A recent post over at Cranky Philosopher argues that it isn’t. His post opens with: The thesis of this post is that there are non-intentional mental states. To establish this thesis all I need is one good example. So consider the felt pain that ensues when I plunge my hand …
What follows are some excerpts from a manuscript on the PCC (psychological correlates of consciousness) that I’ve been working on for a while, which will perhaps never see the light of
day. Philosophers, feel free to have a field day with my naive ideas.
Note I’m not sure which of the ideas are mine and which I stole from others. Of the inspirations I remember, two stick out. One, Gregory suggested that qualia function as a ‘tag for the present’ (see
his paper on this here), and Trehub has also suggested similar ideas in the domain of space …
The title is a familiar mantra I hear from philosophers, a mantra that was largely accepted upon publication of Consciousness Explained. It is advanced as both an anatomical fact and a functional fact. What evidence is cited from neuroanatomy in support of the anatomical claim? I couldn’t find anything in …
Figure 1a from a new paper in Nature Neuroscience, Heirarchy of cortical responses underlying binocular rivalry, from Heeger and others. They performed an interesting fMRI study of binocular rivalry (when a different visual stimulus is presented to each eye, you don’t see a fusion of the two stimuli, but a …
I just culled together a bunch of putative examples of downward causation, some from advocates, some from detractors. Particularly interesting and promising is the article by Robert Bishop, Downward causation in fluid convection, and Bechtel/Craver’s article Top-down causation without top-down causes, for which brief quotes will not do justice. (Note …
Over at Brainhammer, Pete Mandik set out the following problems for info-semantics: If it’s determinate specifications you are worried about, it’s worth keeping in mind that causal/informational stories haven’t been without their own problems. Regarding specificity, there are all sorts of problems concerning where in the causal chain to locate …
There is great interest in sensory coding. Studies of sensory coding typically involve recording from sensory neurons during stimulus presentation, and the investigators determine which aspects of the neuronal response are most informative about the stimulus. These studies are left with a decoding problem: are the discovered codes, sometimes quite exotic, ultimately used by the nervous system to guide behavior? In our one-day workshop, researchers with many different backgrounds will evaluate what we know about neuronal decoders and suggest new strategies, both experimental and computational, for addressing the decoding problem.
