaz de produzir estados conscientes qualitativos. Os modelos são representações teóricas baseadas em algumas pesquisas empíricas. Contudo, a questão central, aparentemente trivial para alguns autores, refere-se à representatividade e confiabilidade dos modelos, i.e., saber se são capazes de explicar como a consciência emerge de processos neurais. Esses modelos são considerados como guia no estudo científico da consciência: os modelos cognitivos de (...) Dennett e Baars, os modelos neurobiológicos de Edelman, Dehaene et al., de Damásio, e o modelo neurodinâmico proposto por Freeman. O presente texto visa a analisar a coerência e a plausibilidade dos modelos, i.e., se realmente explicam a “consciência” e suas propriedades em termos neurais ou se explicam apenas mecanismos neurobiológicos subjacentes no cérebro. O objetivo é avaliar escopo e limites dos modelos além da aplicabilidade na resolução do problema da consciência. Neurocognitive models are proposed in order to study the problem of consciousness. The models are attempts to answer the question of how the brain can generate conscious and qualitative states. Models are theoretical representations based on empirical data. Nonetheless, the central question concerns the reliability and the representativeness of the models, i.e., whether they in fact represent what they are supposed to explain, viz., how consciousness can emerge from neuronal processes. Such models are taken to be a guide for the scientific study of consciousness. Presently, there are six models: the multiple draft, the global workspace, the dynamic core, the global neuronal workspace, the somatic markers hypothesis, and the neurodynamic model. This text is a survey and a philosophical analysis of the models of consciousness, and it considers their plausibility and coherence. I will concentrate on two points: whether the neuroscientific models are able to explain ‘consciousness’ and its properties in neural terms, or whether the models only explain the neural correlates of conscious states, and the scope, limitations and applicability of the models in the attempt to solve the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper I contrast Husserlian transcendental eidetic phenomenology with some other views of what phenomenology is supposed to be and argue that, as eidetic, it does not admit of being ‘naturalized’ in accordance with standard accounts of naturalization. The paper indicates what some of the eidetic results in phenomenology are and it links these to the employment of reason in philosophical investigation, as distinct from introspection, emotion or empirical observation. Eidetic phenomenology, unlike cognitive science, should issue in a ‘logic’ (...) of consciousness. Instead of being derived from empirical investigations its results should consist of high-level background conditions that are necessary for cognitive science to be possible in the first place. To negate these conditions is to be faced with certain types of ‘material’ contradictions. Some analogies with science – mathematical science – are used to develop the argument. (shrink)

Using the film the Wizard of Oz, an illustrative comparison is made between the Scarecrow's learning experiences and our own. Like we often do, the Scarecrow reduces his potential learning and thinking abilities to nothing more than the formal operations presumably at work in the brain. Ostensibly lacking this brain, the Scarecrow solves nearly all the problems encountered in the journey to Oz. A neurophenomenological description of the Scarecrow's experiences reveals his prereflective, situated learning, and embodied cognition. These ways of (...) learning are often ignored and devalued in our educational system. Can this same method reveal our own subjugated knowledges? Herein, neurophenomenology is demonstrated as a critical pedagogy that critiques and liberates subjugated knowledge and supports a richer assessment of human learning and thinking. (shrink)

This dissertation offers new proposals, based on a philosophical appraisal of scientific findings, to address old philosophical problems regarding our immediate acquaintance with time. It focuses on two topics: our capacity to determine the length of intervals and our acquaintance with the present moment. A review of the relevant scientific findings concerning these topics grounds the main contributions of this dissertation. Thus, this study introduces to the philosophical literature an empirically adequate way to talk about how the mind represents time (...) at the most fundamental level. In order to account for our immediate acquaintance with the duration of intervals, a theoretical framework for classifying clocks is used to explain why the representational outputs of the circadian clock and the stopwatch have metric structure. A philosophical analysis of these outputs is proposed to classify them and explain their properties. With respect to our immediate acquaintance with the present, a novel two-phase model of the present is proposed. This model shows that there are two forms of acquaintance with the present, which has consequences for contemporary debates in the philosophy of time. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)