After an excellent SSPP run by Gualtiero (who deserves great thanks!), I thought a modestly humorous post from here in Savannah was in order: Here is a question, which I think suggests a funny criticism: if simulation does play a prominent role in mindreading (the attribution of mental states to …
According to a recent paper in Nature Neuroscience, children with autism have virtually no activity in their brain’s mirror neuron system, the apparatus that facilitates imitation and empathy. The researchers believe this malfunction may be the primary cause of autism. Link.
The standard story about the demise of introspectionist psychology goes something like this: Towards the beginning of the 20th Century, experimental psychologists relied on introspecting subjects to study the mind. Members of one prominent school believed that each thought is reducible to sensory images (visual, auditory including verbal, proprioceptive, etc.). Among …
Here: https://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0608062103v1
David Chalmers helpfully pointed out that the first relevant use of “first-person data” appears to be due to Herbert Feigl (in “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’”, 1958). This brings up what seems to me a confusion in the current literature between first-person data as a kind of scientific data and …
The expression “first-person data” has become quite common in the consciousness studied literature, where it is used to refer to data about conscious experience, sometimes with the implication that these data are obtained only through introspection, and sometimes with the further implication that these are private data (as opposed to …
Article in today’s NYT.
