Dan Lloyd

The central characteristic of cognitive explanations of behavior is the appeal to inner representations. I examine the grounds which justify representational explanations, seeking the minimum conditions which organisms must meet to be candidates for such explanations. I first discuss Fodor's proposal that representationality be attributed to systems which respond to nonnomic properties, arguing that the distinction between the nomic and nonnomic in perception is fatally ambiguous. Then I turn to an illustrative review of the behavior and neurobiology of Hermissenda crassicornis, a marine mollusk. Concerning this "model system," I compare the representational style of explanation with both behaviorist and neurophysiological explanations. Representational explanation is potentially more comprehensive than its rivals, and thus I conclude that representations are useful posits wherever internal information-bearing states mediate behavior

O'Brien & Opie's vehicle hypothesis is an attractive framework for the study of consciousness. To fully embrace the hypothesis, however, two of the authors' claims should be extended: first, since phenomenal content is entirely dependent on occurrent brain events and only contingently correlated with external events, it is no longer necessary to regard states of consciousness as representations. Second, the authors' insistence that only stable states of a neural network are conscious seems ad hoc.

Connectionism—also known as parallel distributed processing, or neural network modeling—offers promise as a framework to unite clinical and cognitive psychology, and as a tool for studying conscious and unconscious mental activity. This paper describes a neural network model of the case study of Lucy R., from Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria. Though very simple in architecture, the network spontaneously displays analogues of repression and hallucination, corresponding to Lucy R.'s symptoms. Salient elements of Lucy's conscious experience are represented in the model by the activations of neuronlike processors in a fully interconnected network, without hidden units. The model learns to associate elements of experience that were associated in Lucy's case history. Some of these configurations of elements were traumatic for Lucy; trauma is modeled in the network by "emphatic learning," learning accomplished at an abnormally high learning rate. The model suggests that changing associations among conscious elements are sufficient to generate the symptoms Freud observed: apparent repression, hallucination, and recovery through therapy. In the case of Lucy R., Freud's theoretical inference regarding active but unconscious thought is not required by his data. Instead, the unconscious can be understood as a set of complex dispositions embodied in connections between elements of conscious experience.

A philosophical zombie is a being indistinguishable from an ordinary human in every observable respect, but lacking subjective consciousness. Zombiehood implies *linguistic indiscriminability*, the zombie tendency to talk and even do philosophy of mind in language indiscriminable from ordinary discourse. Zombies thus speak *Zombish*, indistinguishable from English but radically distinct in reference for mental terms. The fate of zombies ultimately depends on whether Zombish can be consistently interpreted. If it can be interpreted consistently, then zombies remain possible, but no test could ever reveal whether anyone is speaking Zombish. Any materialist theory of consciousness is therefore already a theory in Zombish, and is equally confirmable in its human language edition and its zombie-language edition . On the other hand, if Zombish cannot be consistently interpreted, then the zombies described in Zombish are logically impossible. Either way, the search for a materialistic theory of consciousness should be untroubled by the zombies among us

The continual background awareness of duration is an essential structure of consciousness, conferring temporal extension to the many objects of awareness within the evanescent sensory present. Seeking the possible neural correlates of ubiquitous temporal awareness, this article reexamines fMRI data from off-task “default mode” periods in 25 healthy subjects studied by Grady et al. , 2005). “Brain reading” using support vector machines detected information specifying elapsed time, and further analysis specified distributed networks encoding implicit time. These networks fluctuate; none are continuously active during DM. However, the aggregate regions of greatest variability closely resemble the default mode network. It appears that the default mode network has an important role as a state-dependent monitor of temporality

Could "cognitive neuroscience" be an oxymoron? "Cognitive" and "neuroscience" cohere only to the extent that the entities identified as "cognitive" can be coordinated with entities identified as neural. This coordination is typically construed as intertheoretic reduction between "levels" of scientific description. On the cognitive side, folk psychological concepts crystallize into behavioral taxonomies, which are further analyzed into purported cognitive capacities. These capacities are expressed or operationalized in paradigmatic experimental tasks. These cogs comprise a stable ontology, sustaining more than a century of psychology. On the neural side, the biological hierarchy from cells to brains also affords a .

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Searle and the ‘Deep Unconscious’”Dan Lloyd (bio)Can another person know my thoughts with better authority than I know them myself? With his affirmative answer to this question, Freud invented the twentieth-century human, a being whose mind is accessible to scrutiny from outside, and whose attempts at conscious self-explanation are at best partial and in many cases wrong. Even as Freud’s scientific influence wanes, the shift of authority he inaugurated is still gathering strength. Now the mind is open to many outsiders. Not only psychoanalysts, but behaviorists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists are all striving to read my mind, and yours. Against this historical sea change stands the solitary John Searle, whose work is consistently animated by fierce adherence to first person authority and surly attacks of any theory that could be exploited to undermine that authority. To most readers Searle’s positions seem stubbornly anti-scientific and covertly dualistic, despite his insistence to the contrary. And since science is good and dualism is bad, Searle’s arguments have become standing obstacles for theorists to discuss, debate, or dismiss.Buttressing his insistence on first person authority, Searle defends a Cartesian view of mental representation or intentionality, holding that an intentional entity is a conscious entity, either in actuality or potentiality. Deeply unconscious representations are therefore impossible. Eric Gillett has joined the debate just here with a pointed critique of Searle’s argument (also discussed in Lloyd 1990). Gillett performs a double service by challenging Searle’s premises and offering some positive grounds for the deep unconscious. I agree with Gillett that establishing the existence of deeply unconscious representations requires a theory of intentionality that is independent of conscious awareness. Ruth Millikan’s evolutionary teleology is an excellent candidate, in its pursuit of real function and real content (vs. “as-if” interpretation) for mental items.Some questions remain. First, if deeply unconscious entities are clinically important, then in addition to a defense-in-principle of their existence we will need some method of identifying specific deep representations in particular cases. Millikan’s functionalism links content to broad biological and environmental contexts, and thereby seems to be an unwieldy tool for content ascription. If deeply unconscious representations get their content in the way Millikan describes, how can the clinician make use of them?Second, and more important, Millikan’s theory shares with many others the ambition to explain all intentional entities, conscious and unconscious alike. This leads to a new dualism of mental contents, a split between intentional content and conscious content, since the comprehensive theory of intentionality will assign mental content both [End Page 201] shallow and deep, irrespective of consciousness. This is a perplexity that transcends particular theories of intentionality, since what my mental states represent seems at least partly dependent on my environment or context, but my current state of consciousness is exclusively dependent on my brain. How, in theory, can these two concepts of content be reconciled?In sum, deeply unconscious representations do not come cheap. One way to escape the new dualism of content is to deny that the deep entities are representations. Instead, they might be dispositions or the “mechanisms, instinctual drives, structures, and energies which can never become conscious under any conditions,” as Gillett suggests. (In Lloyd 1994 I explore the possibility of a dispositional unconscious understood via connectionism.) On this view, mental content could remain within our first person authority, while the causal processes that manage that content remain out of sight. I wouldn’t have to guess what I’m thinking, but I would depend on the sciences of the mind to tell me how I come to think it.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Searle and the "Deep Unconscious"Commentary: Commentary by LloydDan Lloyd Dan Lloyd, Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, U.S.A.ReferencesLloyd, D. 1990. Loose connections: Four problems with Searle’s argument for the ‘Connection Principle.’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 615–16. Google ScholarLloyd, D. 1994. Connectionist hysteria: Reducing a Freudian case study to a network model. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 1, no. 2: 69–88. Google ScholarCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press...

  Connectionism and phenomenology can mutually inform and mutually constrain each other. In this manifesto I outline an approach to consciousness based on distinctions developed by connectionists. Two core identities are central to a connectionist theory of consciouness: conscious states of mind are identical to occurrent activation patterns of processing units; and the variable dispositional strengths on connections between units store latent and unconscious information. Within this broad framework, a connectionist model of consciousness succeeds according to the degree of correspondence between the content of human consciousness (the world as it is experienced) and the interpreted content of the network. Constitutive self-awareness and reflective self-awareness can be captured in a model through its ability to respond to self-reflexive information, identify self-referential categories, and process information in the absence of simultaneous input. The qualitative feel of sensation appears in a model as states of activation that are not fully discriminated by later processing. Connectionism also uniquely explains several specific features of experience. The most important of these is the superposition of information in consciousness — our ability to perceive more than meets the eye, and to apprehend complex categorical and temporal information in a single highly-cognized glance. This superposition in experience matches a superposition of representational content in distributed representations

For more than a century the paradigm inspiringcognitive neuroscience has been modular and localist.Contemporary research in functional brain imaginggenerally relies on methods favorable to localizingparticular functions in one or more specific brainregions. Meanwhile, connectionist cognitive scientistshave celebrated the computational powers ofdistributed processing, and pioneered methods forinterpreting distributed representations. This papertakes a connectionist approach to functionalneuroimaging. A tabulation of 35 PET (positronemission tomography) experiments strongly indicatesdistributed function for at least the ''medium sized''anatomical units, the cortical Brodmann areas. Moreimportant, when these PET experiments were interpretedas distributed representations, multidimensionalscaling revealed a ''brain activation space'' with asalient structure organized primarily by the sensorymodality of the stimulus, and secondarily by the typeof motor response. These results suggest that currentanalytical techniques in functional neuroimagingshould be augmented by distributed processinganalyses, and that these analyses may lead to manydiscoveries about the structure of ''inner space.''

Many recovering dualists find that the old Cartesian demons are hard to exorcise. Dual substance abuse manifests itself not only as metaphysical dualism, but as a pervasive epistemological framework that creates an unhealthy codependent relationship between scientific realism and phenomenology. Daniel Dennett has led philosophers to recognize many of the symptoms of creeping crypto Cartesianism. In this paper, I try to take Dennett to the limit: Descartes lives on, I argue, in the very heart of cognitive science, in the concept of representation. I outline a five-step program for overcoming this lingering, fundamental, allegiance to Cartesianism, and discuss Dennett's own progress along this path.

Commonsense psychology and cognitive science both regularly assume the existence of representational states. I propose a naturalistic theory of representation sufficient to meet the pretheoretical constraints of a "folk theory of representation", constraints including the capacities for accuracy and inaccuracy, selectivity of proper objects of representation, perspective, articulation, and "efficacy" or content-determined functionality. The proposed model states that a representing device is a device which changes state when information is received over multiple information channels originating at a single source. The changed state of a representing device is a representation. The unitary information source which would give rise to the information impinging on the representing device, and hence, give rise to the representation, is the content of the representation. The model meets the pretheoretic constraints, and also conforms to available neurobiological data for two invertebrate species