Philosophy Carnival #44
Here.
My Kitchen Experiment with Olfactory Attention
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 …
Haugeland on Systems
Haugeland offers a theory of systems along the following lines: A component is a relatively independent and self-contained portion of a system in the sense that it relevantly interacts with other components only through interfaces between them (and contains no internal interfaces at the same level). An interface is a …
Neurolaw
The next issue of the New York Times Magazine has an article on the way neuroscience is changing the law and judicial system. More reasons why philosophers of mind and ethicists should not ignore neuroscience.
Consciousness in Children without Cerebral Cortex
I got an interesting letter from the grandmother of a child with hydranencephaly (reproduced by permission):Mr. Piccinini,Your response to Dr. Merker’s paper, Consciousness without a CerebralCortex: A Challenge for Neuroscience and Medicine, was educational anddisappointing. I appreciated the evaluation of phenomenal versuscreature consciousness and the application of state consciousness;however I …
Descartes and Embodied Cognition
As a factoid from intellectual history, there is reason to believe that Descartes would be much more sympathetic to the hypothesis of embodied cognition than his critics (e.g. Haugeland, 1998, Rowlands, 1999, 2003) and some of his supporters (e.g., Grush, 2003) have suggested. There is, for example, the well-known passage …
Brain lesions and multiple realization (Round 2)
Thanks to Buddy, I came up with a way of reconstructing Bechtel and Mundale’s argument that does not rely on the tacit premise that univocal localization entails univocal realization. Recall that B&M state: Nevertheless, it is important to note that in interpreting these deficits, researchers implicitly reject multiple realization among …