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  1. Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected Papers.Ned Block - 2007 - Bradford.
    This volume of Ned Block's writings collects his papers on consciousness, functionalism, and representationism. A number of these papers treat the significance of the multiple realizability of mental states for the mind-body problem -- a theme that has concerned Block since the 1960s. One paper on this topic considers the upshot for the mind-body problem of the possibility of a robot that is functionally like us but physically different -- as is Commander Data of _Star Trek's_ second generation. The papers (...)
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  • Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.Andy Clark - 2015 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to (...)
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  • The Predictive Mind.Jakob Hohwy - 2013 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The Predictive Mind is (...)
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  • No watershed for overflow: Recent work on the richness of consciousness.Ian Phillips - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (2):236-249.
    A familiar and enduring controversy surrounds the question of whether our phenomenal experience “overflows” availability to cognition: do we consciously see more than we can remember and report? Both sides to this debate have long sought to move beyond naïve appeals to introspection by providing empirical evidence for or against overflow. Recently, two notable studies—Bronfman, Brezis, Jacobson, and Usher and Vandenbroucke, Sligte, Fahrenfort, Ambroziak, and Lamme —have purported to provide compelling evidence in favor of overflow. Here I explain why the (...)
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  • Rich conscious perception outside focal attention.Ned Block - 2014 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (9):445-447.
    Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has elud- ed resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects’ reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended ‘ensemble prop- erties’ can be detected ‘for free’ without decreasing working memory capacity.
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  • The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience.Jesse Prinz - 2012 - , US: Oup Usa.
    The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions. Major philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness are surveyed, challenged, and extended.
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  • Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science.Andy Clark - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3):181-204.
    Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to (...)
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  • Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access.Ned Block - 2011 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (12):567-575.
    One of the most important issues concerning the foundations ofconscious perception centerson thequestion of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ toarguethatperceptual consciousnessisricher (i.e.,has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argumenthas been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper reviews the controversy, arguing that proponents of sparse perception are committed to the (...)
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  • Perception and Iconic Memory: What Sperling Doesn't Show.Ian B. Phillips - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (4):381-411.
    Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling's partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling's data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to support any such claims. Arguments for overflow based on change-detection paradigms (e.g. Landman et al., 2003; Sligte et al., 2008) cannot be blocked in this way. However, such paradigms (...)
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  • Consciousness cannot be separated from function.Michael A. Cohen & Daniel C. Dennett - 2011 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (8):358--364.
    Here, we argue that any neurobiological theory based on an experience/function division cannot be empirically confirmed or falsified and is thus outside the scope of science. A ‘perfect experiment’ illustrates this point, highlighting the unbreachable boundaries of the scientific study of consciousness. We describe a more nuanced notion of cognitive access that captures personal experience without positing the existence of inaccessible conscious states. Finally, we discuss the criteria necessary for forming and testing a falsifiable theory of consciousness.
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  • The Myth of Phenomenological Overflow.Richard Brown - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):599-604.
    In this paper I examine the dispute between Hakwan Lau, Ned Block, and David Rosenthal over the extent to which empirical results can help us decide between first-order and higher-order theories of consciousness. What emerges from this is an overall argument to the best explanation against the first-order view of consciousness and the dispelling of the mythological notion of phenomenological overflow that comes with it.
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  • Attention, Visual Consciousness and Indeterminacy.James Stazicker - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (2):156-184.
    I propose a new argument showing that conscious vision sometimes depends constitutively on conscious attention. I criticise traditional arguments for this constitutive connection, on the basis that they fail adequately to dissociate evidence about visual consciousness from evidence about attention. On the same basis, I criticise Ned Block's recent counterargument that conscious vision is independent of one sort of attention (‘cognitive access'). Block appears to achieve the dissociation only because he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual consciousness. I then appeal to (...)
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  • Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes.Christof Koch & Naotsugu Tsuchiya - 2007 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (1):16-22.
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  • Attention: some theoretical considerations.J. A. Deutsch & D. Deutsch - 1963 - Psychological Review 70 (1):80-90.
    The selection of wanted from unwanted messages requires discriminatory mechanisms of as great a complexity as those in normal perception, as is indicated by behavioral evidence. The results of neurophysiology experiments on selective attention are compatible with this supposition. This presents a difficulty for Filter theory. Another mechanism is proposed, which assumes the existence of a shifting reference standard, which takes up the level of the most important arriving signal. The way such importance is determined in the system is further (...)
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  • (1 other version)Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays.Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.) - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Attention has been studied in cognitive psychology for more than half a century, but until recently it was largely neglected in philosophy. Now, however, attention has been recognized by philosophers of mind as having an important role to play in our theories of consciousness and of cognition. At the same time, several recent developments in psychology have led psychologists to foundational questions about the nature of attention and its implementation in the brain. As a result there has been a convergence (...)
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  • (1 other version)Attention is cognitive unison: an essay in philosophical psychology.Christopher Mole - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Highlights of a difficult history -- The preliminary identification of our topic -- Approaches -- Bradley's protest -- James's disjunctive theory -- The source of Bradley's dissatisfaction -- Behaviourism and after -- Heirs of Bradley in the twentieth century -- The underlying metaphysical issue -- Explanatory tactics -- The basic distinction -- Metaphysical categories and taxonomies -- Adverbialism, multiple realizability, and natural kinds -- Adverbialism and levels of explanation -- Taxonomies and supervenience relations -- Rejecting the process : first view (...)
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  • Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...)
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  • Is conscious perception gradual or dichotomous? A comparison of report methodologies during a visual task.Morten Overgaard, Julian Rote, Kim Mouridsen & Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy - 2006 - Consciousness and Cognition 15 (4):700-708.
    In a recent article, [Sergent, C. & Dehaene, S. . Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink, Psychological Science, 15, 720–729] claim to give experimental support to the thesis that there is a clear transition between conscious and unconscious perception. This idea is opposed to theoretical arguments that we should think of conscious perception as a continuum of clarity, with e.g., fringe conscious states [Mangan, B. . Sensation’s ghost—the non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness, Psyche, (...)
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  • A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness.Bernard J. Baars - 1988 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such as (...)
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  • Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience.Ned Block - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5):481--548.
    How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their (...)
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  • (1 other version)The revenge of the given.Jerry Fodor - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 105--116.
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  • Action in Perception.Alva Noë - 2004 - MIT Press.
    "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...
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  • (2 other versions)Nonconceptual content, richness, and fineness of grain.Michael Tye - 2006 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 504–30.
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  • The functions of consciousness.Bernard J. Baars - 1988 - In A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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  • (2 other versions)On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.
    Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on (...)
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  • Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2002 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    John Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world; how our ability to think about objects we can see depends on our capacity for conscious visual attention to those things. He illuminates classical problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends.
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  • Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.Joseph Levine - 1983 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (October):354-61.
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  • The Visual Presence of Determinable Properties.James Stazicker - 2018 - In Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Phenomenal Presence. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Several essays in this volume exploit the idea that in visual experience, and in other forms of consciousness, something is present to consciousness, or phenomenally present to the experiencing subject. This is a venerable idea. Hume, for example, understood conscious experience in terms of the various items ‘present to the mind’. However, it is not obvious how the idea should be understood and there are grounds for worrying that there is no good way of making it precise. Here I explore (...)
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  • The visual presence of determinable properties.James Stazicker - 2018 - In Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Phenomenal Presence. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Several essays in this volume exploit the idea that in visual experience, and in other forms of consciousness, something is present to consciousness, or phenomenally present to the experiencing subject. This is a venerable idea. Hume, for example, understood conscious experience in terms of the various items ‘present to the mind’. However, it is not obvious how the idea should be understood and there are grounds for worrying that there is no good way of making it precise. Here I explore (...)
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  • Structuring Mind. The Nature of Attention and How it Shapes Consciousness.Sebastian Watzl - 2017 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element (...)
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  • Attention, Fixation, and Change Blindness.Tony Cheng - 2017 - Philosophical Inquiries 5 (1):19-26.
    The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. Section (...)
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  • Consciousness Explained.Daniel Dennett - 1991 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4):905-910.
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  • (3 other versions)Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
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  • The Puzzle of Perceptual Precision.Ned Block - 2015 - Open Mind.
    Argues for a failure of correspondence between perceptual representation and what it is like to perceive. If what it is like to perceive is grounded in perceptual representation, then, using considerations of veridical representation, we can show that inattentive peripheral perception is less representationally precise than attentive foveal perception. However, there is empirical evidence to the contrary. The conclusion is that perceptual representation cannot ground what it is like to perceive.
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  • Consciousness as a scientific concept: a philosophy of science perspective.Elizabeth Irvine - 2012 - Springer.
    The source of endless speculation and public curiosity, our scientific quest for the origins of human consciousness has expanded along with the technical capabilities of science itself and remains one of the key topics able to fire public as much as academic interest. Yet many problematic issues, identified in this important new book, remain unresolved. Focusing on a series of methodological difficulties swirling around consciousness research, the contributors to this volume suggest that ‘consciousness’ is, in fact, not a wholly viable (...)
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  • (1 other version)Attention alters appearance.Marisa Carrasco, Sam Ling & Sarah Read - 2004 - Nature Neuroscience 7 (3):308-13.
    Does attention alter appearance? This critical issue, debated for over a century, remains unsettled. From psychophysical evidence that covert attention affects early vision-it enhances contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution-and from neurophysiological evidence that attention increases the neuronal contrast sensitivity (contrast gain), one could infer that attention changes stimulus appearance. Surprisingly, few studies have directly investigated this issue. Here we developed a psychophysical method to directly assess the phenomenological correlates of attention in humans. We show that attention alters appearance; it boosts (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):452-458.
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  • Listening to one of two synchronous messages.D. E. Broadbent - 1952 - Journal of Experimental Psychology 44 (1):51.
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  • (3 other versions)Knowledge and its Limits. [REVIEW]L. Horsten - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):200-201.
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  • Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink.Claire Sergent & Stanislas Dehaene - 2004 - Psychological Science 15 (11):720-728.
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  • (1 other version)The information available in visual presentations.George Sperling - 1960 - Psychological Monographs 74:1-29.
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  • (1 other version)Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2):490-494.
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  • Level of aspiration.J. A. Deutsch & D. Deutsch - 1963 - Psychological Review 70 (1):51-60.
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  • Perception and Communication.Donald Eric Broadbent - 1958 - Pergamon Press.
    This book discusses principles and theories regarding perception and communication. Relevant research data is presented which support these theories. 2004 APA, all rights reserved).
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  • The Metaphysics of Attention.Christopher Mole - 2011 - In Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 60-77.
    This paper gives a brief presentation of adverbialism about attention, and explains some of the reasons why it gives an appealing account of attention's metaphysics.
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  • Conceptual Short-Term Memory: A Missing Part of the Mind?H. Shevlin - 2017 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (7-8):163-188.
    In debates in philosophy and cognitive science concerning short-term memory mechanisms and perceptual experience, most discussion has focused on the working memory and the various forms of sensory memory such as iconic memory. In this paper, I present a summary of some evidence for a proposed further form of memory termed conceptual short-term memory. I go on to outline some of the ways in which this additional distinctive sort of short-term memory might be of relevance to ongoing philosophical debates, specifically (...)
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  • Action in Perception by Alva Noë. [REVIEW]Alva Noë - 2005 - Journal of Philosophy 102 (5):259-272.
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  • (1 other version)Visual Attention and the Epistemic Role of Attention.John Campbell - 2011 - In Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 323.
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  • Against Unifying Accounts of Attention.J. Henry Taylor - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (1):39-56.
    There have recently been a number of attempts to put forth a philosophical account of the nature of attention. Many such theories aim at giving necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be attention. In this paper I will argue that any such theory must meet two criteria. Then I shall examine four prominent accounts of attention in some detail, and argue that all of them face problems meeting one or the other of the criteria. I propose an alternative view, (...)
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  • Attention as Experience: Through Thick Thin.Rik Hine - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (9-10):9-10.
    Is our experience of the world 'rich' or 'thin'? In other words, are we aware of unattended sensory stimuli, or are the contents of our consciousness constrained by what we attend to? A recent, ingenious, attempt to address this issue offers us a seemingly unavailable, 'moderate' option; our experience is somewhere between the two. But before we make our minds up about this conclusion, we should see that it resulted from conflating two ways of construing the relevant concepts. I claim (...)
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