What is the difference between the phenomenology of perception and the phenomenology of imagination? Here are three prima facie possibilities: There’s no difference There’ a difference of degree There’s a difference of kind The first view is that perceiving my dog Julius and imagining him (in the same setting) have …
In the previous post I brought up the issue of how to distinguish belief from desire. In a framework in which belief and desire are treated as explanatory posits cited in the explanation of behavior, it’s pretty straightforward to identify the respective functional role each plays in the explanation of …
There’s a long philosophical history, dating back to Plato’s Republic, of distinguishing between a cognitive “department” of the mind (the intellect, or the “understanding”) and a conative department (the will). This is preserved in mainstream philosophy of mind within the framework of belief-desire psychology. Belief is taken to be the …
Maybe before plunging into the project I pursue in Varieties, I should say something on the very idea of a first-person, introspectively based project for studying consciousness. In particular, I want to comment on the idea that a crucial step in cognitive science becoming a serious scientific study, no flimsier …
A couple of months ago I got an amazing book called Owls of the World that more or less summarizes all the knowledge that humanity has gathered so far on the 250-odd species of owl inhabiting the earth. It gave me a glimpse into the kind of work a zoologist …
We shall conclude our posts with something more controversial. In identifying a function for consciousness it is useful to carefully study cases associated with conscious attention. Memory is one case in which there are insights to be found. In chapter 4 of our book, we distinguish between two types of …
While we argue that consciousness and attention must be largely dissociated, there is some overlap between the two. Conscious attention is this overlap and can be described as the “reportable” form of attention that is part of conscious awareness (i.e., where the contents of attention are consciously accessible such that one …
