John Schwenkler kindly asked me to blog about my new book, Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account. I am grateful for the invitation. The original motivation for the research that led to the book was to make progress on the vexed question of whether cognition involves computation. That seems to require …
My last post focused on the relationship between minimal phenomenal selfhood in dreams, spatiotemporal self-location, and bodily experience. But there is another and in some ways more traditional way of thinking about the relationship between dreaming and the self. This is to focus on the epistemic relation between the self, …
As we move from wakefulness into sleep onset and through the different stages of sleep, there are concerted changes in brain activity, the way we process external stimuli from the environment, and in the contents and structure of conscious experience. At the same time, the exact relationship between these changes …
We all dream every night, and most of us feel reasonably certain that we know what it is like to dream. But how well do we really know the phenomenology of dreaming? Can we really be certain that in describing our dreams, we are not merely projecting implicit, pretheoretical assumptions …
We spend roughly one third of our lives asleep, and research tells us that a considerable portion of this time is spent dreaming. Yet, most of us rarely remember our dreams, and even when we do, we would be hard-pressed to describe more than a single dream per night. This …
It is a terrifying thing to finish a book and then think of all the points that should’ve been made, all the topics that should have had an airing. I comfort myself with the thought that Outside Color turned out to be quite a slim volume, and I will be …
“If there are states of sensing bluely, they obviously do not present themselves as such—otherwise the very existence of a controversy about their existence would be inexplicable.” Sellars (1981, 67) It’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. In the first of these posts I suggested that we look …
