One theme of this week’s posts has been the claim that dynamic entities are among the most metaphysically basic of the things in the mental domain. I’ve made only the vaguest gestures towards saying what I mean by this (in response to Gualtiero’s earlier comment). By dynamic entities, I mean …
The previous post argued that Theoretical Computer Science can show things to be naturalistically inexplicable—(where this is much stronger than showing them to be inexplicable with a Classically Computational Theory)—by showing those things to require more time than the universe allows. I’ve not yet said anything about which things might …
We are very excited about our first ever Brains Blog Roundtable, on “Perceptual Representation”! We have a really fantastic lineup for our first roundtable: joining us for this session are Ned Block (NYU), Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers), and Susanna Siegel (Harvard). Join us for a spirited discussion about the state of …
We are pleased to share the news that friend of the Brains community, Nicholas Shea, has been awarded the 2020 Lakatos Award for their open access book Representation In Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018). You can download a free PDF copy of the book at http://bit.ly/RepnCognSci Shea will receive …
The best theory of phenomenal consciousness is one that equates it with the contents of the so-called global workspace (a.k.a. working memory)—or rather, with a subset thereof. Why a subset? Because although conceptual information can be bound into the contents of perceptual and imagistic states, and made available in the …
Guest Editors: Thomas Metzinger (Mainz) & Raphaël Millière (Oxford) Editors-in-Chief: Sascha Benjamin Fink (Magdeburg), Wanja Wiese (Mainz), Jennifer Windt (Monash) We invite submissions of high-quality papers, in .docx, .rtf, or .tex format and between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length, excluding abstract and references. Citations must be inserted using a reference management software …
Consider a contrast. The solar system contains my brain as a part; my brain is conscious; the solar system is not conscious (at least in any everyday sense – let’s set panpsychism aside for now). That’s enough to show that having conscious parts is not enough, all by itself, to …
