We are delighted to announce the next in our series of Brains Blog Roundtables. The topic of this discussion is animal consciousness! Please join Dan Burnston and our fantastic panelists, Liz Irvine (Cardiff), Rachael Brown (ANU), and Jonathan Birch (LSE) for a great discussion about how to investigate, measure, and …
Affect as conative motivational drive is amenable to being decoupleable because it predates—and remains functional—through all evolutionarily later cognitive abilities
A large part of our book is thus dedicated to articulating an affect-based bio-semantics, but we also take a run at pre-linguistic syntax or grammar.
The study of emotions, the so-called affective turn, allows us to rethink crucial elements in psychology and philosophy of mind. There has been a concurrent surge in creative research and theory in the field of ecological psychology.[1] In our book, we seek to clarify the function of affective sentience in …
As I emphasized on Wednesday, phenomenal concepts are, in a sense, private. They are acquaintance-based indexicals that aren’t governed by any set of public norms, and which don’t defer to the expertise of others. Nor do they make any commitment to the underlying nature of the states referred to. When …
It is important to realize that first-personal phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing. Any given mental state is either phenomenally conscious or it isn’t. It makes no sense to talk of degrees of phenomenal consciousness, or partial phenomenal consciousness. This is another place where some of the distinctions drawn in Monday’s post …
In the previous post I articulated Literalism to a degree. In the book I articulate it further by responding to a series of objections, at least some of which have no doubt occurred to you. Since these are likely to be raised in comments, in this post I will present …
