CFP: Sense and Space
Third annual iCog conference, February 2016 Sense and Space 18th-19th February 2016 Senate House, University of London
Why all conscious thinking is sensory-based
This final post addresses an obvious puzzle: why is reflective thinking sensory based? We can, after all, think about all sorts of abstract nonsensory topics. We think about God, the size of the universe, the mental states of other people, the validity of arguments, arithmetical facts and other mathematical entities, …
System 2 reasoning (and a word about mindwandering)
Most psychologists who study human reasoning have converged on some or other version of dual-systems theory. System 1 is a set of systems that are supposed to be fast, inflexible, and unconscious in their operations, issuing in the initial intuitions many of us have when presented with a novel reasoning …
Working memory and fluid g
Yesterday I sketched an argument for believing that all access-conscious thinking is sensory based. But suppose this conclusion is wrong. Suppose there is some sort of workspace in which amodal (nonsensory) thoughts – judgments, goals, decisions, intentions, and the rest – can become active and be conscious. What would one …
Attention, conscious experience, and working memory
One argument for the view that all access-consciousness depends upon sensory representations is an inference to the best explanation (or rather, a series of them) that brings together recent work on consciousness with recent work on working memory. The argument builds on the findings of Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and …
CFP: Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol. 2
The Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy series, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe, and Shaun Nichols, is now calling for papers for its second volume.
The sensory-based theory of conscious thinking
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for this opportunity to talk about some of my recent work, especially my book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. In this post I’ll sketch the …