Brains

Philosophy and Computation - Online Workshop

2012-05-11T16:42:14Z

Sunday, May 13, University of Lund, Sweden

Details

The workshop "Philosophy and Computation" aims to be a platform for various discussions concerning the use of computability in philosophy (for example, how computational complexity constraints can contribute to explain human understanding) and also questions concerning the philosophical investigation of computation (like questions related to Church-Turing thesis).
The workshop is inspired by the celebration of Turing’s Centenary. More information about the celebrations can be found at the following website: http://www.turingcentenary.eu/

The main objective of the workshop is to gather international specialists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and computer scientists, who will be given an opportunity to present their research and time to discuss important topics related to philosophy and computation.

Workshop Online

The workshop will be visible in the real time online (although without any possibility of oral question asking). If you want to join, please click on the link below (you can freely connect and disconnect whenever you want) and install the Adobe Connect plugin to your computer. Provide your name and sign on as a guest. There will be no continuous monitoring of the questions asked through the chat, but feel free to ask questions in the chat plugin during the workshop.

https://connect.sunet.se/philosophyandcomputation

(the link will be active from the PhilEvents site, http://philevents.org/event/show/1124, during the Workshop).

Selected speakers:

Patrick Blackburn

Roskilde University

Walter Dean

University of Warwick

Leon Horsten

Bristol University

Marcin Mostowski

Warsaw University

Gualtiero Piccinini

University of Missouri St. Louis

Oron Shagrir

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Mark Sprevak

University of Edinburgh

Raymond Turner

University of Essex

Konrad Zdanowski

Warsaw University

Organisers:

Paula Quinon

Lund University

Topic areas

Philosophy of Computing and Information

A Profession-Wide Invitation

2012-05-11T15:38:06Z

I hereby extend a profession-wide invitation to contribute to a new blog I have created that aims to be "by and for" early-career philosophers (including philosophers of mind and cognitive science!): The Philosophers' Cocoon.

This blog aims to be a safe and supportive "grass roots" forum for early-career professional philosophers -- graduate students, post-docs, and entry-level faculty members -- to discuss their work, ideas, and personal-professional issues. Philosophers who are not in the "early" stages of their careers are also invited to become contributing members, as their experiences in the profession may, for obvious reasons, be very much relevant to the blog's aims.

Blog participants (i.e. any philosopher who wises to participate!) are invited to post working papers and ideas, as well as comments, questions, or concerns on issues including but not limited to:

Navigating graduate school
Publishing
Work-life-family balance
Etc.

This is not intended to be "my" blog. My hope is to serve as primarily as blog moderator, and for the blog's content to be driven by and for any and every early-career philosopher who wishes to contribute. As blog moderator, I promise to rigorously ensure a safe and supportive environment for all. I will not approve, and will immediately remove, any contributions or comments that I (or anyone else) reasonably finds remotely derogatory or threatening. Finally, anyone who wishes to make an anonymous post (e.g. to discuss an issue they are not comfortable attaching their name to) is welcome to email me their post and request that I post it anymously. I will post any and all such requests, provided they otherwise satisfy the aims described in this mission statement.

If you would like to become a contributor to the Philosopher's Cocoon, please simply send me an email at marvan@ut.edu. Please also be sure to tell me in the email your present status (grad student, etc.), and feel free to provide me with a link to your homepage.

I hope that this blog finds its intended audience and grows organically to meet that audience's needs. I very much look forward to meeting anyone and everyone who chooses to participate.

Sincerely,

Marcus Arvan

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

University of Tampa

The Emperor Cometh

2012-05-07T15:50:14Z

Very happy to say that Hakwan Lau and I have completed our jointly authored paper The Emperor’s New Phenomenology?: The Empirical Case for Conscious Experiences without First-Order Representations which is forthcoming in a Festschrift for Ned Block edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar (MIT Press). The book is slated to have a response from Ned which I am very much looking forward to!

The Man Behind the Legend

2012-05-02T12:16:08Z

3:AM Magazine's Richard Marshall interviews our own Pete Mandik.

New Philosophers' Carnival

2012-04-23T19:00:51Z

Here.

looking for some help from ya'll

2012-04-22T08:41:24Z

Hi everyone
I'm not convinced that this is of interest to anyone but me, but I'm making a list of naturalistically inclined philosophers who work on the mind:

https://sites.google.com/site/glennrjcarruthers/Home/philosophy-resources

if you can think of anyone to add let me know.

cheers
Glenn

i-Comment (and you can, too!)

2012-04-17T17:25:28Z

I'm happy to announce that my criticism of Held et al.'s 2011 paper on Molyneux's question, which began as a post here at Brains, appeared today in a short paper in i-Perception. The core of my argument is the same as before, though now I draw on a wider range of experimental data to reinforce my critique, and suggest some more ways to improve the experimental setup. Here is the abstract:

How do we recognize identities between seen shapes and felt ones? Is this due to associative learning, or intrinsic connections these sensory modalities? We can address this question by testing the capacities of newly sighted subjects to match seen and felt shapes, but only if the subjects can see the objects well enough to form adequate visual representations of their shapes. In light of this, a recent study by R. Held and colleagues fails to demonstrate that their newly sighted subjects' inability to match seen and felt shape was due to a lack of intermodal connections rather than a purely visual deficit, as the subjects may not have been able visually to represent 3D shape in the perspective-invariant manner required for intermodal matching. However, the study could be modified in any of several ways to help avoid this problem.

The purpose of this post, though, is less to plug my work than to make the case for i-Perception's new "i-Comment" platform, which enabled a three-week turnaround of my article from submission to publication, and is dedicated to critical reviews of recently published articles in the science of perception. I've recently commiserated with other philosophers about the difficulty of getting our work published in "truly" scientific outlets, especially when our arguments are primarily negative or critical in spirit. (For example, Nature Neuroscience was not interested in my critique of the Held et al. paper, as the editors there told me its focus was too narrow.) By contrast, this is exactly what i-Comment articles are supposed to do:

This section publishes 'journal club' style articles that review recently published literature from any journal in the study of perception. This format is open to researchers at any stage of their career, but those at an early stage of their career (graduate students, post-docs) are particularly encouraged to submit to this section. Submissions can review articles published within the last two years. Submissions to this section could take the form of a concise and articulate summary of the most critical findings from an empirical article. More critical submissions, however, are also welcome: all too often the concerns raised by journal clubs in individual labs have no airing space in widely accessible publication formats. More speculative submissions, for example, that link an empirical article to a theoretical position, or field of research, not considered by the authors, are also encouraged.

This seems to me to meet a real need in the scientific literature, and I hope that other journals will follow the lead. Add to this the fact that all i-Perception articles are open access (with a small per-page fee to publish), and it's clearly a resource that more philosophers should be taking advantage of.

Experiment Month is Back

2012-04-12T00:00:36Z

Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the plan for your experiment to Experiment Month. Then, if your submission is accepted, the staff will help you out with the more technical side of running the study. More specifically:

1. If you think it might be helpful, staff members will connect you with an 'experiment buddy' who will help you out with experimental design.
2. Once the design is complete, the staff will run your experiment online and send you the data.
3. Finally, staff members will help you with the statistics needed to analyze your data and see whether your hypothesis was confirmed.

To get a better sense of how this project has gone in the past, check out this summary of what ended up happening for the philosophers who submitted last year.

Protolanguage and Experimental Semiotics

2012-04-05T14:40:01Z

Last week I had the good fortune of participating in a stimulating workshop on protolanguage organized by Dorit Bar-On and Mitch Green at the University of Virginia. Thanks to the organizers for their excellent work.

I was asked to comment on a paper by Bruno Galantucci (BG) et al. on a new discipline I never encountered before: experimental semiotics (ES). ES asks people to communicate in novel ways under various constraints and studies the novel communication systems that emerge in those contexts.

Experimental Semiotics (ES) looks like an innovative and promising way to investigate many features of communication systems, including their acquisition, structure, and evolution.

Two questions that are of special interest to philosophers and to those interested in the origin of language are what the nature of language is and whether language is continuous or discontinuous with other (especially non-human) communication systems.

As Bruno Galantucci (BG) pointed out, ES provides evidence that “combinatoriality” (recurrence of basic forms) emerges during a semiotic coordination game when the communication system fades quickly and compositionality (complex expressions take their meaning from the meanings of their parts) emerges during a semiotic matching game when players have to often encode novel meanings.

I pointed out that human language is productive, i.e. it can generate infinitely many recursive structures from finitely many primitives. Combinatoriality defined simply as recurrence of basic forms does not seem to be enough for true productivity. True productivity requires a grammatical division of words into types (noun, verb, etc.) and a recursive syntax that determines which combinations of primitives are well formed (sentences) and which combinations are not. A relevant question is whether any of the ES games that BG describes exhibit “combinatoriality” with enough structure (rules) to amount to true productivity.

A similar point applies to compositionality. True linguistic compositionality comes hand in hand with true productivity, which requires a grammar and a recursive syntax. A relevant question is whether any of the ES games that BG describes exhibit full-blown linguistic compositionality.

It may well be that relatively simple ES games produce communication systems with some degree of “combinatoriality” and a simple form of compositionality. But that is not enough for these communication systems to be of the same kind as natural language. Perhaps the communication systems that ES has studied so far are more akin to a protolanguage than a full blown language. If any ES games do exhibit true productivity and compositionality, then perhaps they should be considered novel languages on a par with natural languages.

Thinking about ES was fun and suggested an experiment that as far as I know has not been tried. I called it a Gavagai Game (in honor of Quine, who thought that reference is indeterminate and therefore we could never be sure that someone who utters “gavagai” while pointing at a rabbit means rabbit rather than undetached rabbit parts, etc.). Two or more people who speak very different languages (and perhaps come from different cultures) are forced to communicate under various conditions, without restrictions to a particular medium of communication or communication rules. It would be interesting to see what kind of communication system they would develop (would it be a pidgin?), what their first steps would be, how their communication system would evolve, how close to a language it would be, and how they would reach agreement as to what they are referring to (to the extent that they do). If anyone has the time and resources to try this...

New Philosophers' Carnival

2012-04-02T19:05:25Z

Here.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

2012-03-30T17:03:27Z

"Distributed cognition and memory research: How do distributed memory systems work?"
Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Guest editors: Kourken Michaelian and John Sutton

Call for Papers
Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2012

According to the extended mind hypothesis in philosophy of cognitive science and the related distributed cognition hypothesis in cognitive anthropology, remembering does not always occur entirely inside the brain, but can also be distributed across heterogeneous systems combining neural, bodily, social, and technological resources. Much of the critical debate on these ideas in philosophy has so far remained at some distance from relevant empirical studies. But claims about extended mind and distributed cognition, if they are to deserve wider acceptance, must both make sense of and, in turn, inform work in the cognitive and social sciences. Is the notion of extended or distributed remembering consistent with the findings of empirical memory research? Can such a view of memory usefully inform empirical work, suggesting further areas of productive enquiry or helping to make sense of existing findings?

This special issue will bring together supporters and critics of extended and distributed cognition, to consider memory as a test case for evaluating and further developing these hypotheses. Submitted
papers should thus address both memory and distributed cognition/extended mind: ideally, papers should aim simultaneously to make contributions to relevant debates in both philosophy and psychology or other relevant empirical fields. While primarily theoretical papers are welcome, they should make direct contact with empirical findings. Similarly, while empirically-oriented papers might draw on evidence from a range of areas, including the cognitive psychology of transactive memory and collaborative recall, cognitive anthropology and cognitive ethnography, science studies and the philosophy of science, the history of memory practices, and the cognitive archaeology of material culture, they should seek to advance the theoretical debate over extended mind and distributed cognition, rather than simply presenting findings from these fields.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

Relations between biological memory and external memory

How do forms of representation and storage in neural and external memory differ, and why do such differences matter? Can theories of distributed cognition deal with the existence of multiple memory systems? For example, does the expert deployment of exograms in certain external symbol systems affect working memory? How might the development and operation of distributed memory systems affect neural memory processes? Is evidence for neuroplasticity relevant for assessing claims about distributed remembering? Given plausible links between memory and self, what might distributed memory systems imply about identity and agency? What happens when distributed memory systems fail or break down?

How do distributed memory systems work?

What is socially distributed remembering, and does it offer any support to revived ideas about group cognition, or to a naturalized understanding of collective memory? Can theories of extended or distributed cognition encompass socially distributed remembering in addition to artifacts and other forms of memory scaffolding? What are the implications of experimental studies of collaborative recall and transactive memory for theories of distributed cognition? How do such theories deal with memory practices and rituals, and with the roles of the non-symbolic material environment?

Distributed memory and embodied cognition

How central in theories of extended or distributed memory should be the study of skill acquisition and of expertise in the deployment of external resources? What accounts of embodied skills, procedural memory, and smooth or absorbed coping are required to support such theories? How do distributed memory systems work in specific contexts of embodied interaction, from conversation to music, dance, performance, and sport?

Guest authors
The issue will include invited articles authored by:

Robert Rupert, University of Colorado (Boulder)
Deborah Tollefsen, University of Memphis, and Rick Dale, University of
California (Merced)
Mike Wheeler, University of Stirling

Important dates

Submission deadline: July 15, 2012
Target publication date: December 15, 2012

How to submit
Prospective authors should register here to obtain a login and select Distributed cognition and memory research as an article type. Manuscripts should be approximately 6,000 words.

Submissions should follow the author guidelines available on the journal's website.

About the journal

The Review of Philosophy and Psychology (ISSN: 1878-5158; eISSN: 1878-5166) is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Springer and focusing on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive science. The aim of the journal is to provide a forum for discussion on topics of mutual interest to philosophers and psychologists and to foster interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of philosophy and the sciences of the mind, including the neural, behavioural and social sciences. The journal publishes theoretical works grounded in empirical research as well as empirical articles on issues of philosophical relevance. It includes thematic issues featuring invited contributions from leading authors together with articles answering a call for paper.

Contact

For any queries, please email the guest editors:
kmichaelian@bilkent.edu.tr, john.sutton@mq.edu.au

The Brain and its States

2012-03-28T14:27:01Z

[cross-posted at Philosophy Sucks!]

Some time ago I was invited to contribute a paper to a forthcoming volume entitled Being in Time: Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was invited because of my paper "What is a Brain State?" Looking back at that paper, which I was writing in 2004-2005, I was interested in questions about the Identity Theory and not so much about consciousness per se and I wished I had said something relating the thesis there to various notions of consciousness. So I was happy to take this opportunity to put together a general statement of my current views on this stuff as well as a chance to develop some of my recent views about higher-order theories. Overall I think it is a fairly decent statement of my considered opinion on the home of consciousness in the brain. Any comments or feedback is greatly appreciated!

The Brain and its States

Does the gender of a filicide offender unduly influence our judgement of guilt?

2012-03-28T05:50:18Z

Hi all, it is a while since I have been around, but I have been following along. Recently we’ve had some interesting discussion around responsibility and justice, issues which I have begun to think more about in the last year or so, so I thought now would be a good time to ask for peoples intuitions about a case which I have found troubling.

A word of caution: the kind of case I’m going to talk about here is very disturbing, I won’t give as much detail as you would get in the news, but even so if you are at all prone to depression or if you’re a parent you may want to skip this (I, myself, ended up hospitalised 2 weeks after I started researching this topic).

So the kind of crime that has me worried is filicide- that is the murder of one’s own child. Now there are many different ‘reasons’ why one may kill one’s own child, but the cases I’m most interested in are those in which the killer is acting out a desire for revenge at the child’s other parent. The child is killed apparently to punish the other parent. When this is deemed as the motivation for the killing the killer is usually deemed responsible and punished. Both women and men have been found guilty of this crime. When killers are deemed to have killed for other reasons courts are more open to treatment based responses.

Now one thing that is surprising is that unlike other homicides, women perpetrate filicides around as often as men (some studies say more women, some say more men, some say the same amount, so there is some variation here- likely dependent on how samples are selected). This is true even though there are commonalities between filicide and other violent crimes (social isolation, poverty etc). However, when we look at courts responses to these killings we see rather inequitable responses. Women are much more likely to be hospitalised and men much more likely to be imprisoned. So, my question is this. Is this disparity a reflection of the real mental states of the killers or, does it, instead reflect some hidden sexist assumptions.

Now it is true that more men are deemed to have acted out of a desire for revenge at the child’s other parent, so perhaps the difference in outcomes for the killers is because of a real difference in motive. Alternatively, we may be more willing to accept an explanation in terms of revenge for a male killer because we assume that a mother (but not a father) could never choose to kill. Indeed, there is some evidence that legal systems are more open to pathologising filicide by mothers- in the UK if a mother kills her child within the first year of life she can have her sentence reduced by pleading “lactational psychosis”.

So what are the sexist assumptions that could lead to this disparity? Here is a list, some taken from the literature some off the top of my head:

Women are not agents of action, they are victims of circumstance
Women are ‘naturally’ passive and men ‘naturally’ violent (i.e. all men are predators and all women are victims)
The role of mother (but not father) is to care for and raise one’s children at the expense of all else. All women are ‘natural’ mothers and so to violate the role of mother is necessarily pathological.

Now none of these beliefs should be endorsed- and I expected that many would vigorously deny that they believe such things- but are they lurking away as assumptions in legal proceedings? One thing I’ll be doing (hopefully this year) is developing a formal survey regarding peoples “mad versus bad” intuitions in the case of the kind of revenge killings I mentioned- looking to see if just the gender of the killer influences assumptions regarding guilt. But before we do any sciences let’s see what readers think:

The Supreme Court found a man guilty of killing his daughter. The court found that the man, who was involved in a custody dispute over two children, murdered his daughter in order to hurt his ex-wife “as profoundly as possible” they rejected a defence based around mental impairment. His rights of access to his children had been limited the day before the murder. He had spoken to his ex-wife moments before the crime and told her that she would never see her children again although, he only attempted to murder one child. He then drove to a court house. No attempts to physically injure or murder his former wife are reported. Similarly no suicide attempt is reported. The judge in the case is quoted as saying in his decision that he believed the man lacked insight into the nature of his crime.

The Supreme Court found a woman guilty of killing her daughter. The court found that the woman, who was involved in a custody dispute over two children, murdered her daughter in order to hurt her ex-husband “as profoundly as possible” they rejected a defence based around mental impairment. Her rights of access to her children had been limited the day before the murder. She had spoken to her ex-husband moments before the crime and told him that he would never see his children again although, she only attempted to murder one child. She then drove to a court house. No attempts to physically injure or murder her former husband are reported. Similarly no suicide attempt is reported. The judge in the case is quoted as saying in his decision that he believed the woman lacked insight into the nature of her crime.

Who is mad? Who is bad? (to ask and present the cases in far too simple a way!)

In closing I want to state that this is not idle fancy, if there are hidden sexist assumptions at play in judging guilt here then either some women are ‘getting away with murder’ or some men are being punished when it is immoral to do so. More importantly, in my opinion, as a soft-determinist, if we as a society are getting these judgements wrong then we are catastrophically failing in our duties toward children in the prevention of this crime. Strategies for the prevention of filicide must turn on the motive of the killers and if the motive is pathological then our response must be different.

(You might be wondering my opinion. I don't think the issue is decided, but for my part I begin to lose a grip on what mental illness is if killing your own child isn't evidence of mental illness).

Glenn.

Repost: Final Call for Papers! Consciousness and Moral Cognition in RoPP

2012-03-16T16:04:34Z

Submissions for a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology on consciousness attribution in moral cognition are due at the end of this month. The list of invited authors includes: Kurt Gray (Maryland) and Chelsea Schein (Maryland), Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and Liane Young (Boston College).

Submissions are due March 31, 2012.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available on RoPP's website.

Call for Papers: When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. We invite contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moralcognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Full Call for Papers

Remembering Ulric Neisser

2012-03-14T22:26:19Z

(cross-posted at Hesperus is Bosphorus)

Ulric Neisser, an American psychologist and one of the founders of cognitive psychology died last month. Neisser’s life, including his major contributions to the revolution of the study of the human cognition is well documented; see for instance, the NY Times obituary and the Mind Hacks blog. My intention is not to replicate what has appeared elsewhere but to add to it by focusing on Neisser’s later work in ecological psychology, more specifically, his interdisciplinary research on the self which has guided the content and methodology of my own work. I take this as an opportunity to remember him, with the added hope of sparking the interest of those less familiar with his later work.Behaviourism dominated the scientific study of the mind in the first half of the 20^th century. Behaviourists declared that psychology should not attempt to address internal mental events and mechanisms but should focus on the observable markers of cognition, such as stimuli, responses, and the consequences of these responses. Despite its contribution to the development of rigorous experimental techniques and to the domain of learning, behaviourism was limited in explaining many interesting dimensions of human cognition, such as the development of language.

Closely linked to the development of the computer, the field of cognitive psychology emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Briefly stated, cognitive psychology studies perception, memory, attention, pattern recognition, problem solving, language, cognitive development, etc, taking the computer both as a model for the way in which human cognitive activity takes place and a tool to specify the information-processing mechanisms that generate behaviour. Forerunners of the cognitive revolution include Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Noam Chomsky, George Miller, and Neisser. The publication of Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology in 1967 marks the emergence of this field of study.

In his later work, starting with Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (1976), Neisser expresses his worries about the exclusive focus of the field of cognitive psychology on computer modeling and information processing through laboratory experiments. He challenges cognitive psychology not to confine itself to the laboratory and rely on computer modeling, but move to the real world and study how people act or interact in it.

Neisser has the following four suggestions for cognitive psychologists:

“First, cognitive psychologists must make a greater effort to understand cognition as it occurs in the ordinary environment and in the context of natural purposeful activity. This would not mean an end to laboratory experiments, but a commitment to the study of variables that are ecologically important rather than those that are easily manageable. Second, it will be necessary to pay more attention to the details of the real world in which perceivers and thinkers live, and the fine structure of information that world makes available to them. We may have been lavishing too much effort on hypothetical models of the mind and not enough on analyzing the environment that the mind has been shaped to meet. Third, psychology must somehow come to terms with the sophistication and complexity of the cognitive skills that people are really capable of acquiring, and with the fact that these skills undergo systematic development. A satisfactory theory of human cognition can hardly be established by experiments that provide inexperienced subjects with brief opportunities to perform novel and meaningless tasks. Finally, cognitive psychologists must examine the implications of their work for more fundamental questions: human nature is too important to be left to the behaviourists and psychoanalysts.” (Neisser, Cognition and Reality, San Francisco: Freeman and Company, 1976, p.7-8)

Cognition and Reality and his proceeding work bring together and synthesize a wide range of theory and research from different branches of psychology, such as developmental and social psychology, thereby illustrating firsthand how such research is possible and illuminating the four guidelines.

In the first issue of the first volume of Philosophical Psychology (1988), Neisser published an article, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” in which he explores the kinds of information that specify the self. He argues that the forms of information that individuate the self are so different from one another that it is plausible to suggest that each establishes a different “self.” Neisser’s selves are the ecological self, or the self that perceives and who is situated in the physical world; the interpersonal self, or the self embedded in the social world who develops through intersubjectivity; the extended self, the self in time that is grounded on memory and anticipation; the private self, or the self exposed to private experiences that are not available to others; and the conceptual self, or the self that represents the self to the self by drawing on the properties of the self and the social and cultural context to which it belongs. He investigates each of these selves by appealing to a wide range of psychologists, e.g., Colwyn Trevarthen, Michael Tomasello, Eleanor Gibson, Peter Hobson, James Gibson, Endel Tulving, Jerome Bruner, Robyn Fivush, Peggy Miller, and Kenneth Gergen.

After this article on self-knowledge, Neisser edited several volumes, each focusing on these different selves, and including contributions from leading psychologists. In 1988 with Eugene Winograd, he edited Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory. In 1993, he edited The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge. In 1994, with Robyn Fivush, he edited The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Finally, in 1997, with David Jopling, he edited The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding.

In short, Neisser spearheaded multi-disciplinary research into the self, bringing together various research strands that highlight different dimensions of this complexity.

The volumes cited above exemplify Neisser’s own prescriptions for the field of cognitive psychology. First, the articles contained within them elaborate on the “selves” as we encounter them in the ordinary environment and in the context of their natural activities. Second, these works are attentive to the details of real world experiences of human beings and theorize the self by taking “real people” as a reference point, as opposed to hypothetical models of what selves might be, to use an expression used by Kathleen Wilkes. Third, the articles lay out the complexity of selfhood by considering its various aspects, e.g. ecological, intersubjective, etc., as well as how the self systematically develops from infancy, how it perceives the environment and processes information available to it, how it interacts with others, how it remembers, and how it reconstructs experiences in remembering. These are all grounded on various experiments from psychology. Finally, each volume has a chapter or two on the implications of the empirical research on the self to philosophical approaches to mind, self, and agency. For instance, in her chapter “The Self and Contemporary Theories of Ethics,” in The Conceptual Self in Context, Sheila Mason discusses the implications of empirical studies on the self and moral agency by considering three dominant approaches to moral theory in Anglo-American philosophy: the Rawlsian “justice model,” the “communitarian model,” developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, and the “ethics of care” developed by feminist theorists including Carol Gilligan, Annette Baier, and Seyla Benhabib. Mason argues that Neisser’s psychological theory of the self could be used to support the communitarian approaches to moral theory as well as the approaches developed by the proponents of the ethics of care who highlight the features of the intersubjective self.

My favorite aspect of Neisser’s work on the self is his consideration of mental disorder as a feature of the self. Early on, in “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge” he argues that even though the selves specified by five different kinds of information are not experienced as distinct, they differ in their developmental histories (for instance the ecological and intersubjective selves start at birth, whereas the conceptual self develops parallel to the development of language), and in the psychopathologies to which they are subject. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, originates in the extended self but gradually influences the other selves. Part of my current research is directed towards incorporating Neisser’s model of the self into scientific research on mental disorders and psychiatric taxonomy. I will share some of that work in this blog as it progresses.

I don’t believe that I have done justice to the richness of Neisser’s later work, but I take consolation in his comments on the humaneness of errors in human communication:

“Human communication offers unparalleled opportunities for understanding, but also false error, misunderstanding and deceit. Our dependence on it means that our understanding of one another and ourselves – or even the subjects like cognitive psychology – is never complete and often simply mistaken. On the other hand, the perceptual cycle tends to be self-correcting, and there is always more information available than has yet been used. The outcome of any single encounter between cognition and reality is unpredictable, but in the long run such encounters move us closer to truth.” (Neisser, Cognition and Reality, San Francisco: Freeman and Company, 1976, p.193-194)

New Philosophers' Carnival

2012-03-12T18:31:20Z

Here.

In Prison, Without Knowing Why

2012-02-27T15:32:15Z

This article in the New York Times caught my attention yesterday, partly because just a few weeks ago I commented on paper at the Central APA meeting on the punishment of late stage demented offenders:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html

The number of prisoners in the US with dementia is on the rise. The NYT article above notes that due to budget constraints, offenders whose cognition is so compromised that they cannot take care of themselves are being cared for by other prisoners. This is a risky solution at best.

I don’t think late stage demented prisoners should be in prison at all. Proportionality is a hallmark of retributive punishment, the primary principle of punishment according the US Model Penal Code. To be just, punishment must be proportional to either the crime committed or harm caused, and to the type of offender. A murderer deserves more punishment than a car thief. And a person who is insane or mentally incompetent is not as deserving of punishment as someone with normal mental capacity. This is because one with diminished mental capacities does not know what they were doing is wrong in the same way a competent person does, or they fail to fully understand the consequences of their acts.

This requirement of proportionality is not only relevant at the time the crime is committed. In Panetti v. Quarterman, the US Supreme Court refused to allow Panetti to be executed because he thought he was being executed for his religious beliefs, instead of his earlier crimes. According to the Court, retribution requires that capital punishment “…have the potential to make the offender recognize at last the gravity of his crime and to allow the community as a whole…to affirm its own judgment that the culpability of the prisoner is so serious that the ultimate penalty must be sought and imposed. The potential for a prisoner’s recognition of the severity of the offense and the objective of community vindication are called in question, however, if the prisoner’s mental state is so distorted by a mental illness that his awareness of the crime and punishment has little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared by the community as a whole.” That is, if the person doesn't understand that they are getting their "just deserts," they feel no connection to society's values or judgment of their acts.

For this reason, a late-stage demented offender who cannot remember their crime is no longer the person who deserves their just deserts. If he cannot link the suffering imposed by imprisonment to their earlier act, he is not enduring punishment proportional to their harmful act. I thus think where there is no basic comprehension of the connection between current punishment and an earlier crime, late stage demented offenders should be released or civilly committed.

For a fuller (more popularized) treatment of this topic using all the principles of punishment, see:

http://pleasandexcuses.brytter.com/posts/158

Any comments would be appreciated.

New Philosophers' Carnival

2012-02-20T21:20:22Z

Here.

4th Online Consciousness Conference

2012-02-17T22:30:01Z

has now officially begun and will run until March 2nd. Stop by http://consciousnessonline.com to get in on the action!

The Overflow Cup Runneth Over

2012-02-16T16:41:30Z

[cross-posted at Philosophy Sucks!]

There has been a lot of action on the overflow front lately! It started with papers by Ned Block and Dennett and Cohen in Trends in Cognitive Science (Block's paper criticized, among others, my recent paper on this stuff). These articles spawned a response by me here and here, which I still stand by. But now, having read the response from Kouider (which echoes his response given at his CUNY Cogsci talk) as well as the response from Overgaard and Block's response to both of them in addition to Lamme's response to Cohen and Dennett and their response in turn, it seems a couple points should be emphasized.

Accessed vs. Accessible

Block again and again says that his argument does not depend on inaccessible consciousness but rather on it being necessary that at any given moment there is some consciousness that is not accessed (but could be accessed at a different moment and so is not inaccessible tout court). There seem to me to be several issues worth considering here. First is that there is a conceptual question about what it means to say that something is accessible but not accessed. One might think that you cannot know that something is accessible without it actually being accessed. Block and others respond that something is accessible when, roughly, it is globally broadcast. But then we might wonder why we ought to think that being globally broadcast is equivalent to being accessible. Aren't their mental contents/states that are globally broadcast but which are not accessible? David Rosenthal has pressed this kind of question in conversation and I am not exactly sure what the neuropsychological answer is in this case. Is there any serious neuropsychological reason to think that global broadcasting is equivalent to being accessible? Second one might worry about the 'thin edge of the wedge' implications of Block's argument. If we can show that there is consciousness that is not accessed then it seems a short step to consciousness that is inaccessible in principle. And if it is true that there is a principled connection between the two then though it would be strictly speaking true that Block's argument did not rely on inaccessible consciousness it would none the less still be appropriate to give a reductio of his argued for view in terms of absurdities in the view it leads to. Finally, it does seem as though there is a principled connection between the two notions. Block argues that it is inappropriate to argue against the claim that there is inaccessible consciousness because he only requires that some consciousness not be accessed not inaccessible. But if one thinks just of a particular moment in consciousness leaving aside the next moment it is of course true that some consciousness is inaccessible. It is inaccessible at that moment. Block's view is that at any given moment in your daily conscious experience there is, necessarily, some parts of your conscious experience that are inaccessible at that moment. Given these considerations I don't think that the appeal to the distinction between not accessed and inaccessible helps make Block's case.

Kouider's Data Count Against His Own View?

Block has said several times that Kouider's own data counts against the no-overflow view. He says in his latest response,

According to the hypothesis Kouider et al. put forward, what is in consciousness before the cue are generic representations plus specific representations that are too sparse to provide the information necessary to explain partial report superiority. However, on their hypothesis one would expect a substantial error rate concerning the uncued items. However, Kouider et al. found the error rate to be small: their own evidence counts against them.

It really is not clear to me why Block thinks that one would expect a substantial error rate concerning the uncued items. He seems to be thinking that the no-overflow view is committed to only generic phenomenology before the cue but this is clearly not the case. It is compatible with the no overflow view that there is some specific phenomenology before the cue (just not all of the items as per overflow). But even if one is not moved by this there is an obvious problem with the argument. The no overflow position maintains that there is enough information unconsciously processed to do the task. Subjects don't make a lot of errors because that information was there whether consciously or not.

Falsifiability vs. Support by the Evidence

I think that Block is right that we do not want falsifiability as a=our standard here and that we need to evaluate theories holistically based on the widest swath of available evidence and theories available to us. Block thinks that there is some evidence that the kinds of unconscious processes necessary to sustain the no overflow view aren't there. But this evidence is very weak and the jury is still out on this issue. In general the science is all over the place on this issue. There is partial evidence on both sides and no theory comes out on top on the basis of current scientific evidence alone. Hopefully this will change in the nearish future but at this point this is where it is. Given this one might think that we should be agnostic about whether overflow is true or not but this doesn't seem right to me. The overflow hypothesis is radical in that it postulates a kind of consciousness that cannot in principle be accessed (at that moment) and yet which is also for me in the way that normal accessed consciousness is for me. That is, I experience the unaccessed consciousness as mine without being aware that I do. How this could be so is deeply mysterious and perhaps in principle untestable with any known scientific methods. Barring prejudice in its favor we would need strong evidence indeed to accept such a notion.