books — The Brains Blog

2. Valent Representation

Yesterday I promised to give an account of valent representation. This is perhaps the core original idea of the book (though it has precedents in Ruth Millikan’s ‘pushmi-pullyu’ representations (1995) and Andy Clark’s ‘action oriented representations’ (1997)). Essentially, valent representation is representation in a valent (i.e. positive or negative) manner. …

1. A new account of the emotions

Tom Cochrane February 11, 2019 February 11, 2019 bodily experience / Emotion / Intentionality / Philosophy of Mind / Psychology / Tom Cochrane: The Emotional Mind

Thanks to John and the team for letting me take over the Brains Blog for the week. Over the next five days I’m going to summarise some of the key ideas in my new book The Emotional Mind: A control theory of affective states (Cambridge University Press). The book grew …

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John Schwenkler February 11, 2019 February 18, 2019 books

We are grateful to Tom Cochrane for blogging this week on The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States (Cambridge, 2019). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.

4. Composite Subjectivity and the Panpsychic Universe

Luke Roelofs February 7, 2019 February 7, 2019 Consciousness / Luke Roelofs: Combining Minds / Metaphysics

So let’s circle back to the combination problem for panpsychism, that got me on this topic in the first place. Despite reading and writing a lot about it, I’m still never quite sure what counts as ‘solving’ the combination problem. Often I read papers that say ‘here’s the combination problem’ …

3. Composite Subjectivity and Psychological Conflict

Luke Roelofs February 6, 2019 February 6, 2019 Consciousness / Luke Roelofs: Combining Minds

In the last post we took physical systems (organisms, brains, solar systems) that contained each other as parts, and asked which were conscious. But some philosophers think this is misguided from the get-go: no physical system, whatever its features, can strictly be a subject of consciousness, but can only ‘support’ …

2. Composite Subjectivity and Functional Structure

Luke Roelofs February 5, 2019 February 5, 2019 Consciousness / functionalism / Luke Roelofs: Combining Minds

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 …

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John Schwenkler February 4, 2019 February 10, 2019 books

We are grateful to Luke Roelofs for blogging this week on Combining Minds: How to Think About Composite Subjectivity (Oxford, 2019). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.