There were some really good papers last month. The three I picked to summarize all involve error-based learning on fast time-scales. One involves the cerebellum in monkeys, the other involves the songbird system in…songbirds. One reason I like these examples is because they illustrate how deeply error-sensitivity is knitted into …
I’ll be posting summaries each month of high-quality, general-interest papers from the systems neuroscience literature (usually there are one to five such papers a month). I plan to post them in the middle of the following month (depending on what else is going on here at Brains). Efference copy: from …
How could we cast suspicion on the semantic poverty thesis discussed in Part III? (Recall this is the view that ‘no amount of analysis, conjunction, or <insert your favorite semantic construction method here> applied to concepts about brain states will yield a concept about subjective experience as such.’). One way …
A year ago we met an alien species (Part I) that lacked subjective conscious states but were virtuoso scientists. They developed a detailed understanding of cat brains at every level of organization, but still did not realize that cats were conscious. This was parlayed into an argument for dualism (Part …
Philosophy has lost one of its greats, Fred Dretske. Among other things, he authored the classic Knowledge and the Flow of Information which is a key source for information-based semantic theories. At a personal level, he was always kind and patient with me, a neuroscientist, peppering him with questions via email, …
In my most recent paper, we report on work in which we trained rats to discriminate among infrared (IR) light sources (normally invisible to the rat). We coupled the output of a head-mounted IR detector to microstimulators in the whisker region of primary somatosensory cortex. The rats initally respond to …
In the previous post (Part I), we met some aliens that seem to have developed a turbo-charged neuroscientific theory of consciousness. Unfortunately for the materialist, the aliens’ story seems incomplete in a way that the antimaterialist can exploit.
