Brains

Philosophers' Carnival #103

2010-02-01T19:13:00Z

The Phenomenal Qualities Project Podcasts

2010-01-30T14:10:00Z

via Sam Coleman;

*The Phenomenal Qualities Project*

Podcasts now available on the Project website-

Featuring:
Tim Crane, David Papineau, Philip Goff
Jerry Valberg, Andreas Hutteman, Sam Coleman

on such topics as:

The nature of phenomenal concepts, perception,
consciousness and metaphysics, intentionalism,
qualia, physicalism.

Podcasts available at:
http://phenomenalqualities.wordpress.com/phenomenal-podcasts/

See also our uploaded papers, and photos from recent events.

--
-The Phenomenal Qualities Project is funded by the AHRC-

http://phenomenalqualities.wordpress.com/
For more information, or to join our mailing list
please contact Sam Coleman (S.Coleman@herts.ac.uk)

Improving on Heterophenomenology?

2010-01-28T20:38:00Z

I've written a paper comparing and contrasting Dennett's Heterophenomenology and the "self-measurement methodology of fist-person data". The latter is an account of first-person data and their use in science that I've been articulating over the last few years. Needless to say, I argue that my account is better than Heterophenomenology, but I also try to make clear that I agree with Heterophenomenology on some important points.

Abstract: Heterophenomenology is a third-person methodology proposed by Daniel Dennett for using first-person reports as scientific evidence. I argue that heterophenomenology can be improved by making six changes: (i) setting aside consciousness, (ii) including other sources of first-person data besides first-person reports, (iii) abandoning agnosticism as to the truth value of the reports in favor of the most plausible assumptions we can make about what can be learned from the data, (iv) interpreting first-person reports (and other first-person behaviors) directly in terms of target mental states rather than in terms of beliefs about them, (v) dropping any residual commitment to incorrigibility of first-person reports, and (vi) recognizing that third-person methodology does have positive effects on scientific practices. When these changes are made, heterophenomenology turns into the self-measurement methodology of first-person data that I have defended in previous papers.

Some other pieces of my account may be found here, here, and here.

Today the new paper was accepted for a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies edited by Richard Brown. If anyone has comments, they would be very welcome. (Brown has requested the final version ASAP.)

Attention and Mental Paint

2010-01-27T23:27:00Z

(cross-posted at Philosophy Sucks!)

The NYU Mind and Language seminar has started up again with a really excellent line up. I hope to blog about them as they happen...

Last Monday I attended Ned Block's session on his paper Attention and Mental Paint. I have talked about an earlier version of this before. The basic idea comes from figures like figure A below. if one fixates (stares) ate the center and, while keeping one's gaze fixed, moves one's attention to an individual disk that disk will appear darker. After a bit of practice one can darken any disk one wants by moving one's attention around. Go ahead, give it a try!

Recently a psychologist, Marisa Carrasco, has run experiments trying to quantify this effect. Below is a reproduction of the stimulus. Here the two patches differ in contrast by 8% yet when one fixates on the center and attends to the 22% patch one will judge it to be the same contrast as the 28% patch.

Block wants to use these findings as the basis for an argument against both direct realism and representationism. The basic argument goes as follows.

First we focus only on two cases. The first case is when we fixate and attend to the center. In that condition subjects get the judgment about contrast right (i.e. they judge that the left patch is lower in contrast). In the second condition we fixate on the center but attend to the left patch. In that condition people get the judgment incorrect (i.e. they judge the two patches to be the same contrast.
The second step is his claim that there is no reason to think that either of the two cases above are illusionary. Both are veridical.
If both experiences are veridical then the thing that they are experiences of must differ in some property but all of the properties of the objects are the same. The only thing that has changed is that one has moved one's attention from center to right.
Therefore there must be mental paint, or non-representational features to our experience (the anti-representational conclusion) or a mental aspect of mental experience (the anti-direct realism conclusion)

a lot of the discussion at the session focused on whether or not there was an illusion at work here. Block claims that in both cases talked about above the perception is veridical. Why? His idea is that both of the experiences play the same functional role and so are accurate. The pro-illusion folk (Jesse Prinz was in this camp) argued that when you attend to something you represent that thing more veridically and so the condition where one fixates and attends to the center is illusionary (Jesse preferred 'distorted'). Block protested that one could just as well say that attention distorted, or magnified, the scene and so the fact that one has access to more information when one attends is not by itself an argument that the experience is more veridical. Some other issues came up about various responses direct realists or representationalism could make.

However, I am less interested in that issue as I am in the issue of whether there is an argument here against anything like the kind of higher-order thought theory that I am fond of (i.e. one very much like David Rosenthal's). On this kind of view we have two distinct kind of mental representations. At the first-order level we have the mental states that represent the sensible qualities. So, when I am seeing red I am in a mental state that has a property, call it red*, the represents physical red. However the kind of representation that is going one here is not intentional or conceptual. It is homomorphic. Red* is the property which is related to green* and pink* in a way that mirrors the relations between physical red, physical green, and physical pink. The starred properties can occur both consciously and unconsciously. When they occur unconsciously there is nothing that it is like for the organism in which they occur. They become conscious when I am aware of myself as being in a red* state. According to Rosenthal I do this by having a thought which deploys the concepts Red. So on this view the higher-order thought is representational in the traditional sense and it is the thing which is responsible for the phenomenology of the experience.

So is there mental pain on this view? Well, as long as one agrees that there can be unconscious sensory states with no phenomenology (a big step!) then Rosenthal's first-order sensory qualities will count as mental paint. They are not intentional and they are mental. But they do not play a role in determining the phenomenology (except in the sense that we get the concepts we deploy in the higher-order thought from them) and so if we restrict ourselves only to conscious experiences it does look like Rosenthal denies the existence of mental paint. A conscious experience of red is constituted by a 'I am seeing red' thought which is completely intentional/representational. So then does Ned's argument cut any ice against Rosenthal's account of conscious experience?

It is not clear that it does. Ned's argument gets its force from the claim that the thing being represented would have to be different because all conscious experiences are or represent just the actual properties that the object actually has. But on Rosenthal's view we have the first and second order mental states. So, one could hold that there is some change in the first-order representation of the two patches or one could hold that the first-order representations are the same in the two cases and what changes is the way in which we are conscious of them. In talking briefly about this with David he seems to think that attention changes the first-order state whereas I seemed to think it was teh content of the higher-order state which changed. But since we are talking about conscious experiences here and it is the higher-order state that accounts for the conscious phenomenology the difference has to be in the way that we are conscious of the patch in the two cases...this may be because of attention in a causal sense but it is the content of the higher-order state that has to account for the difference in the phenomenology.

reading group

2010-01-26T17:10:00Z

Hi Folks,

I'm interested in doing a reading group on Daniel Hutto's book, "Folk Psychological Narratives." In the book Hutto challenges, and offers an alternative to, mindreading accounts of social cognition. His negative arguments against mindreading accounts (Theory Theory, Simulation Theory, and hybrid accounts) include the charge that they cannot adequately explain how we develop mental state concepts, they erroneously presuppose that social cognition is a "spectator sport," and they greatly overestimate the importance and prevalence of mindreading. His positive account includes an emphasis on embodied cognition, direct perception, and the Narrative Practices Hypothesis, Hutto's novel contribution to the debate. Hutto's arguments are interesting and formidable challenges to the standard cognitive science picture of folk psychology.

If there is enough interest, I'd love to have the reading group on Brains with Brains readers. Let me know in the comments section whether you are interested in participating in this reading group.

shannon

UPDATE: We will start the reading group at the beginning of March. If you're interested in joining the group and haven't already contacted me, email me at spaulding@wisc.edu and I'll add you to the email list.

Brains Development

2010-01-25T20:04:00Z

Brains has experienced tremendous growth over the past few months. First, welcome to the many new contributors. Second, the site averages over 200 unique visitors per day -- triple the amount of traffic in September 2009. Thanks to all contributors, old and new, for increasing Brains' popularity.

There is evidence that Brains is a leading blog in its area. For one thing, it's the first link to appear when you google "philosophy of mind blog". For another thing, it was recently listed among the Top 15 Brain Blogs of the Year.

And following up on an old suggestion by Marcin Milkowski, we now have a favicon next to Brains' url!

Firefox, Opera, and Safari users should see the favicon when the page opens. Internet Explorer users may have to delete their temporary internet files in order to see it. Here is how to delete those files:

1. In the Internet Explorer Browser, click Tools, then select Internet Options.
2. In the pop-up window under Browsing History, click Delete.
3. Select the Temporary Internet files and Cookies checkboxes, then click Delete.

If you still can't see the favicon, feel free to contact me at jlv4z3 {at} umsl {dot} edu.

CO2 Program Finalized

2010-01-21T22:23:00Z

I am pleased to announce that the program for the Second Online
Consciousness Conference has been finalized. It is available here:
http://consciousnessonline.wordpress.com . I hope you
will join us *February 19th-March 5th* for what promises to be a very
exciting conference. Please post and distribute widely; apologies for cross
posting.

Philosophers' Carnival #102

2010-01-11T15:22:00Z

Here.

New reviews of Doing without Concepts

2010-01-09T17:07:00Z

In addition to the BBS target article, the symposium in Dialogue (for which Gualtiero's excellent paper has been written) and to the reviews mentioned in an earlier post (Mind, Metapyschology), here are some new reviews of Doing without Concepts that might interest some of you: Andrew Woodfield (Bristol, philosophy) has an interesting review in Analysis; Hugo Mercier (UPenn, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program) has a detailed review in Biology & Philosophy; and Marco Fenici reviews the book in Humana Mente.

Laws of Selection?

2010-01-03T16:57:00Z

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s much anticipated book “What Darwin Got Wrong” is coming out in February. I am sure many here followed the heated discussion prompted by Fodor’s LRB article “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” (available here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/jerry-fodor/why-pigs-dont-have-wings), and perhaps many have read Fodor’s (still unpublished?) manuscript “Against Darwinism” (available on his faculty page: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/Fodor/cv.html).

So what did Darwin get wrong, according to Fodor? One of the arguments developed in “Against Darwinism” goes like this:

P1: If the theory of natural selection explains the distribution of phenotypic traits in a biological population, then there are laws about traits-that-are-selected-for as such.

P2: There are no laws about traits-that-are-selected-for as such.

C: Hence, the theory of natural selection doesn’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in a biological population.

Regarding P1, Fodor has it that the theory of natural selection aspires to a kind of generality that requires laws (or, at any rate, it needs laws if the theory is to do more than provide historical narratives which reconstruct causal chains leading to particular occurrences). Regarding P2, Fodor argues that whether a trait increases fitness is massively context sensitive, and so it is highly unlikely that there will be any laws concerning the fitness of traits as such (and thus traits that are selected for as such).

Now, Fodor has no objections to historical narratives, but he thinks that if there are no nomologically necessary generalizations about the mechanisms of adaptation as such, then natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a creature flourishes in a certain environment, then there must be something about that creature or the environment (or both) in virtue of which it does so. Well, duh.

To which I am inclined to respond as follows: does anyone really think that the adequacy of the theory of evolution of by natural selection depends on there being laws of selection? At its bare-bones, the theory says that when you have variation plus inheritance plus competition, you are likely to get evolution. This isn’t a “law” of selection (as Fodor understands laws of selection), for it is completely silent about which, when, and why traits are fitness enhancing. To answer the latter questions, you actually have to look at the details of particular cases. But there is no reason to suspect (at the outset of investigation) that any nomologically necessary generalizations about traits will emerge, after having examined the cases. Should this generate Sturm and Drang in anyone, though? Am I missing something?

epistemic modals conference announcement

2010-01-01T19:35:00Z

Epistemic Modals

April 16-18, 2010

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Lincoln, NE

Speakers:

Keith DeRose, “Accommodation and Epistemic Possibilities Nobody Knows to be False”

Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies, TBA

Angelika Kratzer, “Epistemic Modals: Embedded, Modified, and Plain”

John MacFarlane, TBA

Robert Stalnaker, “‘If’s, ‘May’s, and ‘Might’s”

Eric Swanson, “Constraint Semantics and the Language of Subjective Uncertainty”

Conference organizers:

Janice Dowell

John Gibbons

Registration required, no fee

To register, please contact either Janice Dowell (janicedowell@hotmail.com) or John Gibbons (jgibbons2@unl.edu).

For conference updates, please check

http://www.unl.edu/philosop/speaker/speaker/ChambersConference.shtml

Should Graduate Students Publish Outside Philosophy Journals?

2009-12-29T20:43:00Z

In response to the earlier thread on publishing while in graduate school, a student at a PGR top 40 department wrote me as follows:

I'm likely to go on the job market in two years, and as such, I was particularly interested (and helped!) by your advice on publishing while in graduate school. I have a few papers that I hope to submit for publication within the next few months, but having read your advice, I now realize I ought to be more careful as to where I submit the papers.

I had hoped, especially given your interdisciplinary interests, that you might be able to add another discussion on the blog:

*How do philosophers view publications in journals outside of philosophy?*

This question is important for many graduate students who work at the intersection of philosophy of science and the special science in which they are interested. For me, given that some of my work is rather technical (and as result, seems more suited for journals in machine learning and artificial intelligence), I'd like to know whether my chances of employment in a philosophy department would be hurt by, say, having two squarely philosophical publications and one publication in a journal devoted to artificial intelligence, when I go on the job market.

One publication in an artificial intelligence or other special science journal combined with two in philosophy journals would not hurt you, I believe. It may even help you by enhancing your bona fide scientific/technical credentials. But if the ratios were reversed, or worse, if all your publications were in non-philosophy journals, then some people might raise their eyebrows.

Caveat 1: for present purposes, I think we may count even highly technical logic journals as among the philosophy journals. Philosophers seem to think that logic, including highly technical mathematical logic, is still a branch of philosophy.

Caveat 2: what I am saying applies only to publications derived from your graduate work in philosophy; if you publish in some other discipline based on work you did prior to or parallel to your graduate work in philosophy (e.g., while pursuing a MA in a special science), that should not hurt you at all.

In my experience, interdisciplinary reach is easy to praise but difficult to reward. If you publish in other disciplines, in principle everyone thinks you are great. In practice, however, your publications outside your discipline may fail to be counted towards your advancement within your discipline (hire, tenure, etc.). If you publish too much outside philosophy (or whatever your discipline is), you may even be suspected of not being a *real* philosopher (or whatever your discipline is). This seems to be even more true in the sciences than in philosophy.

A related example: when I went on the job market in 2003, a rumor got back to me that I was not perceived as a *real* philosopher of mind but more of a historian. This in spite of the fact that I had three publications in philosophy journals and none in history journals! (However, two of my three publications did have a somewhat historical theme, for somewhat accidental reasons, and my Ph.D. was from a History and Philosophy of Science department. Those were the likely sources of me being perceived as a historian.) This perception might have hurt my chances to get philosophy of mind jobs, which is what I was applying for. I am not complaining about my job market experience, where I turned out to be quite lucky and very satisfied with the outcome. The point is simply that these effects based on your early publications do seem to occur and may distort how people perceive you as a job candidate.

Can you do anything to offset these phenomena? Here are a few tips (as usual, these are not written in stone):

1. Aim for a healthy ratio of, say, 2 philosophy publications to each nonphilosophy publication.

2. Even if you have a somewhat "non-purely-philosophical" article, consider submitting it to a philosophy journal that is open to interdisciplinary research (many philosophy of science journals are like that) or to a logic journal before you submit it to a non-philosophy journal.

3. When you submit to non-philosophy journals or non-purely-philosophical journals, consider aiming for journals that are interdisciplinary or are known to publish philosophy articles (e.g., a philosopher of mind might consider a journal like Behavioral and Brain Sciences, although that would require having quite a spectacular article).

Who else has thoughts on this? How do philosophers examining job candidates view publications outside philosophy?

Does culture accelerate biological evolution?

2009-12-26T17:30:00Z

On the Human has an interesting target article by Mark Stoneking, Professor of evolutionary genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antrhopology, on a question at the border of the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of biology: Does culture accelerate biological evolution or rather buffer our species from new selective pressures?

Generally, On the Human has had interesting guests (Doris, Rosenberg) with a good cast of invited commentators. Many of the topics discussed here should be of interest for the readers of Brains.

Edouard

The Folk Concept of Happiness, Revisted

2009-12-26T03:36:00Z

Dan Haybron's recent post on 'The Folk Concept of Happiness' brings up an interesting question that I think deserves some further discussion. Is people's ordinary concept of happiness a purely psychological one, or is it wrapped up in some way with irreducibly normative or moral issues?

To address this question, Dan ran a very nice experimental study. Subjects were given a story about a person who is deluded in such a way that he thinks everything in his life is going well even though everything is, in fact, going catastrophically poorly. Faced with this case, subjects said that the person did not have well-being but that he actually was happy. Dan therefore concludes that "'happy' is primarily a psychological term in folk usage."

But, interestingly enough, Sven Nyholm recently ran another study that got just the opposite sort of result. He randomly assigned subjects to receive either a story about someone who was doing something morally good (working as a doctor in a field hospital in Africa) or about someone who was doing something morally wrong (working as a doctor in a Nazi death camp). Subjects in these two conditions were given exactly the same information about the person's psychological states: that he often found his work upsetting but that, at the end of the day, he found a deep sense of fulfillment in the thought that he was contributing to an important cause. Nonetheless, subjects said that the person was happy when he did something morally good but not when he did something morally bad. Sven therefore concludes that moral judgments actually do influence people's ascriptions of happiness.

I am really puzzled about what is going on here, and I'd love to hear any thoughts you all might have about how to go after these questions.

[p.s. Phillips, Misenheimer and I recently ran a study which seems to support the view that moral judgments do play a role in intuitions about happiness (but not in intuitions about unhappiness).]

An exciting development in memory research

2009-12-25T00:43:00Z

Here

Experience as action -- the paper

2009-12-24T20:45:00Z

Special one time offer for Brains readers!!!!!

People who have weighed in on my earlier post might be interested to check out the MS I've just wrapped up: here. Comments gratefully acknowledged.

Philosophers' Carnival #101

2009-12-21T13:14:00Z

Here.

Cognitive Phenomenology

2009-12-18T21:35:00Z

(cross-posted at Philosophy Sucks!)

Via David Rosenthal-

There was a conference entitled “Theory Of Consciousness In Analytic Phenomenology And Philosophy Of Mind,”
at the University of Bern, Switzerland, May 27-29, 2009.
Podcasts of the talks are, for the next 2-3 years, at
https://cast.switch.ch/vod/channels/g3bo2419i
Talks are by David M. Rosenthal, Gianfranco Soldati, Andrea Borsato, David Woodruff Smith, Eduard Marbach, Sebastian Leugger, Dan Zahavi, Uriah Kriegel, Michelle Montague, and Galen Strawson.
The program is at
http://www.philosophie.ch/events/esap/es_single.php?action=date&eventid=299

I only listened to David R, Uriah, and Galen's talks and the sound quality is not always even but there is a lot of interesting stuff going on...well worth the listen.

This is something that I am very glad to see. I am definitely one of those who thinks that cognitive phenomenology is real (and I think David Rosenthal is committed to it so it was interesting to hear him at this conference) though I don’t think that my view is the standard one. I, like Strawson, want to distinguish between the traditional kind of externalist content (though I, like Devitt, also allow inferential content) and the cognitive phenomenology. I take the cognitive phenomenology to go with the mental attitude that we take towards the traditional content. Let’s take belief, desire, and intention. These are the basic kinds of cognitive mental attitudes (whether there are more or if all other reduce to combinations of these three is a contentious issue…I take no stand on that here). Each one of these is really the name for a family of mental attitudes. So for belief we have a range between complete skepticism to mild doubt to probably true to complete certitude. What these have in common is a subjective sense of confidence as to whether something is actually true. To believe that p is to be subjectively certain that p is true, or to be convinced that p is true. Likewise, to doubt that p is to be subjectively uncertain that p is true. Likewise to want something is to have a subjective longing for it and to have an intention to A is to feel subjectively resolved to do A.

This explains all of the relevant data; for instance one main line of evidence for cognitive phenomenology is the experience that one has when one understands a sentence in a language one speaks. I agree that there is something that it is like for the person who understands a sentence of English but I claim that this is the result of the person coming to have some conscious mental attitude held towards the traditional content. So, when Galen tells me that the Earth weighs four times more than the Moon, I might feel surprise and wonder whether that were really true. Of course one might just ‘entertain’ the content but even here one take a qualitatively neutral mental attitude towards the content. This also allows us to explain why it is so many people dismiss cognitive phenomenology. Since my belief that 2+2=4 and my belief that New York City is on the East Coast of the United States of America are both things that I take to be beyond dispute they will feel subjectively similar when I introspect. Since I am looking for a phenomenological difference between the two thoughts I overlook their similarity. Interestingly this is supported by the reports of some schizophrenics who say that they can distinguish their delusional beliefs from their ‘normal’ ones by how they feel.

What then are we to say about unconscious beliefs, desires, and intentions? My claim is that conscious beliefs are just are the beliefs which we are conscious of ourselves as having and so is a higher-order view about consciousness. To have a conscious belief that p if just for one to have a higher-order state to the effect that one believes p. One feels subjectively certain about P just because one is conscious of oneself as believing P. When the belief is unconscious I have the same mental attitude held towards the traditional content but I am no longer conscious of myself as believing it and so there is nothing that it is like for me to believe it. I think that we can at this point give a homomorphism account of the mental attitudes. The mental attitudes come in families and there will be similarities and differences between these families that preserve the similarities and differences between the illocutionary forces of utterances used to express the mental attitude+traditional content…but that is another story….

Call for Papers: The Second Annual Online Consciousness Conference February 2010

2009-12-18T20:55:00Z

Call for Papers: The Second Annual Online Consciousness Conference February 2010

Papers in any area of consciousness studies are welcome and should be roughly 3,000-4,000 words, suitable for blind review, and sent to consciousnessonline@gmail.com <mailto:consciousnessonline@gmail.com> by *January 5th 2009*. Those interested in being referees or commentators should also contact consciousnessonline@gmail.com. Authors of accepted papers are urged to make, or have made, some kind of audio/visual presentation (e.g. narrated powerpoint or video of talk) though this is not required to present.

More details can be found at the conference website: consciousnessonline.wordpress.com

It was a great conference last year and looks like it'll be a great conference this year.

Two Kinds of Concept: Implicit and Explicit

2009-12-16T14:53:00Z

I've written a paper on concepts, which is forthcoming in a symposium in the journal Dialogue on Eduard Machery's book Doing without Concepts. In my new paper, I update, refine, and defend the view proposed in Piccinini and Scott (2006), "Splitting Concepts".

In the new paper, I argue that there are two kinds of concept: explicit concepts and implicit concepts. Implicit concepts are an implicit version of what psychologists call prototypes, although implicit concepts (unlike prototypes according to most theories) may encode some causal information about categories. Explicit concepts may encode statistical and causal information, but more importantly, they may encode syntactic information, definitional information, and whatever else is needed for the language faculty (in the narrow sense) to process them. Explicit concepts are necessary for explicit cognition – the distinctively human ability to use language, represent unobservable, nonexistent, abstract, and ad hoc aspects of the world, and perform linguistic inferences.

As always, any comments would be welcome.