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140Functional MRI and the study of human consciousnessJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14 (6): 818-831. 2002.& Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the begin with single-subject (preprocessed) scan series, and study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consider the patterns of all voxels as potential multivariate consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much encodings of phenomenal information. Twenty-seven subjects of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis from the four studies were analyzed with multivariate of multiple experimental …Read more
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94Mental representation from the bottom upSynthese 70 (January): 23-78. 1987.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 d…Read more
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88Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (edited book)MIT Press. 2014.
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84Consciousness: A connectionist manifesto (review)Minds and Machines 5 (2): 161-85. 1995.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 frame…Read more
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84Studying the mind from the inside outBrain and Mind 3 (1): 243-59. 2002.Good research requires, among other virtues,(i) methods that yield stable experimentalobservations without arbitrary (post hoc)assumptions, (ii) logical interpretations ofthe sources of observations, and (iii) soundinferences to general causal mechanismsexplaining experimental results by placing themin larger explanatory contexts. In TheNew Phrenology , William Uttal examines theresearch tradition of localization, and findsit deficient in all three virtues, whetherbased on lesion studies or on n…Read more
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80Terra cognita: From functional neuroimaging to the map of the mind (review)Brain and Mind 1 (1): 93-116. 2000.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 functionalneuroimag…Read more
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80Beyond “the Fringe”: A Cautionary Critique of William JamesConsciousness and Cognition 9 (4): 629-637. 2000.
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78Simple MindsMIT Press. 1989.Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.
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74The Music of Consciousness: Can Musical Form Harmonize Phenomenology and the Brain?Constructivist Foundations 8 (3): 324-331. 2013.Context: Neurophenomenology lies at a rich intersection of neuroscience and lived human experience, as described by phenomenology. As a new discipline, it is open to many new questions, methods, and proposals. Problem: The best available scientific ontology for neurophenomenology is based in dynamical systems. However, dynamical systems afford myriad strategies for organizing and representing neurodynamics, just as phenomenology presents an array of aspects of experience to be captured. Here, th…Read more
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67Commentary on Searle and the 'Deep Unconscious'Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (3): 201-202. 1996.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…Read more
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67Is "Cognitive Neuroscience" an Oxymoron?Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18 (4): 283-286. 2011.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 expresse…Read more
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64Connectionist hysteria: Reducing a Freudian case study to a network modelPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 1 (2): 69-88. 1994.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…Read more
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62A 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 i…Read more
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60Through a Glass Darkly: Schizophrenia and Functional Brain ImagingPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18 (4): 257-274. 2011.To william james, conscious life was a stream; to Edmund Husserl, a flow. These metaphors point to the marvelous continuity of experience as it weaves through the world of thought and things. We might similarly talk about the flow of the body, as I reach for my cup of coffee. A physiologist could decompose the action, isolating the contribution of each muscle and joint to the whole. This functional analysis would constitute one form of explanation of the movement. As we replace "I grab the cup" …Read more
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53Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of ConsciousnessMIT Press. 2004.An innovative theory of consciousness, drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and supported by brain-imaging, presented in the form of a hardboiled ..
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47Frankenstein's children: Artificial intelligence and human valueMetaphilosophy 16 (4): 307-318. 1985.
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42The Fables of Lucy R.: Association and Dissociation in Neural NetworksIn Dan J. Stein & J. Ludick (eds.), Neural Networks and Psychopathology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 248--273. 1998.According to Aristotle, "to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind," (Poetics 1448b). But even as he affirms the unbounded human capacity for integrating new experience with existing knowledge, he alludes to a significant exception: "The sight of certain things gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the most exact images of them, whether the forms of animals which we greatly despise or of corpses." Our capacity for learning …Read more
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42Consciousness should not mean, but beBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 158-159. 1999.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 ho…Read more
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42Neural correlates of temporality: Default mode variability and temporal awarenessConsciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 695-703. 2012.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 ana…Read more
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41Popping the thought balloonIn Don Ross, Andrew Brook & David L. Thompson (eds.), Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, Mit Press. pp. 169--99. 2000.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 …Read more
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40Protention and Predictive Processing: The Wave of the FutureConstructivist Foundations 13 (1): 98-99. 2017.Gallagher’s main claim can be enhanced neurophenomenologically. In his 1907 lectures Thing and Space, Husserl argued that perception in general is enactive. Moreover, the neuroscientific theory of predictive processing connects neatly to a future-oriented phenomenology.
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40Consciousness, connectionism, and cognitive neuroscience: A meeting of the mindsPhilosophical Psychology 9 (1): 61-78. 1996.Accounting for phenomenal structure—the forms, aspects, and features of conscious experience—poses a deep challenge for the scientific study of consciousness, but rather than abandon hope I propose a way forward. Connectionism, I argue, offers a bi-directional analogy, with its oft-noted “neural inspiration” on the one hand, and its largely unnoticed capacity to illuminate our phenomenology on the other. Specifically, distributed representations in a recurrent network enable networks to superpos…Read more
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40Leaping to conclusions: Connectionism, consciousness, and the computational mindIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 444--459. 1991.
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35Consciousness: Only introspective hindsight?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (4): 686-687. 1991.
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34Access deniedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 261-262. 1995.The information processing that constitutes accessconsciousness is not sufficient to make a representational state conscious in any sense. Standard examples of computation without consciousness undermine A-consciousness, and Block's cases seem to derive their plausibility from a lurking phenomenal awareness. That is, people and other minded systems seem to have access-consciousness only insofar as the state accessed is a phenomenal one, or the state resulting from access is phenomenal, or both.
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34Commentary on towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodesPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (2): 127-128. 1996.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes”Dan Lloyd (bio)To think about grief is to think about many things. My one-year-old daughter was practicing opening and closing a cabinet door as I puzzled over a response to Wright, Sloman, and Beaudoin’s “Toward a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes.” She was completely absorbed in her project, and as I watched my elf at her task, I thought about the voices…Read more
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29Connectionism in the golden age of cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1): 42-43. 1988.
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |