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148IX*—An Argument for Holism1Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1): 151-170. 1995.Ned Block; IX*—An Argument for Holism1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 151–170
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Readings in Philosophy of PsychologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (2): 227-230. 1980.
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12Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2. Ned BlockPhilosophy of Science 50 (1): 175-176. 1983.
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11Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and the Nature of ConsciousnessPhilosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 39-70. 1999.
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20Is Experiencing Just Representing?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 663-670. 1998.
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9Troubles with functionalismIn W. Savage (ed.), Perception and Cognition, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 9--261. 1978.
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89Author's responseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1). 1997.The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness arises from the battle between biological and computational approaches to the mind. If P = A, the computationalists are right; but if not, the biological nature of P yields its scientific nature.
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836Philosophical issues about consciousnessIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.There are a number of different matters that come under the heading of ‘consciousness’. One of them is phenomenality, the feeling of say a sensation of red or a pain, that is what it is like to have such a sensation or other experience. Another is reflection on phenomenality. Imagine two infants, both of which have pain, but only one of which has a thought about that pain. Both would have phenomenal states, but only the latter would have a state of reflexive consciousness. This entry will start …Read more
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1763ConsciousnessIn Patrick Wilken, Timothy J. Bayne & Axel Cleeremans (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2009.There are two broad classes of empirical theories of consciousness, which I will call the biological and the functional. The biological approach is based on empirical correlations between experience and the brain. For example, there is a great deal of evidence that the neural correlate of visual experience is activity in a set of occipetotemporal pathways, with special emphasis on the infero-temporal cortex. The functionalist approach is a successor of behaviorism, the view that mentality can be…Read more
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547The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (edited book)MIT Press. 1997." -- "New Scientist" Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, ..
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522If perception is probabilistic, why doesn't it seem probabilistic?Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (1755). 2018.The success of the Bayesian approach to perception suggests probabilistic perceptual representations. But if perceptual representation is probabilistic, why doesn't normal conscious perception reflect the full probability distributions that the probabilistic point of view endorses? For example, neurons in MT/V5 that respond to the direction of motion are broadly tuned: a patch of cortex that is tuned to vertical motion also responds to horizontal motion, but when we see vertical motion, foveal…Read more
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467Is experiencing just representing? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 663-670. 1998.The first problem concerns the famous Swampman who comes into existence as a result of a cosmic accident in which particles from the swamp come together, forming a molecular duplicate of a typical human. Reasonable people can disagree on whether Swampman has intentional contents. Suppose that Swampman marries Swampwoman and they have children. Reasonable people will be inclined to agree that there is something it is like for Swampchild when "words" go through his mind or come out of his mouth. F…Read more
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454Measuring away an attentional confound?Neuroscience of Consciousness 3 (1): 1-3. 2017.A recent fMRI study by Webb et al. (Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independent of visual attention, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2016;113:13923–28) proposes a new method for finding the neural correlates of awareness by matching atten- tion across awareness conditions. The experimental design, however, seems at odds with known features of attention. We highlight logical and methodological points that are critical when trying to disentangle attention and awareness.
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100The Puzzle of Perceptual PrecisionOpen Mind. 2015.Argues for a failure of correspondence between perceptual representation and what it is like to perceive. If what it is like to perceive is grounded in perceptual representation, then, using considerations of veridical representation, we can show that inattentive peripheral perception is less representationally precise than attentive foveal perception. However, there is empirical evidence to the contrary. The conclusion is that perceptual representation cannot ground what it is like to perceive
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401What Is Dennett’s Theory a Theory of?Philosophical Topics 22 (1/2): 23-40. 1994.A convenient locus of discussion is provided by Dennett.
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33Functional Role and Truth ConditionsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1): 157-184. 1987.
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75Readings In Philosophy Of Psychology, V (edited book)Harvard University Press. 1981.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and ... V. Influence of imaged pictures and sounds on detection of visual and auditory signals. ...
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211Mental Pictures and Cognitive SciencePhilosophical Review 92 (4): 499--542. 1983.Such claims are part 0f a viewpoint according t0 which mental images represent in thc manner of pictures. It is very natural t0 think that such claims are confused or nonsensical. One of my purposes here is a limited dcfcnsc of this supposedly confused doctrine, especially against its chief cognitive science rival. But this..
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280Can the mind change the world?In Hilary Putnam & George Boolos (eds.), Meaning and method: essays in honor of Hilary Putnam, Cambridge University Press. pp. 137--170. 1990.
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215Paradox and cross purposes in recent work on consciousnessCognition 79 (1-2): 197--219. 2001.Dehaene and Naccache, Dennett and Jack and Shallice “see convergence coming from many different quarters on a version of the neuronal global workspace model†(Dennett, p. 1). (Boldface references are to papers in this volume.) On the contrary, even within this volume, there are commitments to very different perspectives on consciousness. And these differing perspectives are based on tacit differences in philosophical starting places that should be made explicit.  Indeed, it is not clear …Read more
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1991Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gapPhilosophical Review 108 (1): 1-46. 1999.The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) Still, th…Read more
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1321Holism, mental and semanticIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. 1996.Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For example, the meaning of 'c…Read more
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1336The Anna Karenina Theory of the UnconsciousNeuropsychoanalysis 13 (1): 34-37. 2011.The Anna Karenina Theory says: all conscious states are alike; each unconscious state is unconscious in its own way. This note argues that many components have to function properly to produce consciousness, but failure in any one of many different ones can yield an unconscious state in different ways. In that sense the Anna Karenina theory is true. But in another respect it is false: kinds of unconsciousness depend on kinds of consciousness
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259Behaviorism revisitedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 977-978. 2001.O'Regan and Noe declare that the qualitative character of experience is constituted by the nature of the sensorimotor contingencies at play when we perceive. Sensorimotor contingencies are a highly restricted set of input-output relations. The restriction excludes contingencies that don’t essentially involve perceptual systems. Of course if the ‘sensory’ in ‘sensorimotor’ were to be understood mentalistically, the thesis would not be of much interest, so I assume that these contingencies are to …Read more
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
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