Here are two things Dennett says about heterophenomenology: (1) Scientists should interpret a subject’s first-person reports as expressions of the subject’s beliefs (about their consciousness experience)(2) Scientists should treat people as incorrigible about what it’s like to be them. Since (2) seems to contradict Dennett’s often repeated claim that people …
I recently read a very interesting opinion in Nature by Tu & Knight titled “Metabolic cycles as an underlying basis for biological oscillations” (2006). The main idea of the paper is that many periodic processes in organisms, specifically, the circadian cycle, hibernation cycle, and sleep-wake cycle, can be partially explained in terms …
C.B. Martin, The Mind in Nature, OUP, 2007. C.B. Martin died on October 23, 2008, barely a year after his magnum opus came out. As Paul Snowdown writes in his obituary, Martin was one of the most “original, profound and important” philosophers of our time (hat tip Leiter Reports). Yet for a …
I’m writing up a series of posts at my neuroscience blog on the creationists’ recent discovery of consciousness. The first post is here. I’ll be looking at consciousness from many angles, but always through a neuropsychological lens. Since this is a philosophy forum, I’ll quote the bit that offended my …
What follows are some excerpts from a manuscript on the PCC (psychological correlates of consciousness) that I’ve been working on for a while, which will perhaps never see the light of
day. Philosophers, feel free to have a field day with my naive ideas.
Note I’m not sure which of the ideas are mine and which I stole from others. Of the inspirations I remember, two stick out. One, Gregory suggested that qualia function as a ‘tag for the present’ (see
his paper on this here), and Trehub has also suggested similar ideas in the domain of space …
Alerted by Arnold Trehub, I just discovered Science & Consciousness Review, an interesting group blog devoted to reviewing work on the science of consciousness. Incidentally, Arnold has a quick review of Annti Revonsuo’s book, Inner Presence and one of Velmans and Schneider’s Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.
Many theories of attention postulate a mechanism involving the thalamus. Roughly, the idea is that the thalamus can enhance certain sensory signals going to the cortex at the expense of others, and this is what constitutes (sensory) attention. (The mechanism may depend in part on recurrent signals from cortex to …
