First off, I want to thank John Schwenkler for inviting me to contribute a few posts on my new book, Modest Nonconceptualism: Epistemology, Phenomenology, Content, this week. As I’m sure readers of the Brains blog are well aware, there is an intricate debate over whether perceptual experience is conceptual or …
The third session of the Minds Online conference has begun! It is on the theme of Belief and Reasoning, and includes the following papers: Ram Neta (UNC) “Basing Is Conjuring” (KEYNOTE) Grace Helton (University of Antwerp): “The Revisability View of Belief” Commentators: Michael Bishop and Neil Van Leeuwen Jack Marley-Payne (MIT): “Against Intellectualist Theories of …
Many thanks to John for inviting me to blog about my book, Thinking about Oneself, this week. The book is concerned with self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. A paradigmatic expression of this ability is the ability to think “I”-thoughts (as in the thought “I am hungry”, …
Anyone familiar with the philosophical literature on representation is familiar with the notion of misrepresentation. The standard view is that any robust notion of representation must make it possible to have misrepresentation. If something cannot misrepresent, it does not represent at all. At least not in the most interesting and …
Most of the philosophers who discuss computation are interested in computation because they are interested in the computational theory of cognition. Cognitive systems are typically assumed to represent things, and computation is supposed to help explain how they represent. So many philosophers conclude that computation is the manipulation of representations. …
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 …
Why isn’t a lucid dream just a dream within a dream? Suppose I’m having a flying dream and I think, “I must be dreaming.” I’m in a dream state, so why I am not just dreaming that I’m dreaming? To put the question another way, if there’s a difference between …
