…. the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. (James 1904:481) I chose this quotation from William James’s …
I’ll end my week in the spotlight on a romantic note, by presenting an idealized procedure for producing a complete theory of in the “descriptive psychology of consciousness.”
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 …
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 …
To substantiate the claims about our definitions of ‘consciousness’ and ‘attention’ we would like to explain how using the framework of dissociation (CAD) helps elucidate these meanings in two important ways. First, the framework shows that debates can be reinterpreted in insightful ways and second, it provides theoretical reasons to …
