The Brains Blog

Ruth Millikan will livestream “Mental Representation made simple”

Nick Byrd February 3, 2020 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

We are excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday (10th). As always, it is free. You can find information about how and when to join the webinar below or at the Neural Mechanisms website—where you can also join sign up for the mailing list that notifies people about …

Symposium on Joseph Gottlieb’s “Verbal Disputes in the Theory of Consciousness”

It’s my pleasure to introduce our next Ergo symposium, featuring Joseph Gottlieb’s “Verbal Disputes in the Theory of Consciousness“, including commentaries by Jonathan Farrell, Assaf Weksler, and Josh Weisberg. I’d like begin by thanking each of the participants for their great work.

Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science

John Schwenkler January 22, 2020 academia / CFPs

The Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science (BSCS) is an undergraduate study abroad program for students from the US and other countries aimed at broadening their understanding of cognitive science from an interdisciplinary perspective. Lecturers of the Program are distinguished experts with noteworthy international research and teaching experience. The host of …

CFP: ESPP 2020

Kristina Musholt January 21, 2020 CFPs

The 28th annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology will take place in Leipzig, Germany from August 31 to September 3, 2020. Keynote speakers are Victoria McGeer, Dorit Bar-On, Vicky Southgate and Herbert Clark. The deadline for submissions is April 1. For further details see: https://www.espp2020.com

Frances Egan’s “The role of Representation in Computational Cognitive Models”

Nick Byrd January 20, 2020 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

5. The Positive Semantic Argument

Peter Carruthers January 17, 2020 animal cognition / Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds15 Comments

As I emphasized on Wednesday, phenomenal concepts are, in a sense, private. They are acquaintance-based indexicals that aren’t governed by any set of public norms, and which don’t defer to the expertise of others. Nor do they make any commitment to the underlying nature of the states referred to. When …

4. The Negative Semantic Argument

Peter Carruthers January 16, 2020 animal cognition / Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds15 Comments

It is important to realize that first-personal phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing. Any given mental state is either phenomenally conscious or it isn’t. It makes no sense to talk of degrees of phenomenal consciousness, or partial phenomenal consciousness. This is another place where some of the distinctions drawn in Monday’s post …

3. Reducing the Phenomenal

Peter Carruthers January 15, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: The Centered Mind / Phenomenal Concepts7 Comments

The phenomenal concept strategy has been pursued by many different authors. The basic idea is to explain the problematic thought experiments (zombies, Mary, and the explanatory gap) in terms of the distinctive set of concepts we can use when thinking about our own access-conscious nonconceptual mental states. People differ over …

2. The Global Workspace

Peter Carruthers January 14, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds11 Comments

The best theory of phenomenal consciousness is one that equates it with the contents of the so-called global workspace (a.k.a. working memory)—or rather, with a subset thereof. Why a subset? Because although conceptual information can be bound into the contents of perceptual and imagistic states, and made available in the …

1. Consciousness Problems

Peter Carruthers January 13, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds23 Comments

A number of factors make the problem of consciousness seem harder than it is. I will say something briefly about two of them here. One is that people the world over are tacit dualists about the mental, making them much more receptive towards non-physical qualia than they otherwise would be. …

Now Featured

John Schwenkler January 12, 2020 books

We are pleased to have Peter Carruthers (University of Maryland) blogging this week on Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (Oxford, 2019). To view all of Peter’s posts on a single page, please click here.

A Couple of Venues

Gualtiero Piccinini January 6, 2020 UncategorizedOne Comment

Just a quick reminder about two venues for good work in the philosophy of neuroscience: Synthese used to publish a yearly Special Issue in the philosophy of neuroscience. The format has changed slightly, in that the papers are now published as they are accepted, but they are collected together online …

Manolo Martinez’s “Information Theory is a Formal Theory of Representation”

Nick Byrd January 6, 2020 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

Carlotta Pavese on The Psychological Reality of Practical Representation

Nick Byrd December 16, 2019 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

We are excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday (20th). As always, it is free. You can find information about how and when to join the webinar below or at the Neural Mechanisms website—where you can also join sign up for the mailing list that notifies people about …

CFP: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Locating Representations in the Brain, Synthese Topical Collection

Sarah Robins December 11, 2019 CFPs

We’re pleased to announce a call for papers for a Synthese Topical Collection* on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Locating Representations in the Brain Guest Editors: Sarah Robins (University of Kansas) and Jessey Wright (Stanford University). The concept of ‘representation’ has become ubiquitous in neuroscience, especially in light of recent advances in …

CFP: Metacognition: new developments and challenges

Joulia Smortchkova December 3, 2019 CFPs

Submission deadline: March 6, 2020 The Metacognition of Concepts project is inviting submissions for talks or posters on the topic of metacognition for a conference in London on May 12-13, 2020. In recent years the scope of metacognition has expanded. Metacognitive processes seem to be involved in practically all cognitive …

Symposium on Michel and Morales, “Minority Reports: Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex”

Robert Briscoe December 2, 2019 Consciousness / Mind & Language Symposia / Neuroscience; Philosophy of Science / Philosophy of Mind6 Comments

I’m very pleased to announce our latest Mind & Language symposium on Matthias Michel and Jorge Morales’ forthcoming “Minority Reports: Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex.” Our outstanding commentators on the target article include Liz Irvine (Cardiff), Benjamin Kozuch (Alabama), and Michael Pitts with Kevin Ortego (Reed College).

Announcing the 2020 Neural Mechanisms webinar series!

Nick Byrd December 2, 2019 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

We’re excited to share the 2020 Neural Mechanisms webinar series. The amazing line-up is in this post. Many thanks to Marco Viola and Fabrizio Calzavarini for organizing the Neural Mechanism events and to all of the commentators that make these webinars possible!

JOB: Tulane University

Daniel Burnston November 20, 2019 Uncategorized

The Tulane University Philosophy Department is hiring a Professor of Practice in the area of Asian Philosophy/Buddhism, with an AOC in the Philosophy of Mind. Professors of practice are non-tenure track but continuing positions with full benefits, and with opportunities for long-term employment and increases in compensation. Professors of practice …

3. Aspects of the Self

Majid Davoody Beni November 2, 2019 Consciousness / Ethics / Majid Davoody Beni: Structuring the Self3 Comments

In the previous post, I showed how the self-structure could be specified. The self has also some properties, e.g., phenomenal, social, and ethical ones, that are capable of being specified in structural terms. Let us begin with phenomenal aspects, which amount to the capacity to have consciousness and intentional states. …