In my final post I would like to wrap up by sketching some of the implications of my proposal – in particular concerning our theorizing about social cognition – as well as raising some questions that are being left open. There exists quite a large controversy in philosophy and psychology …
To provide a full account of the ability to think “I”-thoughts, we need an explanation of the transition from implicitly self-related information to explicit self-representation. In the previous post, I argued that world-directed action and perception do not require explicit self-representation. This raises the question of when explicit self-representation does …
Recently, there have been several attempts to provide an account of our ability for self-conscious thought in terms of nonconceptual forms of (self-)representation (most prominent among these is perhaps the account offered by Bermúdez (1998)). Proponents of nonconceptual content assume that there are ways of representing the world that are …
Many thanks to John for inviting me to blog about my book, Thinking about Oneself, this week. The book is concerned with self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. A paradigmatic expression of this ability is the ability to think “I”-thoughts (as in the thought “I am hungry”, …
Anyone familiar with the philosophical literature on representation is familiar with the notion of misrepresentation. The standard view is that any robust notion of representation must make it possible to have misrepresentation. If something cannot misrepresent, it does not represent at all. At least not in the most interesting and …
One of the ways that the philosophical literature on computation is traditionally impoverished is that it tends to focus on just one or two paradigmatic examples, such as Turing machines or traditional digital computers. Perhaps because of this, some philosophers have produced accounts of physical computation from which it follows …
In my previous post, I introduced pancomputationalism–the idea that every physical system performs computations. There are three main versions of pancomputationalism. Unlimited pancomputationalism says that every physical system performs just about any computation you like. For example, a piece of the Berlin wall sitting outside a museum, like the one in …
