A book review of 'The Intercorporeal Self. Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity'.

An overview of: "Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell. Understanding the feel of consciousness".

To appear in the Cambridge Handbook to Cognitive Science, eds. Ramsey and Frankish.

This article investigates the origins of the experiences involved in the diagnostics (detection and normative evaluation) of biological entities in image-based medical praxis. Our specific research aim presupposes a vast discussion regarding the origins of knowledge in general, but is narrowed down to the alternatives of anthropomorphism and biomorphism. Accordingly, in the subsequent chapters we will make an attempt to investigate and illustrate what holds the diagnostic experiential situation together—biological regularities, manifestation via movement, conscious synthesis, causal categories, or something else. (...) We argue that as long as knowledge originates out of practices, a promising way forward is to oscillate between the prominent although controversial ideas of the history of philosophy and observations of concrete human practices, such as, in our chosen example, image-based medical diagnostics of biological pathologies. Although a number of thinkers are involved in the discussion, Aristotle and Husserl are most important here as the representatives of historical paradigms on the matter. The body in this research was not taken solely as the physical entity (Körper) but rather as a transcendental, constitutive structure where diagnostic and biological processes synchronize in teleological movement (Leib). However, philosophical speculations are illustrated by actual radiograms, the interpretation of which brings us back to the aforementioned question of primacy regarding cognition. (shrink)

Ferdinand Pöhlmann argues that a sense of one’s own basic abilities to move is a constitutive condition on the ability to perceive the world spatially. This constitutive relation explains why egocentric spatial representation is to be regarded as a kind of self-representation. In arguing for these claims, conceptual as well as empirical questions are discussed and an overview of accounts that take action as a constitutive condition on spatial representation is given. The picture that emerges is linked to the phenomenological (...) (Scheler) as well as to the analytic (Evans) tradition in the Philosophy of Mind.​. (shrink)

This anthology focuses on “practical” forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing. -/- The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians (...) – some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single “theory of knowledge” but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge. -/- We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both disciplinebased and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, tea cher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters. (shrink)

A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...) extension of Hull’s view to the ubiquitous phenomenon of symbiosis. Finally, using immunology as a key example, it shows that the genidentity view suggests that the main interest of a process approach is epistemological rather than ontological and that its principal claim is one of priority, namely that processes precede and define things, and not vice versa. (shrink)

How much does stimulus input shape perception? The common-sense view is that our perceptions are representations of objects and their features and that the stimulus structures the perceptual object. The problem for this view concerns perceptual biases as responsible for distortions and the subjectivity of perceptual experience. These biases are increasingly studied as constitutive factors of brain processes in recent neuroscience. In neural network models the brain is said to cope with the plethora of sensory information by predicting stimulus regularities (...) on the basis of previous experiences. Drawing on this development, this chapter analyses perceptions as processes. Looking at olfaction as a model system, it argues for the need to abandon a stimulus-centred perspective, where smells are thought of as stable percepts, computationally linked to external objects such as odorous molecules. Perception here is presented as a measure of changing signal ratios in an environment informed by expectancy effects from top-down processes. (shrink)

Daniel Weiskopf has recently raised an apparently powerful objection against the so-called “extended mind thesis” with regard to beliefs. His argument is that since alleged cases of “extended beliefs” lack a characteristic feature of beliefs properly so called (newly acquired beliefs are usually integrated with already existing beliefs rapidly, automatically and unconsciously), they do not count as genuine beliefs properly so called. We defend the extended mind thesis by arguing that Weiskopf is wrong. First, we suggest an alternative account of (...) informational integration that is compatible with externally stored beliefs’ being beliefs properly so called, emphasizes the crucial role action plays for cognition, and stresses the embodied and situationally embedded nature of human cognizers. Second, we argue that even if informational integration were usually rapid, automatic, and unconscious, this would not be an essential feature of beliefs. Third, we argue that even if rapid, automatic, and unconscious informational integration were characteristic of our commonsense conception of beliefs, externally stored “beliefs” would still be sufficiently similar to beliefs properly so called for them to be grouped together for all practical and scientific purposes. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, the rise of embodied cognition (EC) articulated in various schools (or versions) of embodied, embedded, extended and enacted cognition (Gallagher’s 4E) has offered AI a way out of traditional computationalism—an approach (or an understanding) loosely referred to as embodied AI. This view has split into various branches ranging from a weak form on the brink of functionalism (loosely represented by Clarks’ parity principle) to a strong form (often corresponding to autopoietic-friendly enactivism) suggesting that body−world interactions (...) constitute cognition. From an ontological perspective, however, constitution is a problematic notion with no obvious empirical or technical advantages. This paper discusses the ontological issues of these two approaches in regard to embodied AI and its ontological commitments: circularity, epiphenomenalism, mentalism, and disguised dualism. The paper also outlines an even more radical approach that may offer some ontological advantages. The new approach, called the mind-object identity, is then briefly compared with sensorimotor direct realism and with the embodied identity theory. (shrink)

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general (...) theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3). (shrink)

Sloman suggests that although many try to model consciousness as a unitary and abstract entity, the project is an incoherent one. This claim will be supported, but it will also be argued that current movements in consciousness research are broadly consistent with Sloman's "alternative" suggestions of how best to make progress in this area.

For many years emotion theory has been characterized by a dichotomy between the head and the body. In the golden years of cognitivism, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, emotion theory focused on the cognitive antecedents of emotion, the so-called “appraisal processes.” Bodily events were seen largely as byproducts of cognition, and as too unspecific to contribute to the variety of emotion experience. Cognition was conceptualized as an abstract, intellectual, “heady” process separate from bodily events. Although current emotion theory has moved (...) beyond this disembodied stance by conceiving of emotions as involving both cognitive processes (perception, attention, and evaluation) and bodily events (arousal, behavior, and facial expressions), the legacy of cognitivism persists in the tendency to treat cognitive and bodily events as separate constituents of emotion. Thus the cognitive aspects of emotion are supposedly distinct and separate from the bodily ones. This separation indicates that cognitivism’s disembodied conception of cognition continues to shape the way emotion theorists conceptualize emotion. (shrink)

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: (...) Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition. The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections. (shrink)

This thesis explores and discusses foundational issues concerning the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and the enactive approach to cognitive science, with the aim of clarifying, developing, and promoting the project of enactive phenomenology. This project is framed by three general ideas: 1) that the sciences of mind need a phenomenological grounding, 2) that the enactive approach is the currently most promising attempt to provide mind science with such a grounding, and 3) that this attempt involves both a naturalization of phenomenology (...) and a phenomenologization of the concept of nature. More specifically, enactive phenomenology is the project of pursuing mutually illuminative exchanges between, on the one hand, phenomenological investigations of the structures of lived experience and embodied existence and, on the other, scientific accounts of mind and life – in particular those framed by theories of biological self-organization. The thesis consists of two parts. Part one is an introductory essay that seeks to clarify some of enactive phenomenology’s overarching philosophical commitments by tracing some of its historical roots. Part two is a compilation of four articles, each of which intervenes in a different contemporary debate relevant to the dissertation’s project. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and (...) anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience. (shrink)

In this chapter, the frameworks of enactive cognitive science (e.g., Baran- diaran 2008, 2017; Di Paolo et al. 2018) and ontological design, particu- larly the work of Tony Fry (e.g., 2009), are synthesized to give a general account of how humans act toward change at multiple scales. According to this synthesis, design is understood as a spatiotemporally extended form of adaptive self-regulation, or adaptivity in the enactive vocabulary (Di Paolo 2005). When we design, we regulate ourselves in the local-present to (...) resource our future selves in ways that make certain regulations either possible or easier, and thus, desired outcomes more probable. Adaptivity, here, entails an ongoing redirection of the individuating tendencies of person-world systems either for maintaining some existing trajectories or for stabilizing new ones. This happens predominantly through modify- ing constraints at what Secchi and Cowley (2018, 2021) term the meso- scale of social organizing. This chapter considers diferent types of design (maintenance, habit, identity) operative across scales, from organisms to organizations. It concludes with some indications for how this perspective might be valuable in facing current ecological and environmental chal- lenges and the obvious demands they put on the need for change across all scales of human living. (shrink)

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with (...) the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses. (shrink)

We experience our encounters with the world and others in different degrees of intensity – the presence of things and others is gradual. I introduce this kind of presence as a ubiquitous feature of every phenomenally conscious experience, as well as a key ingredient of our ‘feeling of being alive’, and distinguish explanatory agendas that might be relevant with regard to this phenomenon (1 – 3). My focus will be the role of the body-brain nexus in realizing these experiences and (...) its treatment in recent accounts of the bodily constitution of experience. Specifically, I compare a sensorimotor approach to perceptual presence that focuses on properties of the moving body (O’Regan 2011; Noë 2012) with a more general enactivism that focuses on properties of the living body (Thompson 2007). First, I develop and discuss a theory of access derived from sensorimotor theory that might be suited to explain the phenomenon of gradual presence. This is a theory that sees the mastery of sensorimotor, bodily engagements with the world as key elements in setting up a phenomenal experience space. I object that in current versions of sensorimotor theory the correlation posited between presence and changes in the subject’s physical relation to the environment is too rigid. Nevertheless I defend the claim that gradual presence is constituted by our temporally extended engagement with the environment (4 – 7). Second, I consider some objections stemming from enactivism with regard to self-regulatory properties of the living body and the phenomenological claim that the organism’s value-laden relations with its environment have to be included in the theory. I will show that the latter is a necessary amendment to sensorimotor theory and its concept of gradual presence (8-10). (shrink)

A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment – the agent’s physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators – is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence, models of cognition need to be embodied. In contrast to methods from empirical sciences to study cognition, robots can be freely manipulated and virtually all key variables of their embodiment and control programs can be systematically varied. As such, they provide an extremely powerful tool (...) of investigation. We present a robotic bottom-up or developmental approach, focusing on three stages: (a) low-level behaviors like walking and reflexes, (b) learning regularities in sensorimotor spaces, and (c) human-like cognition. We also show that robotic based research is not only a productive path to deepening our understanding of cognition, but that robots can strongly benefit from human-like cognition in order to become more autonomous, robust, resilient, and safe. (shrink)

This chapter describes the conceptual foundations of cognitive science during its establishment as a science in the 20th century. It is organized around the core ideas of individual agency as its basic explanans and information-processing as its basic explanandum. The latter consists of a package of ideas that provide a mathematico-engineering framework for the philosophical theory of materialism.

I have argued elsewhere that non-sentential representations that are the close kin of scale models can be, and often are, realized by computational processes. I will attempt here to weaken any resistance to this claim that happens to issue from those who favor an across-the-board computational theory of cognitive activity. I will argue that embracing the idea that certain computers harbor nonsentential models gives proponents of the computational theory of cognition the means to resolve the conspicuous disconnect between the sentential (...) character of the data structures they posit and the nonsentential qualitative character of our perceptual experiences of corporeal (i.e., spatial, kinematic, and dynamic) properties. Along the way, I will question the viability of some externalist remedies for this disconnect, and I will explain why the computational theory put forward here falls quite clearly beyond the useful bounds of the Chinese-Room argument. (shrink)

En este ensayo exploro cierta veta reduccionista del enfoque enactivo de Noë. Primero argumento que su concepción de nuestro encuentro perceptual con las propiedades intrínsecas de los objetos requiere una metafísica relacional revisionista para ser exitosa. Luego argumento que la propuesta de Noë sobre el rol de la percepción para el pensamiento espacial exige una concepción revisionista de nuestros conceptos espaciales cotidianos. Finalmente, sugiero que a la base de estas formas de revisionismo está una comprensión reduccionista de la egocentricidad perceptual (...) que debe abandonarse si queremos una concepción más substantiva de la percepción y su rol explicativo en el pensamiento. (shrink)

In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? -/- The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux’s letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous (...) others including psychologists and cognitive scientists today. Does such a question represent a philosophical puzzle or a problem that can be solved by experimental tests? Can vision be fully restored after blindness? What is the relation between vision and touch? Are the senses linked through learning or bound at birth? -/- Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy is a major collection of essays that explore the long-standing issues Molyneux’s problem presents to philosophy of mind, perception and the senses. In addition, the volume considers the question from an interdisciplinary angle, examines the pre-history of the question, and aspects of it that have been ignored, such as perspectives from religion and disability. -/- As such, Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy presents a set of philosophically rich, empirically informed, and scientifically rigorous original investigations into this famous puzzle. It will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences including neuroscience, neurobiology and ophthalmology, as well as those studying the mind, perception and the senses. (shrink)

How deep is the current diversity in the panoply of theories to define consciousness, and to what extent do these theories share common denominators? Here we first examine to what extent different theories are commensurable (or comparable) along particular dimensions. We posit logical (and, when applicable, empirical) commensurability as a necessary condition for identifying common denominators among different theories. By consequence, dimensions for inclusion in a set of logically and empirically commensurable theories of consciousness can be proposed. Next, we compare (...) a limited subset of neuroscience-based theories in terms of commensurability. This analysis does not yield a denominator that might serve to define a minimally unifying model of consciousness. Theories that seem to be akin by one denominator can be remote by another. We suggest a methodology of comparing different theories via multiple probing questions, allowing to discern overall (dis)similarities between theories. Despite very different background definitions of consciousness, we conclude that, if attention is paid to the search for a common methological approach to brain-consciousness relationships, it should be possible in principle to overcome the current Babylonian confusion of tongues and eventually integrate and merge different theories. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a perspective on language and its development by starting from two approaches. The first is the ecological-enactive approach to cognition. In opposition to the widespread idea that cognition is information-processing in the brain, the ecological-enactive approach explains human cognition in relational terms, as skilful interactions with a sociomaterial environment shaped by practices. The second is the metalinguistic approach to language, which holds that reflexive or metalinguistic language use – talking about talking – is crucial for understanding language (...) and its development. In particular, I defend two theses: 1. A child’s initial communicative behaviour can be explained in terms of attentional actions: social actions that function by directing someone else’s attention. 2. In order for the child’s communicative behaviour to be sensitive to key properties of language, such as semantic content and normativity, she needs to learn metalinguistic skills. The development of this ecological-enactive perspective on language serves two functions. First, the ecological-enactive approach started by considering basic behaviour, such as locomotion and grasping. An approach in the cognitive sciences, however, should be able to account for the full gamut of human cognition. If the perspective developed in this thesis is viable, this is a contribution to extending the ecological-enactive approach to typically human forms of cognition. Second, this perspective throws new light on philosophical problems concerning language. In the different chapters, I deal with questions concerning the nature of linguistic knowledge, explanations of communicative behaviour, and the origins of semantic content and linguistic normativity. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of vision and visual consciousness is often described as a radical alternative to the computational and connectionist orthodoxy in the study of visual perception. However, it is far from clear whether the theory represents a significant departure from orthodox approaches or whether it is an enrichment of it. In this study, I tackle this issue by focusing on the explanatory structure of the sensorimotor theory. I argue that the standard formulation of the theory subscribes to the same (...) theses of the dynamical hypothesis and that it affords covering-law explanations. This however exposes the theory to the mere description worry and generates a puzzle about the role of representations. I then argue that the sensorimotor theory is compatible with a mechanistic framework, and show how this can overcome the mere description worry and solve the problem of the explanatory role of representations. By doing so, it will be shown that the theory should be understood as an enrichment of the orthodoxy, rather than an alternative. (shrink)

Enactivism maintains that the mind is not produced and localized inside the head but is distributed along and through brain-body-environment interactions. This idea of an intrinsic relationship between the agent and the world derives from the classical phenomenological investigations of the body (Merleau-Ponty in particular). This paper discusses similarities and differences between enactivism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is not usually considered as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between phenomenological investigations and enactivism (or 4E theories in general). After a (...) preliminary analysis of the three principal varieties of enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic and radical), I will present Sartre’s account of the body, addressing some key points that can be related to the current enactivist positions: perception-action unity, anti-representationalism, anti-internalism, organism-environment interaction, and sense-making cognition. Despite some basic similarities, enactivism and Sartre’s phenomenology move in different directions as to how these concepts are developed. Nevertheless, I will suggest that Sartre’s phenomenology is useful to the enactivist approaches to provide a broader and more complete analysis of consciousness and cognition, by developing a pluralist account of corporeality, enriching the investigation of the organism-environment coupling through an existentialist perspective, and reincluding the concept of subjectivity without the hypostatisation of an I-subject detached from body and world. (shrink)

Embodied and extended cognition is a relatively new paradigm within cognitive science that challenges the basic tenet of classical cognitive science, viz. cognition consists in building and manipulating internal representations. Some of the pioneers of embodied cognitive science have claimed that this new way of conceptualizing cognition puts pressure on epistemological and ontological realism. In this paper I will argue that such anti-realist conclusions do not follow from the basic assumptions of radical embodied cognitive science. Furthermore I will show that (...) one can develop a form of realism that reflects rather than just accommodates the core principles of non-representationalist embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

We propose to expand the conversation around moral enhancement from direct brain-altering methods to include technological means of modifying the environments and media through which agents can achieve moral improvement. Virtual Reality (VR) based enhancement would not bypass a person’s agency, much less their capacity for reasoned reflection. It would allow agents to critically engage with moral insights occasioned by a technologically mediated intervention. Users would gain access to a vivid ‘experience machine’ that allows for embodied presence and immersion in (...) a virtual world that meaningfully replicates relevant aspects of real life. We explore how VR can train empathy and foster moral growth in complex ways that would be inaccessible even for traditional moral education. Virtual Reality Perspective Taking is a unique medium for making empathy more reflective. (shrink)

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also arises in auditory, tactile, interoceptive, and olfactory cases. A number of influential philosophical theories have attempted to explain mental imagery in terms of belief-based forms of representation using (...) the Dependence Thesis, dependence upon means of access, such as enactivism, or in terms of the similarity of content with perceptual processing. The focus of this paper concerns the later approach and in particular assessing if Nanay’s promissory note that his theory is applicable to modalities other than vision, such as smell, seems likely to be of theoretical tender. The thesis argued for in this paper is that olfactory imagery exists and is best accounted for by considering it as a type of perceptual processing with a unique representational format relative to the olfactory perceptual modality. The paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of Nanay’s theory of mental imagery for olfaction and suggests some further issues that arise when transitioning to multi-modal mental imagery. (shrink)

I develop a “two-systems” interpretation of Husserl’s theory of belief. On this interpretation, Husserl accounts for our sense of the world in terms of (1) a system of embodied horizon meanings and passive synthesis, which is involved in any experience of an object, and (2) a system of active synthesis and sedimentation, which comes on line when we attend to an object’s properties. I use this account to defend Husserl against several forms of Heideggerean critique. One line of critique, recently (...) elaborated by Taylor Carman, says that Husserl wrongly loads everyday perception with explicit beliefs about things. A second, earlier line of critique, due to Hubert Dreyfus, charges Husserl with thinking of belief on a problematic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model which involves explicit rules applied to discrete symbol structures. I argue that these criticisms are based on a conflation of Husserl’s two systems of belief. The conception of Husserlian phenomenology which emerges is compatible with Heideggerean phenomenology and associated approaches to cognitive science (in particular, dynamical systems theory). (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests (...) that emotions are perceptions of high level properties and perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception. (shrink)

This paper examines the status of unattended visual stimuli in the light of recent work on the role of attention in visual perception. Although the question of whether attention is required for visual experience seems very interesting, this paper argues that there currently is no good reason to take a stand on the issue. Moreover, it is argued that much of the allure of that question stems from a continued attachment to the defective ‘inner picture view’ of experience and a (...) mistaken notion that the ultimate goal of vision is to produce visual experience. The paper considers a promising general account of the content and structure of vision and presents reasons for not taking that account to be committed to any substantive claims about the experiential status of unattended visual stimuli. Also addressed are the active nature of vision and the role of vision in enabling our ecological success. These considerations highlight that visual experience is not the whole of vision and that a much more important question about unattended visual stimuli than whether they are consciously experienced is what contribution they make to how we interact with the world. (shrink)

Consider the much-discussed case of the distracted driver, who is alleged to successfully navigate his car for miles despite being completely oblivious to his visual states. Perhaps he is deeply engrossed in the music playing over the radio or in philosophical reflection, and as a result he goes about unaware of the scene unfolding before him on the road. That the distracted driver has visual experiences of which he is not aware is a possibility that first-order representationalists happily accept, but (...) higher-order representationalists steadfastly deny. HOR claims that perceptual states become conscious only as the object of higher-order states; perceptual states are not intrinsically conscious. According to HOR, since the driver is supposed to be completely distracted by other cognitive tasks, he cannot form higher-order representations of his visual states, with the result that those states are disqualified as experiences.1 HOR theories have come in two flavors, those that claim that the relevant higher-order representations are thought-like and those that that rely on an inner perception-like mechanism that is directed toward one. (shrink)

I respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is ridiculous to suppose that consciousness is a cultural construction based on language and learned in childhood. Block is wrong to dismiss social constructivist theories of consciousness on account of it being ludicrous that conscious experience is anything but a biological feature of our animal heritage, characterized by sensory experience, evolved over millions of years. By defending social constructivism in terms of both Julian Jaynes’ behaviorism and J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, I draw (...) a distinction between the experience or what-it-is-like of nonhuman animals engaging with the environment and the secret theater of speechless monologue that is familiar to a linguistically competent human adult. This distinction grounds the argument that consciousness proper should be seen as learned rather than innate and shared with nonhuman animals. Upon establishing this claim, I defend the Jaynesian definition of consciousness as a social–linguistic construct learned in childhood, structured in terms of lexical metaphors and narrative practice. Finally, I employ the Jaynesian distinction between cognition and consciousness to bridge the explanatory gap and deflate the supposed hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

In this initially daunting but ultimately enjoyable and informative book, Mohan Matthen argues that this tradition is mistaken about both the processes of perception or sensing and the relationship between sensation, perception, and cognition. Since this tradition is sufficiently alive and well in the contemporary literature to constitute something like the received view of perception and the role of sensation in it, Matthen’s challenge and the alternative view he proposes are potentially significant. Sensory systems, Matthen thinks, are primarily devices for (...) sorting objects into kinds, a process resulting in sensory quality spaces that provide the basis for judgments about and inductions over what there is in the world perceived. Sensory systems do not deliver ‘raw’ sense data, fleeting qualia, or unordered sensations for true cognitive processing; rather, they deliver an output that is sorted and ordered, an output that is already, in traditional terms, conceptualized. Sensory experience or sensations come not ‘before’ cognition but ‘after’ it. When we think about sensory systems in general, and not just the small subset of them that we possess, sensory experience is thus a kind of icing on the cake of perception, not one of its crucial ingredients. (shrink)

This paper attempts to do two things. First, it recounts the problem of intentionality, as it has typically been conceptualized, and argues that it needs to be reconceptualized in light of the radical form of externalism most commonly referred to as the extended mind thesis. Second, it provides an explicit, novel argument for that thesis, what I call the argument from meaning making, and offers some defense of that argument. This second task occupies the core of the paper, and in (...) completing it I distinguish _active _ _cognition_ from _cyborg fantasy arguments_ for externalism, and develop the analogy between the extended mind thesis in the cognitive sciences and developmental systems theory in developmental biology. The rethinking of the problem of intentionality on offer leads not so much to a solution as to a dissolution of that problem, as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of some ideas about narrow content owing to Horgan and Tienson and Brian Loar.

I argue for an overlooked distinction between perceptual presence and volumetric content, and flesh it out in terms of predictive processing. Within the predictive processing framework we can distinguish between agent-active and object-active expectations. The former expectations account for perceptual presence, while the latter account for volumetric content. I then support this position with reference to how experiences of presence are created by virtual reality technologies, and end by reflecting on what this means for the relationship between sensorimotor enactivism and (...) predictive processing. (shrink)

According to the additive view of sensory imagination, mental imagery often involves two elements. There is an image-like element, which gives the experiences qualitative phenomenal character akin to that of perception. There is also a non-image element, consisting of something like suppositions about the image's object. This accounts for extra- sensory features of imagined objects and situations: for example, it determines whether an image of a grey horse is an image of Desert Orchid, or of some other grey horse. The (...) view promises to give a simple and intuitive explanation of some puzzling features of imagination, and, further, to illuminate imagination 's relation to modal knowledge. I contend that the additive view does not fulfil these two promises. The explanation of how images come to be determinate is redundant: the content constituting the indeterminate mental images on which the view relies is sufficient to deliver determinate images too, so the extra resources offered by the view are not required.. (shrink)