Brains

CFP: First Annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conference

2013-05-16T18:47:43Z

I am pleased to announce this call-for-papers for the first annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conference (PCPC), which will be held at the University of Tampa from Friday October 18th-Sunday October 20th, 2013. This conference will be unique in several respects:

Although attendance at the conference and participating as session chairs or commentators will be open to all members of the profession, paper presenters must be early-career philosophers -- basically, anyone who doesn't have tenure (e.g. graduate students, post-docs, VAP, TT Assistant Profs, independent scholars, etc.)

Due to the kinds of travel-funding issues that early-career philosophers often face, several paper sessions (the exact number of which will be determined later) will be reserved for Skype presentations in which the author will be projected, and field audience questions, in real time over the internet.

Although commentators and audience members are encouraged to present objections to papers, a guiding aim of the conference will beconstructive criticism, i.e. helping authors to improve problems (e.g. by not only raising objections, but offering and discussing possible solutions).

Because successfully navigating the publishing world is one of the most difficult capacities for early-career philosophers to develop, and typical conference-length papers are too short (3,000 words) to publish, we will welcome submissions the length of any typical journal article (20-30 pages double-spaced) -- the aim being to help early-career philosophers develop full-length papers into publishable quality. As a rule of thumb, the longer the paper, the higher the standards for acceptance to the conference. Extremely long papers are discouraged.

In order to defray costs of attendance (once again out of concern for the needs of early-career scholars), there will be no registration fee, and consequently no official banquet, snacks, etc. Tampa is awesome, and there are many affordable places to meet, eat, and congregate around the university.

We hope to stream all talks live via the internet and, if time permits, take some audience questions from internet viewers by email.

To submit a paper to present at the PCPC, please email the following to marvan@ut.edu by July 1, 2013: (1) a blinded (i.e. anonymized) paper, (2) a separate title page with the author's name, contract information, and brief paper abstract, and (3) a statement concerning whether you intend to attend the conference in person or only via Skype. Decision emails indicating whether your paper has been accepted will be sent out around August 1, 2013. Finally, please bear the following in mind:

In order to ensure that the conference is well-attended, there will be relatively few Skype sessions -- so the probability that your paper will be accepted is higher should you state in your submission email that you can attend in person.
Submission of a paper comprises a tacit agreement to serve as a commentator or session chair should your paper be accepted and you accept the invitation to present.

Philosophers' Carnival #151

2013-05-15T11:38:04Z

Here.

CFP: Wide Cognition and Social Intelligence

2013-05-12T16:02:57Z

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland - August 19th to 23rd, 2013

Invited key-speakers

Steve Butterfill (Warwick)

Joel Krueger (Copenhagen)

Myriam Kyselo (San Sebastian)

Tad Zawidzki (George Washington)

Call for papers

The theme of the workshop is the significance of wide cognition – which is embodied, enacted, extended, embedded, and distributed cognition – for social intelligence.

Wide cognition has, over the last couple of decades, become more and more widespread in all areas of cognitive science – from neuroscience to cognitive psychology to cognitive linguistics to philosophy to computer science and robotics. Unlike traditional frameworks for cognitive science, these approaches do not explain cognitive phenomena solely in terms of the manipulation of (language-like) internal representations but stress that (1) minds can extend into the environment; (2) agents are cognitive insofar as they are embodied; (3) their cognitive scaffolding is enacted, or constructed, in an active fashion; (4) cognitive phenomena are always interactions with the environment; (5) and cognitive acts are often paradigmatically distributed among multiple agents. The workshop’s aim is to explore the relevance of this body of research for understanding social intelligence. In particular, its reliance on environmental design, bodily interaction, shared cognitive and symbolic tools, and complex schemas of collaboration.

The workshop will also feature discussion of a white paper of the topic that is being prepared in collaboration with the SINTELNET coordination network (sintelnet.eu).

Abstracts

Abstracts of less than 500 words will be accepted till May 30th. All submissions should be made through the easychair website. Abstracts will be evaluated on a first come basis so early submission is strongly encouraged in order to avoid missing out on available spots.

More info on Kazimierz workshops here.

Program of Perception and Concepts (Riga, May 16-18)

2013-05-06T02:53:14Z

The program of the Conference Perception and Concepts, organized by Jesse Prinz and myself, can be found there. This will be a fantastic conference.

Join us if you are around!

Edouard Machery

CFP: "Pictorial and Spatial Representation"

2013-05-05T12:36:50Z

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Pictorial and Spatial Representation"

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Guest editors: Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg

Deadline for submissions: 1 August 2013

The Theme

Pictorial and spatial representation play an essential role in a vast range of human communication and reasoning, exemplified by the widespread use of diagrams, maps, pictures, iconic gestures, comics, and film.

In this special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, we seek to bring together work from philosophy and cognitive science (including psychology, linguistics, and computer science) that breaks new ground in the study of spatial representation generally. Recent developments in these fields set the stage for new and exciting perspectives on this poorly understood, but philosophically and scientifically central subject matter.

The primary subject of this special issue is the public use of pictorial and spatial representations, including uses in a variety of functional roles, such as communication, externalized reasoning and proof, planning, and navigation. We will exclude research on the more familiar subject of spatial cognition, including perception and mental imagery, except insofar as it is related to public representational phenomena. We encourage submissions which pinpoint specific media, but which also address fundamental semantic concepts like content, veridicality, and validity as they apply to the variety of spatial representations. In addition, we welcome contributions which draw connections between contemporary philosophical and scientific research, as well as work which fosters rigorous engagement with empirical results and formal methods.

Potential articles might discuss:

The analysis of diagrams, pictures, or maps in terms of:
- Syntax, semantics, or pragmatics;
- Content, reference, or veridicality;
- Validity, reasoning, or proof.
The cognitive, communicative, and practical functions of spatial representations (including pictorial representations).
Taxonomies of spatial representations.
The difference between spatial representations and linguistic representation.
The relationship between cognition or perception and spatial representation.

Invited Authors

TArticles by the following authors will be featured:

Patrick Maynard (Western Ontario)
Sun-Joo Shin (Yale)
Matthew Stone (Rutgers)
Barbara Tversky (Columbia)

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 1 August 2013
Target publication date: 31 March 2014

How to submit

Prospective authors should register at: www.editorialmanager.com/ropp to obtain a login and select Pictorial and Spatial Representation as the article type. Manuscripts should be approximately 8,000 words and conform to 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, which focuses on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive science. The journal's aim 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 papers.

Contact

For any queries, please email the guest editors: valeria.giardino@gmail.com and gabriel.greenberg@gmail.com.

CFP: Episodic Memory

2013-04-21T14:18:19Z

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Guest editor: Denis Perrin

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2013

Theme: Episodic memory is a fundamental form of human memory, the hallmark of which is the reliving of past experiences as a result of mental time travel towards one’s own past. As such, it plays a basic role in personal identity, time consciousness, action, and the grounding of knowledge. In the field of psychology, current research programs have revived classical accounts of that cognitive ability, such as attributionalism or constructivism, relying on well-established defining features, such as mental time travel. They have also brought out new features of episodic memory that make it necessary to go beyond traditional accounts. Suffice it to mention the dependence of episodic memory on the segmentation of the flux of consciousness in events, or the role of episodic memory in episodic future thinking. Those advances foster current philosophical works on remembering, by providing new empirical data and theoretical frameworks that are likely to challenge existing conceptions. But they also call for a philosophical assessment, given that psychology itself draws on distinctively philosophical frameworks to account for the data (e.g. inferentialism or reflexivism). This special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, devoted to episodic memory, encourages contributions seeking to show how psychological studies of episodicity (be they cognitive, developmental, clinical or neurological) renew the philosophical approach to remembering, or putting forward new conceptual analyses aimed at criticizing or further developing the existing accounts of episodic memory in psychology.

Key questions:

The distinctive subjective experience proper to episodic memory, that is:

how and why episodic memories are about the remembering subject;
the subjective time of episodic navigation;
the role played by semantic and procedural memories in the subjective experience of episodic memory.

The epistemology of episodic memory:

the information contents provided by episodic memory, and how they differ from the contents of perception, imagination or semantic memories;
the relation of episodic memory to truth and falsehood.

The functional roles of episodic memory with respect to:

personal and social identity;
knowledge and beliefs;
action and reality monitoring;
phylogenetic evolution and episodic future thought.

Guest authors:

Dorothea Debus (University of York)
Jordi Fernandez (University of Adelaide)
Christoph Hoerl (University of Warwick)
James Russell (University of Cambridge)

Important Dates:

September 30, 2013: Submission deadline
April 31, 2013: Target publication date

How to submit: Prospective authors should register at: www.editorialmanager.com/ropp to obtain a login and select Episodic memory as the article type. Manuscripts should be approximately 10,000 words and conform to the author guidelines available on the journal's website.

Philosophers' Carnival #150

2013-04-17T20:15:19Z

A special sesquicentmensial edition, compiled by Eric Schwitzgebel.

CFP: The Hard Problem of Consciousness, Special Issue of Topoi

2013-04-16T03:20:26Z

apologies for x-postings

CFP: The Hard Problem of Consciousness, Special Issue of Topoi

In addition to the below CFP we are also seeking to expand our pool of reviewers for this issue. If you are available to review a paper please contact the guest editors named below.

Much work in the philosophy of consciousness begins with the premise that consciousness offers a uniquely Hard Problem. This premise can lead to radical speculative metaphysics such as pan-protopsychism (Chalmers) or epiphenomenal property dualism (early Jackson). It can also be used by researchers to justify ignoring advances in consciousness studies from other disciplines. However, not everyone agrees that consciousness poses a Hard Problem and instead offer explanations of consciousness in general (Clark, Dennett, Irvine, O'Brien and Opie, Prinz) or particular conscious experiences (G.Carruthers, de Vignemont, Frith and Hohwy). Given that the existence of a Hard Problem is controversial and that it is supposed to lead to radical metaphysical conclusions we would expect that advocates of the existence of a Hard Problem would have considerable arguments in favour of their view. Often, however, the nature of problem is treated as self-evident and not argued for, despite the controversy. In this issue we wish to ask what arguments, if any, can be put forward that consciousness really does pose a uniquely hard problem and how they fare in the face of conceptual and empirical scrutiny.

Additionally work in developing theories of consciousness has led to a proliferation of hypotheses regarding the nature of consciousness. These hypotheses are motivated by empirical discoveries in numerous fields such as attention (Prinz), psychophysics (Dennett, Clark) and delusions research or psychiatry more broadly (Frith and Hohwy). As these hypotheses are developed implications for how consciousness is to be characterised emerge.

These considerations suggest a variety of questions to be posed regarding the existence of a Hard Problem. Here are some (non-prescriptive examples):

Are there good a priori reasons to believe that consciousness offers a uniquely “Hard Problem” and so demands a radically different explanation to other mental phenomena?

Is the characterisation of consciousness as ‘Hard’ plausible in light of theoretical advances? If not how is the problem of consciousness to be characterised; i.e. what is the explanatory target of a theory of consciousness?

What do various empirical discoveries about consciousness tell us about the nature of the problem we are investigating? Is it plausible that consciousness poses a hard problem in light of discoveries in attention, psychophysics or any other research?

For this issue we are interested in papers which address the status of the Hard Problem as a characterisation of consciousness from a rigorous multi-disciplinary perspective. Contributions should be accessible to anyone within the broad (multi-disciplinary) field of consciousness studies. We are open to new empirical and theoretical advances that specially address the status of the Hard problem. The guiding question for the issue is only: is the characterisation of consciousness as posing a uniquely Hard Problem reasonable?

Deadline for initial submission of papers February 28 2014

Submissions must be made using Topoi’s online submission system at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/topo/

When submitting your paper, please make sure to select “S.I.: Hard problem of consciousness (Carruthers/Schier)” in the scroll-down menu for Article Type. In preparing your article for submission, follow the guidelines available from the journal website, http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245 , under Information for Guest Editors and Authors –> Manuscript Preparation.

If you have any questions please contact the guest editors:

Glenn Carruthers: glenn.rj.carruthers@gmail.com

Elizabeth Schier: lizschier@gmail.com

More on the Obama administration's brain-mapping initiative

2013-04-02T13:01:51Z

Here:

President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.
A senior administration scientist compared the new initiative to the Human Genome Project, in that it is directed at a problem that has seemed insoluble up to now: the recording and mapping of brain circuits in action in an effort to “show how millions of brain cells interact.”
It is different, however, in that it has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than year.
...
As part of the initiative, the president will require a study of the ethical implications of these sorts of advances in neuroscience.
While news of the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by many researchers in fields as diverse as neuroscience, nanotechnology and computer science, there are skeptics.
“The underlying assumptions about ‘mapping the entire brain’ are very controversial,” said Donald Stein, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta. He said changes in brain chemistry were “not likely to be able to be imaged by the current technologies that these people are proposing.”
Emphasizing the development of technologies first, he said, is not a good approach. “I think the monies could be better spent by first figuring out what needs to be measured and then figuring out the most appropriate means to measure them.” he said. “In my mind, the technology ought to follow the concepts rather than the other way around.”

Sounds like an issue that philosophers should be funded to think about!

UPDATE: Here is an official press release.

Consciousness and the Soul

2013-04-01T11:55:20Z

Nicholas Humphrey and Galen Strawson take on the big questions in a debate hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas .

Synthese Issue on Neuroscience and Its Philosophy -- 2013 and 2014

2013-03-30T01:12:54Z

The journal Synthese publishes a yearly issue on Neuroscience and Its Philosophy. In recent years, this has been perhaps the highest profile venue explicitly devoted to articles in the philosophy of neuroscience. For example, two papers published in the 2011 issue have already been anthologized.

The 2013 is mostly full but there is room for a couple more papers. If you want to make it into the 2013 issue, feel free to submit your best work at your earliest convenience!

Synthese has recently revised its policy on special issues. Accordingly, starting next year, all proposals for special issues have to be submitted every year to the editors in chief. I am glad to report that the editors in chief have just approved the 2014 issue, so the tradition will continue at least into next year.

Anyone doing good work in the philosophy of neuroscience should consider submitting their papers to Synthese's yearly issue on Neuroscience and Its Philosophy. An explicit option Neuroscience and Its Philosophy is available in Editorial Manager (Synthese's online submission system), which option can be selected when submitting a paper to Synthese. When you choose that option, I am in charge getting your paper refereed.

Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos"

2013-03-29T16:07:02Z

This is my first 'real' blog post, and before I begin, I'd like to thank John for inviting me to contribute to this blog (and apologize for the fact that it's taken me while to get around to doing so). Many thanks for giving me this opportunity!

I have recently published a review of Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" in Science (if you're interested, it's in Science, 339 (6125), p. 1277), and as the word limit there was very restrictive (and given how much stir the book has caused), I thought I'd take this opportunity to say a bit more about what I think about the book and, more importantly, to hear about what others here think about it.

Most of the reviews of Nagel's book - especially those by philosophers - have been scathing. Now, as I said in my own review, I do think the book has several major flaws (more on those in a second). However, I am not sure it deserved quite the beating it received and I also don't think it is the most interesting (let alone charitable) approach to focus solely on the negative points of a book in a review. So while I was (and remain) critical in my own approach, I also tried to bring out the positive points in the book.

Perhaps a few words on the negative points first. I think several aspects of the book are rather weak; for instance, the fact that in the chapter on 'values' Nagel simply assumes moral realism, without providing any argument for it. He also doesn't do himself any favors when he combines (problematic) intuitions about the probability that consciousness and cognition could have evolved in the time span available with the philosophically rather more interesting issue of the (im-)possibility of reductionism. The former - which are regularly championed by proponents of 'intelligent design' (a movement which, despite his outspoken atheism, Nagel is sympathetic to, as he points out in the book) - don't lead to strong arguments and can, I think, be rather easily dismissed (as indeed most of the reviews of his book have done). For one thing, we are notoriously bad at judging probabilities and aside from his 'common sense' intuition Nagel does not in fact provide any arguments for the view that the evolution of consciousness and cognition was unlikely. Moreover, even if this could be shown, it is unclear what follows from it (after all, to say that an event was unlikely to occur is not to say that it was impossible, and I don't see why the former should lead one to reject an otherwise very strong theory, such as evolutionary theory). Further, his own sketch of an alternative, namely the introduction of teleological principles, remains unconvincing, not only because he doesn't say much about how we are to think about these principles, but also because they don't really seem to address what I ultimately take to be at the heart of his arguments - namely, the irreducibility of consciousness.

However, in focusing on the weaknesses, one fails to see that this main argument is actually very compelling, and that it needs a response (even if Nagel's own response disappoints). So what is this argument? Well, it's basically making the point that we are still lacking an understanding of the relation between the mind and brain. Consciousness doesn't seem to be reducible to any functions fulfilled by processes in the brain (because it is conceivable that these functions could be fulfilled in the absence of any phenomenal qualities). If so, according to Nagel, not only do we have a mind-brain or mind-body problem, but we also have a problem when it comes to explaining the evolution of consciousness. This problem is very different from any considerations relating to probabilities of mutations etc. (even though, frustratingly, Nagel himself doesn't do a very good job of keeping these two sets of problems apart). Rather, the problem consists in the fact that if consciousness necessarily remains outside the scope of the vocabulary of functionalism (or any other naturalistic theory), then it also remains outside the scope of evolutionary theory. While we might be able to explain why various cognitive functions that we take to be correlated with consciousness could have evolved, consciousness itself (due to the fact that it cannot be reduced to these functions) remains outside of the picture.

Now, none of this is particularly new or original, but given that we have recently witnessed several physicists (such as Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss) argue that physics can explain everything, and given the general popularity of the view that there will ultimately be a 'physical theory of everything', I think Nagel is right to remind the general public (which is the target audience for this book) that there still is an 'explanatory gap' when it comes to consciousness, and that not everything can be explained in the terms of the physical sciences, after all. So, as someone who is generally sympathetic to 'explanatory gap' type arguments, I am sympathetic to this point (even though, unlike Nagel, I wouldn't say that it implies that materialism is false, or, as he puts it, 'almost certainly false'. In fact, I take it to be one of the other main flaws of the book that it doesn't consider the possibility of a 'non-reductive materialism'.) I found it somewhat surprising that, as far as I can tell, hardly any of the other reviews focused on this issue, and that instead everyone tried very hard to dismiss Nagel's book as thoroughly as possible. I suspect this has something to do with the worry that the book will lend support to proponents of 'intelligent design', but I would find it problematic if because of this worry his arguments were given less credit than they deserve (especially since he makes it very clear that he is an atheist and that he isn't looking for or trying to support some theological solution to the problem he raises).

Anyway, I am really curious to hear what you all make of this. What are your thoughts?

CFP: What is cognition?

2013-03-29T14:32:41Z

Workshop on "What is cognition?" in Bochum, June 27-29, 2013

The workshop invites contributions exploring any and all issues that can move us toward an answer to the question, “what is cognition?”. Contributions are welcome to address a particular view already championed in the literature or bring forward original suggestions on how we might produce an adequate notion of cognition in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

PhD-students and Post-Docs are invited to submit papers or posters. Master students are also invited to submit posters.

Paper submissions must be appropriate for short talks of 20 min. for a total 30 min session. Papers may not exceed 1500 words, including an abstract of 150 words.

Posters should be directly submitted or be described by an abstract of 500 words.

http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/cognition/call.html

*Submission deadline: May 1st , 2013*

CFP: Reduction and emergence in the sciences

2013-03-29T14:27:24Z

LMU Munich, 14-16 November 2013

The conference invites proposals for talks that address the inter- or intratheoretic relations of specific theories or provide precise notions of such relations for the application in the sciences.

Submission Process

Please submit both a short abstract (max. 100 words) and an extended abstract (500-1000 words) through the automatic submission system by 15 May 2013. Please prepare your abstracts for blind review, and save your extended abstract as a PDF file.

The conference language is English.

http://www.reductionandemergenceinscience.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/call_for_papers/index.html

Anosognosia for hemiplegia and types of body representation

2013-03-29T03:33:20Z

xposted at idontknowwhatiam

another attempt to popularise what I do!

Continuing the theme of providing popular summaries of my papers today I’d like to talk a little about anosognosia for hemiplegia and some implications the disorder has for understanding how we represent our own bodies.

Given the very pompous nature of the name “anosognosia for hemiplegia” [MD’s are even better than philosopher’s at playing power games by making up words ] I doubt that its meaning is at all transparent. ‘Anosognosia’ refers to a patient’s lack of knowledge about some problem with their body. In the medical context the most striking examples pick out patients who seem to lack knowledge of a disorder so overwhelming and severe that it is baffling how they could miss it. The most shocking case being Anton’s syndrome or “blindness denial” sufferers of which although clearly blind nevertheless claim to be able to see perfectly well. “Hemiplegia” means half paralysis and refers to cases where either the left or right side of the body is paralysed. I take it that you know what ‘for’ means, so by now you may have guessed that ‘anosognosia for hemiplegia’ refers to patients who lack knowledge about their paralysis- they are paralysed down one side of their body but they do not know this to be the case. The name, of course, comes from Babinski of defecating Maxwell fame (yes I watch the big bang theory; no I don’t think it is offensive to nerds).

So the important thing is that patients suffering from ansognosia for hemiplegia (AHP) are paralysed but they don’t know it. When asked why they are in hospital they don’t mention their paralysis, when asked if they can move they say that of course they can (‘how else could I scratch my right arm?’ (Fotopoulou et al. 2008). They also act as if they are not paralysed; when asked to lift a try of glasses they typically grab the tray from one side, as if to lift with both hands. Patients who are paralysed but aware of this problem grab the try at the centre when asked to perform such actions.

Overall a scary situation to be in, made all the worse by the fact that AHP is one of the least serious symptoms such patients experience following stroke. This is not to say that the symptom isn’t dangerous, it is, but it typically remits after days or weeks. After it remits patients say different things about their experience. Some patients claim that they knew they were paralysed all along and deny their previous denials, so to speak. What are we to make of this? Did they know they were paralysed or not?

The answer, I suspect, is both. To see why we need to look more closely at what patients say about their paralysis. Whilst it is defining of AHP that patients deny their paralysis, it is also true that in some circumstances they temporarily acknowledge that they are paralysed. They do so when repeatedly confronted on their inability to perform tasks which require the use of both hands or when cold water is squirted in their ears (the reason for this is complex, for now suffice to say it changes how patients can direct their attention). When patients do come to acknowledge that they are a paralysed this insight only lasts a short amount of time, 20 minutes or so. Very quickly AHP patients seem to lose this knowledge about the state of their body. What these examples suggest is that somewhere in there is the knowledge that they are paralysed, but this knowledge isn’t used in most circumstances.

Why don’t they access this knowledge? Well in fact I think this isn’t quite the right question, because in one sense they’re not failing to access this knowledge about the current condition of their body, because no one would check the current condition of their body in this circumstance. If I ask you right now if you are paralysed you don’t need to check to find out. You can answer based on knowledge of what your body is usually like. This is what the AHP patient does. When asked if they are paralysed the AHP patient asks based on this knowledge- they’ve not been paralysed before so why would they think they are paralysed now?

We have then a different question to ask about the AHP patient. Why doesn’t knowledge about the current condition of their body, which we know they have- at least when they temporarily acknowledge their paralysis, help them learn that they are paralysed? Why doesn’t this update their knowledge of what their body is usually like?

If we can answer this I think we will have done a huge part of the work needed to understand why people with AHP don’t know that they are paralysed. There is also, as it turns out, a lot more work we can do with this distinction between knowing what your body is like now and knowing what it is usually like. But we can get to that next time.

With love

DrNPC

My paper on this is: Carruthers, G. (2008). “Types of body representation and the sense of embodiment.” Consciousness and Cognition 17(4): 1302-1316.

And others using this distinction: Carruthers, G. (2009). “Is the body schema sufficient for the sense of embodiment? An alternative to de Vignemont’s model.” Philosophical Psychology 22(2): 123-142.

Carruthers, G. (in press). “Toward a Cognitive Model of the Sense of Embodiment in a (Rubber) Hand.” Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Reference:

Fotopoulou, A., M. Tsakiris, P. Haggard, A. Vagopoulou, A. Rudd and M. Kopelman (2008). “The role of motor intention in motor awareness: an experimental study on anosognosia for hemiplegia.” Brain 131(12): 3432-3442.

cfa AAP stream "advances in Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences"

2013-03-27T01:05:14Z

Apologies for Cross Posting- please distribute to interested parties

As part of this year's Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting (7th-12th July, University of Quensland St Lucia campus) I will be coordinating a stream called "Advances in Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences".

In recent decades philosophers taking a rigerously naturalistic approach to the mind (broadly treating minds as natural phenomena open to empirical investigation) have made considerable advances in our understanding of phenomena such as consciousness, memory, delusions and mental representation to name just a few. This stream aims to showcase the newest work in this area. It is my pleasure to invite contributions studying any and all aspects of the mind and related phenomena grounded in empirical discoversies.

Abstracts of up to 250 words should be submitted via the conference website: http://www.aap-conferences.org.au/ when submitting be sure to select the option indicating you are submitting for this stream.

abstract submissions are now open: http://www.aap-conferences.org.au/submit-an-abstract/

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. General equiries about the conference not related to this stream should be directed to Gilbert Burgh and Damian Cox aap-2013@uq.edu.au

all the best
Glenn

CFP: Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference

2013-03-13T11:19:56Z

Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference

October 11th & 12th, 2013

Keynote speaker: Edouard Machery (Pitt)

Submissions are invited on any topic pertaining to experimental philosophy. Authors will have approximately 35 min.

presentation time. Authors can report new experimental results or contribute to broader philosophical or methodological debates over existing results.

Both XPhi-friendly and XPhi-critical papers are welcomed, although XPhi-critical authors may be required to complete feats of strength and be targets of the airing of grievances at some point during the conference. Authors are encouraged to talk through their papers rather than read them verbatim.

Organizers: Neil Otte, Paul Poenicke, & James Beebe (Experimental Epistemology Research Group, University at Buffalo)

Submissions should be sent via email to neilotte@gmail.com no later than June 30, 2013.

The event will take place on the campus of the University at Buffalo and is sponsored by the Peter Hare Memorial Fund and the Dept. of Philosophy at the Univ. at Buffalo.

CONF: Implicit Bias, Philosophy and Psychology

2013-03-13T02:36:52Z

I'll be giving a talk on self-knowledge at the upcoming conference on implicit bias at the University of Sheffield, from April 19-21. It promises to be an excellent event, with keynote talks from Helen Beebee, Irene Blair, Paschal Sheeran, and Manuel Vargas, and several talks from people who should be familiar to readers of this blog.

Registration is open until April 10 at the latest -- the conference is free to attend, but the organizers do request that all attendees register, in order to help plan meals and ensure that there will be sufficient space.

Male/Female Student Ratio in Philosophy Ph.D. Programs

2013-03-10T01:39:25Z

My student Mike Sigler collected these data and gave me permission to share them.

Frances Egan on Vimeo: "How to think about mental content"

2013-03-06T18:02:14Z

Brains people interested in representational and computational theories of mind will be interested in this talk by Frances Egan, which is coming out soon in Philosophical Studies. If you post questions or comments in the next week or so, Frances will try to respond to them.

Two New Releases

2013-03-04T13:48:22Z

Title: Why It Doesn't Matter to Metaphysics What Mary Learns

Artist(s): Robert Cummins, Martin Roth, Ian Harmon

Label: Philosophical Studies (here)

Release Date: February, 2013

Genre: Hardcore philosophy of mind

Title: Folk Psychology as Science

Artist: Martin Roth

Label: Synthese (here)

Release Date: December, 2012

Genre: Post-punk philosophy of science

Comments welcomed. If you'd like a bootleg copy of either single, send me an email (martin.roth@drake.edu)

Delusions of Thought Insertion and the Sense of Agency, or Disorder's of Self-Consciousness part 2

2013-03-02T01:59:02Z

and this was attempt number 2:

So here is a weird thing to say:

I look out of the window and I think that the garden looks nice and the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamon Andrews come into my mind. There are no other thoughts there, only his…He treats my mind like a screen and flashes his thoughts onto it like you flash a picture (Mellor 1970 p. 17).

Now there’s lots to be baffled by here (not the least of which being: who the hell is Eamon Andrews? – he’s an old British TV presenter), and it’s just that sense of bafflement that I want to highlight. What is this person claiming? That someone else is thinking in their mind? What on Earth would that be like? This isn’t trivial. No one else ever thinks using my mind and only you ever think with yours. How can we even understand what this person is saying?

Well, when I tell you that this statement comes from a person suffering from schizophrenia you might be tempted to dismiss the statement as a semi-random sequence of words, which certainly sounds like an English sentence, but not one which in anyway reflects the experiences the subject is actually having. Maybe this isn’t a report of an experience the patient has, but rather what we hear from them is an empty sequence of words- perhaps the result of thought derailment- more closely related to what is insensitively referred to as “incomprehensible ramblings” than the kind of delusion we saw last time out.

There are a number of considerations which speak against this. The first is the sheer consistency of patient’s reports. Patients don’t just say this once; it is something they claim over extended periods of time. The second is the number of patients making claims around this theme; it just isn't likely that so many people would randomly produce such sentences. The third is that patients make this kind of claim even when they don’t show other signs of symptoms such as thought derailment. Overall, then, it seems the burden is on us to try and understand what these patients are saying about their experiences, rather than dismiss them as incomprehensible.

Well how might we start to do so? Last time out with delusions of alien control the problem didn't arise; I just highlighted a common experience and suggested that the delusion arose from a bizarre form of that experience. But what kind of experience, familiar experience, could be altered to give rise to this kind of belief, these “delusions of thought insertion”.

One popular approach has actually been to relate these delusions to delusions of alien control. As delusions of alien control involve a deficit in the sense of agency over bodily actions, perhaps delusions of thought insertion involve a deficit in the sense of agency over mental actions. Just as delusions of alien control arise because the patient doesn't feel like they control their own actions, perhaps delusions of thought insertion arise because the patient doesn't feel like they control their thoughts?

However an explanation such as this may work it cannot be the same as what we saw last time out for alien control. Recall the mechanism which we thought was important for this delusion involved a representation of actual sensory feedback, however, in the case of thoughts there isn't actual sensory feedback to be had. So we’re looking for a different, but perhaps in some way analogous mechanism.

All well and good, but there is a bigger problem for trying to extend this kind of account for delusions of alien control to explain thought insertion. I left a part of the explanation last time out hidden. In order to come up with something as weird as feeling that someone else is controlling your actions it is supposed that lacking a feeling of agency is somehow anomalous. The patient is thought to come up with the delusion to explain their experience because the experience is weird. It’s unexpected. This stage is needed to get us from “feeling that I didn't do it” to “feeling person x did it”.

Is this move plausible for accounts of delusions of thought insertion? Well there are a few worries to be had. First, if you're anything like me, you might not find it so weird to think that such and such a thought you have wasn't under your control, maybe it just popped into your head, out of the blue as it were. If that sort of consideration is right then just how noticeable would thoughts for which the patient lacks a sense of agency be noticeable? Maybe thinking thoughts one doesn't seem to control isn't as anomalous as performing actions one doesn't seem to control. Second, we might worry about the nature of the delusional belief the patient ends up with. It certainly makes sense to attribute your actions to someone else- this really happens, as in the simultaneous door opening effect we saw last time. But it is in fact the case that no one else can put their thoughts in your mind (i.e. put them in directly, without an act of communication- the patient quotes above certainly doesn't seem to be saying that Eamon Andrews is communicating his thoughts to her, it’s something more direct than that.)

Well I must admit that the second of these problems still baffles me, but I think some progress has been made on the first. The more radical proposal I have made around this is to suppose that patients suffering from these delusions don’t lack a sense of agency when they ought to have it; rather they lack a sense of agency over their thoughts and this accurately reflects the fact that they have lost, a rather specific kind of, control over some of their thoughts. In particular it seems that what they lose, sometimes for some thoughts, is the capacity to try not to have the thought.

Trying not to have a thought, or trying not to think about something, is in one way very hard to do… “God I want the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song out of my head”, so I don’t want to be read as saying that normally we are good at directing our thoughts away from certain topics. Rather what is important to note is that usually what we can do is pick out thoughts we don’t want to have and then trying to supress it. This is the capacity which seems to be failing in delusions of thought insertion.

The evidence for this comes from studies where experimenters try and create particular thoughts in their subjects and then direct them not to act on the thought. We might do this be giving subjects a list of sentence stems, like “The dough was put in the hot ____” and then directing subject’s to finish the sentence in a way that doesn't make sense. Here the experimenter tries to make the subject think the word “oven” but then the subject is required to inhibit this word, and come up with another. It turns out that patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (and some related symptoms, just to make it complex!) are worse at these sorts of tasks than people who don’t suffer from these symptoms (Waters et al. 2003).

I still don’t know why patient’s go from this to attributing the thought to someone else, but I think progress is being made here.

You can read my full account of this in my paper:

"A metacognitive model of the sense of agency over thoughts." Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 17(4): 291-314.

And that’s something else that I do.

With love

DrNPC

References

Mellor, C. S. (1970). "First Rank Symptoms of Schizophrenia." The British Journal of Psychiatry 117(536): 15-23.

Waters, F. A. V., J. C. Badcock, M. T. Maybery and P. T. Michie (2003). "Inhibition in schizophrenia: Association with auditory hallucinations." Schizophrenia Research 62(3): 275-280.

Delusions of Alien Control and the Sense of Agency (disorders of self consciousness pt1)

2013-03-02T01:57:39Z

Lately I've decided that it's time to try and make my work comprehensible to laypeople. Here is attempt number 1. Cross posted at idontknowwhatiam

Hello all

I like to think that I have been taking the idea of the philosopher as public servant seriously. This is perhaps grounded in an intuition that we all have reciprocal responsibilities to one another. Coupled with this is the fact that even though I actively publish my research I do not make any money from that. All of the money universities spend in buying journal subscriptions goes to the publishers, who as well as producing the published volumes (both hard and e) provide centralised mechanisms for peer review (although it is worth noting that the reviewers themselves don’t get paid by the publishers for their services). So who does pay me and my fellows for our research and reviewing? Well, I am employed b y a public university which means that indirectly you pay for my work. For this pay I produce the best research I can and the best teaching I can to those who come my way. I also write this occasional blog in which I have, amongst other things, been highlight examples of bad thinking when I come across them. I’ve enjoyed doing this for you, but today I’d like to go a step further and begin to try and give you a sense of the kind of research I do. Now my research papers are available to those with the right library subscriptions and in some instances in pre-print form on my website. You are of course free to read them, but these papers are written for other philosophers of cognitive science and usually a subset of those who happen to be working on a particular topic. So here is an attempt to make the things I work on more digestible. Here I begin a series of introductions into disorders of self-consciousness.

Imagine this scenario. Suppose you are walking down a flight of stairs, as you get to your level you reach to open the door, but there is something wrong with how the door opens. Perhaps it’s moving too fast? Shortly after this you realise the reason for this- someone else is opening the door from the other side. Mundane enough, but what if some of your actions felt like that when there wasn’t anyone else around? What then? Unfortunately this isn’t idle fancy, but rather a way for us to begin to understand what it is like for people suffering from what we call delusions of alien control. Here are some examples of the sort of things people suffering this delusion say:

When I reach my hand for the comb it is my hand and arm which move, and my fingers pick up the pen, but I don’t control them… I sit there watching them move, and they are quite independent, what they do is nothing to do with me… I am just a puppet who is manipulated by cosmic strings. When the strings are pulled my body moves and I cannot prevent it (Mellor 1970 p. 18).

I felt like an automaton, guided by a female spirit who had entered me during it [an arm movement].

I thought you [the experimenter] were varying the movements with your thoughts.

I could feel God guiding me [during an arm movement] (Spence 2001 p. 165)

Now people suffering this delusion say many unusual things, but what makes them all instances of delusions of alien control is that they say that it is not themselves, but rather someone else who is controlling their actions. Now why would they say this? Well that’s a terribly difficult question and I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t have an entirely acceptable answer- especially with regards to why they can believe that some other particular person (or god or similar) is in control.

But all is not lost; consider again opening a door whilst someone else unexpectedly opens it from the other side. There are two experiences here which are especially noteworthy. First there seems to be something wrong with the movement being made, it somehow doesn’t seem to be happening as it should. Second, thinking about the action that takes place, i.e. how the door is opened, it doesn’t seem like you are doing that. Sure it seems that you are contributing to it, but not exclusively and not in the normal way. This later experience, call it the sense of agency, has been of particular interest to me and has been one of the experiences I have studied as a case study in consciousness.

The sense of agency is the feeling that you, yourself, are the one controlling what you do with your body. You are the one that acts with your body and whatever artefacts (doors, tools etc.) you happen to be using. One thing that seems to be happening in the door example is that this feeling, quite appropriately, is absent- you don’t feel like you are (completely) in control of what is happening, and you are not in fact in control.

One of the better attempts to explain delusions of alien control sees close parallels between this (perfectly ordinary) experience and delusions of alien control. This idea put forcibly by Frith, Blakemore and Wolpert (Frith et al. 2000), is that part of why those suffering from delusions of alien control think that someone else is controlling their actions is because those actions all feel similar to what it’s like when you try to open a door someone else is also opening. The patient’s actions don’t seem to happen as they should and they lack a sense of agency for them.

Why might this happen? One idea is that maybe the sense of agency depends on (causally depends on- for the philosophers ) actions feeling right, as happening as they are supposed to. Looking at some older ideas about what is needed for motor control (i.e. controlling the body’s movements) we arrive at the claim that the motor control system needs to unconsciously predict what is going to happen based on what one is trying to do. The reason for this is twofold. First, it allows the person who is acting to respond to things more quickly, it takes time for sensory feedback from the body to get to the brain, so in order to correct errors more quickly the motor control system produces a prediction of what is going to happen. If the prediction is that one is going to make an error, say miss the cup one is reaching for and knock it over, then one can begin to correct this error before actually getting to the cup and knocking it over. Second it gives the person a way of distinguishing what sensory experiences one is having are due to changes in the world and which are due to what oneself is doing.

This later claim is especially important in understanding the sense of agency. One reason that the movement of the door seems so odd in our example is that it’s not happening as expected. That is it doesn’t move as predicted, it moves faster than it should. To have the experience it is supposed that we normally compare what we predict will happen to what actually does happen- according to our senses. When the prediction isn’t met, the action feels odd, like there is something wrong with it. In this case the door moves faster than it should.

Now let’s add another supposition. What if this comparison between what happens and what is predicted to happen is (causally) responsible for the sense of agency? Such that when there is a match one experiences a sense of agency and when there is no match one doesn’t experience a sense of agency. Well then we get a neat, albeit simplified, picture on which we can explain why opening the door with someone else feels like it does. The door doesn’t move as predicted, so there is no match and no sense of agency.

Can this be applied to delusions of alien control? Well one hypothesis is that those suffering this delusion sometimes fail to properly predict what will happen based on what they are trying to do. Without this prediction there can be no match between what is expected and what happens and so they lack a sense of agency. When this happens for the patient their action feels odd, like it’s not happening in the right way, and they lack a feeling of being in control of the action.

There is evidence that such patients do have problems in forming such predictions. Try and tickle yourself. Can’t do it? This is thought to happen because the sensation of touch as you try to tickle yourself is predicted by the motor system. This prediction cancels out, to an extent, the feeling of touch- it just isn’t strong enough to feel tickly. However, this is not so for those suffering delusions of alien control. These patients say that when they tickle themselves it feels just as intense and tickly as if someone else does it (Blakemore et al. 1999; Blakemore et al. 2000). This is thought to be because they do not predict the feeling of touch coming from their own action in the right way and so the feeling, when it occurs, is not cancelled out.

We have then an interesting case where a normal experience is absent in a delusion and the potential of an explanation for why this occurs. Overall this gives us a nice case study in how we come to have the experiences we have, a case study in consciousness.

Now of course the truth of this hypothesis is controversial and much of my research has been examining whether or not it is true. You can read about the evidence that supports these ideas and a comparison of this view to its rivals in my papers:

(2009) “Commentary on Synofzik, Vosgerau and Newen 2008″ in Consciousness and Cognition 18(2) pp.515-520; DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2008.05.006;

(2010) “A Comparison of Fortunes: the Comparator and Multifactorial weighting Models of the Sense of Agency” in Christensen, Schier and Sutton eds. Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science online copy

(2010) “A Problem for Wegner and Colleagues’ Model of the Sense of Agency” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9(3) pp.341-357; DOI:10.1007/s11097-010-9150-6

(2012) “The Case for the Comparator Model as an Explanation of the Sense of Agency and its Breakdowns” in Consciousness and Cognition 21(1) pp.30-45; DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2010.08.005

See my publications page for my research papers.

And there you have it. This is one of things that I do.

With Love

DrNPC

References

Blakemore, S.-J., J. Smith, R. Steel, E. C. Johnstone and C. D. Frith (2000). "The perception of self-produced sensory stimuli in patients with auditory hallucinations and passivity experiences: evidence for a break-down in self monitoring." Psychological Medicine 30: 1131-1139.

Blakemore, S. J., C. D. Frith and D. M. Wolpert (1999). "Spatio-temporal prediction modulates the perception of self-produced stimuli." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11: 551-559.

Frith, C. D., S.-J. Blakemore and D. M. Wolpert (2000). "Abnormalities in the Awareness and Control of Action." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B - Biological Sciences 355: 1771-1788.

Mellor, C. S. (1970). "First Rank Symptoms of Schizophrenia." British Journal of Psychiatry 117: 15-23.

Spence, S. A. (2001). "Alien Control: From Phenomenology to Cognitive Neurobiology." Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology 8(2-3).

Job at King's

2013-03-01T23:25:32Z

Looks like a great opportunity:

The Philosophy Department at King’s College London is seeking an outstanding philosopher with research expertise and teaching experience in philosophy of mind and/or philosophy of psychology. This is a three-year fixed term appointment, starting from September 2013.

Further information can be found here:

Rosenthal's Challenge to Phenomenal Concepts

2013-02-25T14:00:32Z

[cross-posted at Philosophy Sucks!]

Like I don't have enough going on over at this year's Online Consciousness Conference (which is still in session until Friday March 1st) I have been sitting in on David Rosenthal's class at the Graduate Center on Mental Qualities (previous post here). Today he presented an argument against phenomenal concepts that was very interesting.

The argument began with pointing out that our normal concept of pain is one that we are able to apply to other people. It then proceeds to point out that a phenomenal concept is such that it can only be applied in one's own case. The challenge then, according to Rosenthal, is to give an account of how it is (or how it is even possible) that these two concepts (one public and the other private) line up. I take this to mean the following. How can we explain how the extension of these concepts come out to be the same (viz pains). So, for instance, when I see you moaning and groaning with a visible injury I am likely to say 'you are in pain'. When I do so I must be employing the public concept of pain (the other one applies only in my own case).

It is certainly the case that those who like phenomenal concepts allow their referents to come apart. Chalmers, for instance, argues that the public language concept has its reference fixed in a relational way. It will refer to whatever it is that is the typical cause of painful experiences. Whereas the phenomenal concept (the 'pure' one to use Chalmers' terminology) does not have its reference fixed in this relational way, but rather picks out the conscious experience by its intrinsic nature or essence (that it is painful for me). So, if we consider a 'pain invert' -someone who experiences pleasure in response to painful stimuli- then their public language concept will pick out the same things that mine does (I am not inverted). This is because the pain-invert learns the word 'pain' in the way we all do and she will apply it to stabbings, burnings, etc. However the pain-invert's phenomenal concept picks out the pleasure as the kind of conscious experience that it is. So when they think "I am having *this* kind of experience" they single out and refer to a pleasurable experience, whereas when I do so I single out and refer to a painful one. So in this kind of case the referents of the two concepts come apart.

So is there a problem about extension here? It is true that when I attribute painful experience to you I think that I am attributing an experience to you which is like the one that I have when I pick out my pain via a phenomenal concept but what could possibly guarantee this? Especially in light if the invert cases. I suggested that at this point those who like phenomenal concepts ought to appeal to the dancing and fading qualia arguments (though in light of Dave's recent backing off of the dancing qualia argument maybe we should focus on the fading qualia one). Those arguments aim to show that it is highly implausible that you and I are inverts with respect to our conscious experience (even though it is logically possible the argument tries to suggest that it is not nomologically possible). The reason why it is highly implausible is that it would entail that I am radically out of touch with my conscious experience and we have good reason to think this is not the case (for some discussion of this see here). If those arguments work then we can be reasonably confident that your phenomenal pain concept picks out a conscious experience which is like the one that I pick out with my phenomenal pain concept. So when I use the public language concept I am attributing to you a property which is typically caused in a certain way (stabbing, burning, etc) and I can identify this property in my own experience via a phenomenal concept. So I take myself to be attributing to you the same kind of property which is caused in those ways in my experience (and which I single out via a phenomenal concept). My belief that these kinds of properties are similar in the way I think they are is licensed by reflection on dancing and fading qualia.

Ok, now off to the conference!

Study of Color Discrimination and Memory

2013-02-23T16:53:33Z

We are conducting a study of color discrimination and short-term color memory. I would be grateful if you would participate in the study. You'll need to use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the color of a square to fit the color of a second image. It will only take about 5-10 minutes. Click on the link below to begin.
www.synesthesiaresearch.com/study

A New Theory of Free Will

2013-02-20T04:31:03Z

Just a quick note that I recently published an article in The Philosophical Forum , "A New Theory of Free Will", that may be of interest to readers (a free PDF of the penultimate draft is available here). Here's the abstract:

This paper shows that several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses – including the holographic principle and multiverse theory in quantum physics, and eternalism and mind-body dualism in philosophy – jointly imply an audacious new theory of free will. This new theory, "Libertarian Compatibilism", holds that the physical world is an eternally existing array of two-dimensional information – a vast number of possible pasts, presents, and futures – and the mind a nonphysical entity or set of properties that "read" that physical information off to subjective conscious awareness (in much the same way that a song written on an ordinary compact-disc is only played when read by an outside medium, i.e. a CD-player). According to this theory, every possible physical “timeline” in the multiverse may be fully physically deterministic or physically-causally closed but each person’s consciousness still entirely free to choose, ex nihilo, outside of the physical order, which physically-closed timeline is experienced by conscious observers. Although Libertarian Compatibilism is admittedly fantastic, I show that it not only follows from several live scientific and philosophical hypotheses, I also show that it (1) is a far more explanatorily powerful model of quantum mechanics than more traditional interpretations (e.g. the Copenhagen, Everett, and Bohmian interpretations), (2) makes determinate, testable empirical predictions in quantum theory, and finally, (3) predicts and explains the very existence of a number of philosophical debates and positions in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will. First, I show that whereas traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics are all philosophically problematic and roughly as ontologically “extravagant” as Libertarian Compatibilism – in that they all posit “unseen” processes – Libertarian Compatibilism is nearly identical in structure to the only working simulation that human beings have ever constructed capable of reproducing (and so explaining) every general feature of quantum mechanics we perceive: namely, massive-multiplayer-online-roleplaying videogames (or MMORPGs). Although I am not the first to suggest that our world is akin to a computer simulation, I show that existing MMORPGs (online simulations we have already created) actually reproduce every general feature of quantum mechanics within their simulated-world reference-frames. Second, I show that existing MMORPGs also replicate (and so explain) many philosophical problems we face in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will – all while conforming to the Libertarian Compatibilist model of reality. I conclude, as such, that as fantastic and metaphysically extravagant as Libertarian Compatibilism may initially seem, it may well be true. It explains a number of features of our reality that no other physical or metaphysical theory does.

Cross-posted at Experimental Philosophy

NY Times: "Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain"

2013-02-18T16:42:30Z

No word yet on possible funding for philosophers:

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.
Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.
The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.

CFP: European Society for Philosophy and Psychology 21st Annual Conference

2013-02-18T14:19:43Z

Grenada, Spain
9th-12th July, 2013

Deadline for Submissions: 15 March 2013

Keynote speakers:

Katherine Nelson (CUNY)
Christopher Peacocke (Columbia)
Michael Martin (UCL/Berkeley)
Angela Friederici (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig)

There will be five invited symposia on the following topics:

Time and Causation: Organizer: Marc Buehner (Cardiff), speakers Alison Gopnik (Berkeley), Christoph Hoerl (Warwick)

The Second Person: Organizer: Naomi Eilan (Warwick). There will be two symposia sponsored by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust to include Philippe Rochat (Emory), Edward Hinchman (Milwaukee), Leonhard Schilbach (Cologne & Max-Planck-Institute for Neurological Research), Guy Longworth (Warwick), Johannes Roessler (Warwick)

Normativity: Organizer: Hannes Rakoczy (University of Göttingen), speakers Kristin Andrews (York, Canada), Charles W. Kalish (Madison-Wisconsin), Joshua Knobe (Yale)

Non-literal content: Organizer: Esther Romero (Granada), speakers to include Belen Soria (Granada)

General Aim:

The aim of the European Society for Philosophy & Psychology is “to promote interaction between philosophers and psychologists on issues of common concern”. Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists and biologists are encouraged to report experimental, theoretical and clinical work that they judge to have philosophical significance; and philosophers are encouraged to engage with the fundamental issues addressed by and arising out of such work. In recent years ESPP sessions have covered such topics as spatial concepts, theory of mind, attention, joint attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, infants’ understanding of intentionality, memory and time, motor imagery, counterfactuals, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, minimalism in linguistic theory, reasoning, vagueness, mental causation, action and agency, thought without language, externalism, connectionism, hypnosis, and the interpretation of neuropsychological results.

Call for Papers

The Society invites submitted symposia, papers and posters for this meeting. Submissions are refereed and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to psychologists, philosophers and linguists.

Symposia are allocated a two-hour slot and consist of a set of linked papers on a common theme. Symposia organizers should submit an outline of the symposium along with a list of speakers and abstracts as a single document. Please do not submit more than one PDF file per symposium. Papers should not exceed a length of 20 minutes (about 8 double-spaced pages) for a total 30 minute session. Submissions may be by abstract (ca. 500 words) but in the case of philosophical submissions a full paper is preferred.

A submission for a poster presentation should consist of a 500-word abstract.

When submitting your paper or poster online, please first indicate the primary discipline of your paper (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) and then, by checking the respective box, whether your submission is intended as a paper or a poster.

Submitted papers may also be considered for presentation as a poster, in case they are found unsuitable for presentation as a paper. If you would like us to consider your paper also as a poster, please check the box ‘Paper or poster’.

All paper and poster submissions (whether abstracts or full papers) should be in PDF-format and should be properly anonymized in order to allow for blind refereeing.

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION IS THE 15th OF MARCH 2013.

Please use the online submission form to be found at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=espp2013 (this requires registering with EasyChair, which is easy to do and free of charge).

If you have any questions, contact us by writing an email to: 2013@eurospp.org

Program chairs:

Fabian Dorsch
Teresa McCormack
Gillian Ramchand

Online Consciousness Conference Now Online!

2013-02-15T17:01:31Z

The Fifth Online Consciousness Conference is now underway! It will run until March 1st so stop by and join in the fun!