•  54
    Of course they do
    with Vittorio Gallese
    Consciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 574-576. 2003.
  •  4860
    Künstliche Intelligenz: Chancen und Risiken
    with Mannino Adriano, David Althaus, Jonathan Erhardt, Lukas Gloor, and Adrian Hutter
    Diskussionspapiere der Stiftung Für Effektiven Altruismus 2 1-17. 2015.
    Die Übernahme des KI-Unternehmens DeepMind durch Google für rund eine halbe Milliarde US-Dollar signalisierte vor einem Jahr, dass von der KI-Forschung vielversprechende Ergebnisse erwartet werden. Spätestens seit bekannte Wissenschaftler wie Stephen Hawking und Unternehmer wie Elon Musk oder Bill Gates davor warnen, dass künstliche Intelligenz eine Bedrohung für die Menschheit darstellt, schlägt das KI-Thema hohe Wellen. Die Stiftung für Effektiven Altruismus (EAS, vormals GBS Schweiz) hat mit …Read more
  •  767
    This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of “minimal phenomenal selfhood,” which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those …Read more
  •  57
    Inferences are just folk psychology
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 670-670. 2004.
    To speak of “inferences,” “interpretations,” and so forth is just folk psychology. It creates new homunculi, and it is also implausible from a purely phenomenological perspective. Phenomenal volition must be described in the conceptual framework of an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. It is a non sequitur to conclude from dissociability that the functional properties determining phenomenal volition never make a causal contribution.
  •  120
    The emergence of a shared action ontology: Building blocks for a theory
    with Vittorio Gallese
    Consciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 549-571. 2003.
    To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. We will investigate which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process, by answering to the following questions: What are the ex…Read more
  • Das Leib-Seele-Problem in den achtziger Jahren
    Conceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 25 99-114. 1991.
  •  19
    Reply to Livet: Meta-abeyance?
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.
    Let me begin by pointing out a number of potential misunderstandings in Pierre Livet’s densely written commentary. In the first paragraph, Pierre Livet writes, “phenomenal transparency involves an implication of the existence of the entities represented”. This is what I call the “extensionality equivocation”. As explained at length in BNO, “phenomenal transparency” has been a technical term in philosophy at least since G. E. Moore’s paper The Refutation of Idealism. In BNO, I offered a refined n…Read more
  •  110
    Commentary on jakab's Ineffability of Qualia
    Consciousness and Cognition 9 (3): 352-362. 2000.
    Zoltan Jakab has presented an interesting conceptual analysis of the ineffability of qualia in a functionalist and classical cognitivist framework. But he does not want to commit himself to a certain metaphysical thesis on the ontology of consciousness or qualia. We believe that his strategy has yielded a number of highly relevant and interesting insights, but still suffers from some minor inconsistencies and a certain lack of phenomenological and empirical plausibility. This may be due to some …Read more
  •  408
    Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (4): 353-393. 2003.
    A representationalist analysis of strong first-person phenomena is developed (Baker 1998), and it is argued that conscious, cognitive self-reference can be naturalized under this representationalist analysis. According to this view, the phenomenal first-person perspective is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a cognitive first-person perspective. Cognitive self-reference always is reference to the phenomenal content of a transparent self-model. The concepts of phenomenal transparenc…Read more
  •  199
    Video ergo sum: Manipulating bodily self-consciousness
    with Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, and Olaf Blanke
    Science 317 (5841): 1096-1099. 2007.
    Genes adjacent to species-specific loci are 6.2% older than genes adjacent to other dynamic loci (P < 10−2 by randomization; gray bars in Fig. 3); thus, species-specific genes are not randomly distributed but are found preferentially in the older regions, indicating that the incipient Escherichia and Salmonella lineages continued to participate in recombination at loci unlinked to lineage-specific genes
  •  72
    Sommario. Prima che di definire un modello della coscienza e comprendere che cosa sia un fenomeno soggettivo, è necessario sviluppare una teoria della prospettiva in prima persona. Questa teoria deve essere concettualmente con- vincente, empiricamente plausibile e, soprattutto, aperta a nuovi sviluppi. Il quadro di riferimento concettuale deve essere coerente con il progresso scienti- fico. Le sue ipotesi fondamentali devono essere adattabili in modo da permette- re a nuovi risultati sperimental…Read more
  •  17
    Teaching Philosophy with Argumentation Maps: Review of Can Computers Think? The Debate by Robert E. Horn (review)
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 5. 1999.
  •  1361
  • Duchowość a uczciwość intelektualna
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 4 (2). 2013.
  •  2012
    Reply to Gallagher: Different conceptions of embodiment
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.
    Gallagher is right in pointing out that scientific realism is an implicit background assumption of BNO, and that I did not give an independent argument for it. He is also right in saying that science does not _demonstrate_ the existence of certain entities, but that it assumes those entities in a process of explanation and theory formation. However, it is not true that science, as Gallagher writes (p.2), “simply” assumes the reality of certain things: such assumptions are embedded in the context…Read more
  •  281
    " In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of...
  •  3555
    Contemporary philosophical and scienti .c discussions of mind developed from a 'proto-concept of mind ',a mythical,tradition- alistic,animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many di .erent cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a 'soul '.It will be argued that this notion originates in accurate and truthful .rst-person reports about the experiential content of a special neurophenomenological state-cl…Read more
  •  141
    Motor ontology: The representational reality of goals, actions and selves
    with Vittorio Gallese
    Philosophical Psychology 16 (3). 2003.
    The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target …Read more
  •  173
    Why are identity disorders interesting for philosophers?
    In Thomas Schramme & Johannes Thome (eds.), Philosophy and Psychiatry, De Gruyter. pp. 311-325. 2003.
    “Identity disorders” constitute a large class of psychiatric disturbances that, due to deviant forms of self-modeling, result in dramatic changes in the patients’ phenomenal experience of their own personal identity. The phenomenal experience of selfhood and transtemporal identity can vary along an extremely large number of dimensions: There are simple losses of content. There are also various typologies of phenomenal disintegration as in schizophrenia, in depersonalization disorders and in_ Dis…Read more
  •  50
    Was genau ist eigentlich eine Ich-Störung? Ich werde auf den folgenden Seiten dafür argumentieren, daß man die Natur dieses Typs von psychiatrischen Störungsbildern besser verstehen kann, indem man einen Blick über die medizinischen Fachgrenzen hinweg in die analytische Philosophie des Geistes [1] und in die Kognitionswissenschaft [2] wirft. Beiden Disziplinen ist gemeinsam, daß mentale Zustände dort häufig einer funktionalen Analyse unterzogen und als Informationsverarbeitungsereignisse beschri…Read more
  •  1
    The future of consciousness studies'
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (5-6). 1997.
  •  65
    Das Ziel dieses Beitrags besteht darin, eine kurze Darstellung der "Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität" (SMT) anzubieten, die sich an naturwissenschaftlich orientierte Leser richtet, die selbst keine Philosophen sind, aber dennoch an philosophischen Theorien des Selbstbewusstseins interessiert sind.
  •  12
    Reply to Legrand: Content from the Inside Out
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.
    In the current debate, very few people have penetrated as deeply into the self-model theory of subjectivity and have developed such a scholarly expertise on the project as a whole as Dorothée Legrand has done. In the last sentence of her commentary, Legrand alludes to the ugly consequences I have to face after calling the book Being No One: I am suddenly confronted with people from all over the world who are stomping their feet on the ground like stubborn children, claiming that they definitely …Read more
  •  1358
    This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsectio…Read more
  •  1058
    Precis: Being No-One
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 11 1-30. 2005.
    This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent book _Being No One_ (BNO hereafter). A more systematic summary, which focuses on short answers to a set of specific, individual questions is already contained _in _the book, namely as BNO section 8.2. Here, I deliberately and completely exclude all work related to semantically differentiating and empirically constraining the philosophical concept of a "quale" (mostly Chapter 2, 3 & 8), all proposals regarding conceptual foundati…Read more