Yesterday I promised to give an account of valent representation. This is perhaps the core original idea of the book (though it has precedents in Ruth Millikan’s ‘pushmi-pullyu’ representations (1995) and Andy Clark’s ‘action oriented representations’ (1997)). Essentially, valent representation is representation in a valent (i.e. positive or negative) manner. …
Thanks to John and the team for letting me take over the Brains Blog for the week. Over the next five days I’m going to summarise some of the key ideas in my new book The Emotional Mind: A control theory of affective states (Cambridge University Press). The book grew …
We are grateful to Tom Cochrane for blogging this week on The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States (Cambridge, 2019). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.
So let’s circle back to the combination problem for panpsychism, that got me on this topic in the first place. Despite reading and writing a lot about it, I’m still never quite sure what counts as ‘solving’ the combination problem. Often I read papers that say ‘here’s the combination problem’ …
In the last post we took physical systems (organisms, brains, solar systems) that contained each other as parts, and asked which were conscious. But some philosophers think this is misguided from the get-go: no physical system, whatever its features, can strictly be a subject of consciousness, but can only ‘support’ …
The Brains blog is excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday. It is free. Find information about how and when to join the webinar here: https://www.neuralmechanisms.org/blog/webinar-julia-haas-8-february-2019 (and below). Revisiting Binocular Rivalry Julia Haas (Australian National University) February 8, 2019 Webinarh 8-10 – Greenwhich Mean Time (Convert to your local time …
Consider a contrast. The solar system contains my brain as a part; my brain is conscious; the solar system is not conscious (at least in any everyday sense – let’s set panpsychism aside for now). That’s enough to show that having conscious parts is not enough, all by itself, to …
