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835Philosophical 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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816QualiaIn Richard L. Gregory (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press. 2004.Qualia include the ways things look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain; more generally, what it's like to have mental states. Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, in my view, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Yet, the existence of qualia is controversial. Here is what is controversial: whether qualia, so defined, can be characterized in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. Opponent…Read more
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762Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and NeuroscienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5): 481--548. 2007.How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have n…Read more
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750Does the prefrontal cortex play an essential role in consciousness? Insights from intracranial electrical stimulation of the human brainJournal of Neuroscience 1 (41): 2076-2087. 2021.A central debate in philosophy and neuroscience pertains to whether PFC activity plays an essential role in the neural basis of consciousness. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have revealed that the contents of conscious perceptual experience can be successfully decoded from PFC activity, but these findings might be confounded by post- perceptual cognitive processes, such as thinking, reasoning, and decision-making, that are not necessary for con- sciousness. To clarify the involvement…Read more
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745Advertisement for a Semantics for PsychologyMidwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 615-678. 1986.
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742Finessing the Bored Monkey ProblemTrends in Cognitive Sciences 24 (1): 1-2. 2020.This is a response to Ian Phillips and Jorge Morales, "The Fundamental Problem with No-Cognition Paradigms," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2020
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664Anti-Reductionism Slaps BackNoûs 31 (s11): 107-132. 1997.For nearly thirty years, there has been a consensus (at least in English-speaking countries) that reductionism is a mistake and that there are autonomous special sciences. This consensus has been based on an argument from multiple realizability. But Jaegwon Kim has argued persuasively that the multiple realizability argument is flawed.1 I will sketch the recent history of the debate, arguing that much --but not all--of the anti-reductionist consensus survives Kim's critique. This paper was origi…Read more
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630The higher order approach to consciousness is defunctAnalysis 71 (3). 2011.The higher order approach to consciousness attempts to build a theory of consciousness from the insight that a conscious state is one that the subject is conscious of. There is a well-known objection1 to the higher order approach, a version of which is fatal. Proponents of the higher order approach have realized that the objection is significant. They have dealt with it via what David Rosenthal calls a “retreat” (2005b, p. 179) but that retreat fails to solve the problem.
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608Attention and mental paint1Philosophical Issues 20 (1): 23-63. 2010.Much of recent philosophy of perception is oriented towards accounting for the phenomenal character of perception—what it is like to perceive—in a non-mentalistic way—that is, without appealing to mental objects or mental qualities. In opposition to such views, I claim that the phenomenal character of perception of a red round object cannot be explained by or reduced to direct awareness of the object, its redness and roundness—or representation of such objects and qualities. Qualities of percept…Read more
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605The Defective Armchair: A Reply to TyeThought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2): 159-165. 2014.Michael Tye's response to my “Grain” (Block ) and “Windows” (Block ) raises general metaphilosophical issues about the value of intuitions and judgments about one's perceptions and the relations of those intuitions and judgments to empirical research, as well as specific philosophical issues about the relation between seeing, attention and de re thought. I will argue that Tye's appeal to what is (§. 2) “intuitively obvious, once we reflect upon these cases” (“intuition”) is problematic. I will a…Read more
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599Mental paintIn Martin Hahn & B. Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Mit Press. pp. 165--200. 2003.The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of philosophy-- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are
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595Wittgenstein and QualiaPhilosophical Perspectives 21 (1): 73-115. 2007.endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected. The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are contents of experiential states which cannot be fully captured in natural language. I will pinpoint the difference …Read more
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556Consciousness and cognitive accessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3): 289-317. 2008.This article concerns the interplay between two issues that involve both philosophy and neuroscience: whether the content of phenomenal consciousness is 'rich' or 'sparse', whether phenomenal consciousness goes beyond cognitive access, and how it would be possible for there to be evidence one way or the other.
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544Max Black's objection to mind-body identityOxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 3-78. 2006.considered an objection that he says he thought was first put to him by Max Black. He says.
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534The 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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487If 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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448Concepts of ConsciousnessIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 206-218. 2002.
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398What 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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392Measuring 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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390Review of Alva Noe, Action in Perception (review)Journal of Philosophy 102 (5): 259-272. 2005.This is a charming and engaging book that combines careful attention to the phenomenology of experience with an appreciation of the psychology and neuroscience of perception. In some of its aimsfor example, to show problems with a rigid version of a view of visual perception as an inverse optics process of constructing a static 3-D representation from static 2-D information on the retina--it succeeds admirably. As No points out, vision is a process that depends on interactions between the percei…Read more
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376Readings in Philosophy of Psychology: 1 (edited book)Harvard University Press. 1980.... PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY is the study of conceptual issues in psychology. For the most part, these issues fall equally well in psychology as in..
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325Bodily sensations as an obstacle for representationismIn Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Bradford Book/mit Press. pp. 137-142. 2005.Representationism 1, as I use the term, says that the phenomenal character of an experience just is its representational content, where that representational content can itself be understood and characterized without appeal to phenomenal character. Representationists seem to have a harder time handling pain than visual experience. I will argue that Michael Tye's heroic attempt at a representationist theory of pain, although ingenious and enlightening, does not adequately come to terms with the r…Read more
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308Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected PapersBradford. 2007.This volume of Ned Block's writings collects his papers on consciousness, functionalism, and representationism. A number of these papers treat the significance of the multiple realizability of mental states for the mind-body problem -- a theme that has concerned Block since the 1960s. One paper on this topic considers the upshot for the mind-body problem of the possibility of a robot that is functionally like us but physically different -- as is Commander Data of _Star Trek's_ second generation.…Read more
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289How heritability misleads about raceIn Bernard Boxill (ed.), Boston Review, Oxford University Press. pp. 99-128. 1996.According to The Bell Curve, Black Americans are genetically inferior to Whites. That's not the only point in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book. They also argue that there is something called "general intelligence" which is measured by IQ tests, socially important, and 60 percent "heritable" within whites. (I'll explain heritability below.) But the claim about genetic inferiority is my target here. It has been subject to wide-ranging criticism since the book was first published last y…Read more
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282How not to find the neural correlate of consciousnessIn João Branquinho (ed.), The Foundations of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 1. 2001.There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H2O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searles reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wrong …Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Perception |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |