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42How to operationalise consciousnessAustralian Journal of Psychology 71 390-410. 2019.Objective To review the way consciousness is operationalised in contemporary research, discuss strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and propose new measures. Method We first reviewed the literature pertaining to the phenomenal character of visual and self-consciousness as well as awareness of visual stimuli. We also reviewed more problematic cases of dreams and animal consciousness, specifically that of octopuses. Results Despite controversies, work in visual and self consciousnes…Read more
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101The feeling of embodiment: A case study in explaining consciousnessPalgrave MacMillian. 2019.This book proposes a novel and rigorous explanation of consciousness. It argues that the study of an aspect of our self-consciousness known as the ‘feeling of embodiment’ teaches us that there are two distinct phenomena to be targeted by an explanation of consciousness. First is an explanation of the phenomenal qualities – 'what it is like' – of the experience; and second is the subject's awareness of those qualities. Glenn Carruthers explores the phenomenal qualities of the feeling of embodimen…Read more
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40Intuitions, edited by Anthony Robert Booth and Darrell P. Rowbottom: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. ix + 289, £40 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1): 187-190. 2016.
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61Confabulation or Experience? Implications of Out-of-Body Experiences for Theories of ConsciousnessTheory and Psychology 28 (1): 122-140. 2018.Difficulties in distinguishing veridical reports of experience from confabulations have implications for theories of consciousness. I develop some of these implications through a consideration of out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Do these variations indicate individual variation in experience or are they post-hoc confabulations, stories told by subjects to themselves in an attempt to make sense of the core phenomenology? I argue that no existent or possible evidence would be sufficient to favour o…Read more
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28The conceptual space explanation of the rubber hand illusion: first experimental testsPsychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 4 (2): 161-175. 2017.The experience of embodiment may be studied using the rubber hand illusion. Little is known about the cognitive mechanism that elicits the feeling of embodiment. In previous models of the rubber hand illusion, bodily signals are processed sequentially. Such models cannot explain some more recent findings. Carruthers (2013) proposed a multidimensional model of embodiment, in which the processing of embodiment is understood in terms of conceptual hand space. Visual features of hands are represente…Read more
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45A model of the synchronic selfConsciousness and Cognition 16 (2): 533-550. 2007.The phenomenology of the self includes the sense of control over one’s body and mind, of being bounded in body and mind, of having perspective from within one’s body and mind and of being extended in time. I argue that this phenomenology is to be accounted for by a set of five dissociable cognitive capacities that compose the self. The focus of this paper is on the four capacities that compose the synchronic self: the agentiveB self, which underlies the sense of control over one’s body; the boun…Read more
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1773The case for the comparator model as an explanation of the sense of agency and its breakdownsConsciousness and Cognition 21 (1): 30-45. 2012.I compare Frith and colleagues’ influential comparator account of how the sense of agency is elicited to the multifactorial weighting model advocated by Synofzik and colleagues. I defend the comparator model from the common objection that the actual sensory consequences of action are not needed to elicit the sense of agency. I examine the comparator model’s ability to explain the performance of healthy subjects and those suffering from delusions of alien control on various self-attribution tasks…Read more
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29A Comparison of fortunes : the comparator and multifactorial weighting models of the sense of agencyAscs09: Proceedings of the 9Th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science. 2010.The sense of agency over bodily actions is the feeling that one is the agent of one's actions. In this paper I examine the prospects of Frith and colleagues' influential comparator account of how the sense of agency over one's bodily actions is elicited, in comparison to the multifactorial weighting model advocated by Synofzik and colleagues in response to some problems with this account. I examine two problems for the comparator model. I consider the common objection that the actual sensory con…Read more
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254Types of body representation and the sense of embodimentConsciousness and Cognition 17 (4): 1316. 2008.The sense of embodiment is vital for self recognition. An examination of anosognosia for hemiplegia—the inability to recognise that one is paralysed down one side of one’s body—suggests the existence of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ representations of the body. Online representations of the body are representations of the body as it is currently, are newly constructed moment by moment and are directly “plugged into” current perception of the body. In contrast, offline representations of the body are re…Read more
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709Introduction: The Hard Problem of ConsciousnessTopoi 36 (1): 1-3. 2017.In this paper we try to diagnose one reason why the debate regarding the Hard Problem of consciousness inevitably leads to a stalemate: namely that the characterisation of consciousness assumed by the Hard Problem is unjustified and probably unjustifiable. Following Dennett : 4–6, 1996, Cognition 79:221–237, 2001, J Conscious Stud 19:86, 2012) and Churchland :402–408, 1996, Brainwise: studies in neurophilosophy. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), we argue that there is in fact no non-question begg…Read more
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115The nature of representation and the experience of oneself: A critical notice on Gottfried Vosgerau's Mental Representation and Self-ConsciousnessPhilosophical Psychology 24 (3). 2011.Philosophical Psychology, Volume 24, Issue 3, Page 411-425, 01Jun2011
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121A Metacognitive Model of the Sense of Agency over ThoughtsCognitive Neuropsychiatry 17 (4): 291-314. 2012.Introduction. The sense of agency over thoughts is the experience of oneself qua agent of mental action. Those suffering certain psychotic symptoms are thought to have a deficient sense of agency. Here I seek to explain this sense of agency in terms of metacognition. Method. I start with the proposal that the sense of agency is elicited by metacognitive monitoring representations that are used in the intentional inhibition of thoughts. I apply this model to verbal hallucinations and the like and…Read more
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59Making Sense of Spousal Revenge FilicideAggression and Violent Behavior. forthcoming.“Spousal revenge” killers murder their child apparently out of a desire to cause harm to their ex-partner, the child’s other parent. Standard explanations of these killings fail to provide an adequate solution to what I call the problem of spousal revenge filicide. This is the problem of how a killer comes to take their rage at their former partner out on their own child and how that child can be dehumanized to the point of murder. Although the dehumanization of the victim is acknowledged to oc…Read more
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577Difficulties for extending Wegner and colleagues’ model of the sense of agency to deficits in delusions of alien controlAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 5 (3): 126-141. 2014.Wegner and colleagues have offered an explanation of the sense of agency over one’s bodily actions. If the orthodox view is correct and there is a sense of agency deficit associated with delusions of alien control, then Wegner and colleagues’ model ought to extend to an explanation of this deficit. Data from intentional binding studies opens up the possibility that an abnormality in representing the timing of mental events leads to a violation of the principle of priority in those suffering from…Read more
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154Is the body schema sufficient for the sense of embodiment? An alternative to de Vignmont's modelPhilosophical Psychology 22 (2): 123-142. 2009.De Vignemont argues that the sense of ownership comes from the localization of bodily sensation on a map of the body that is part of the body schema. This model should be taken as a model of the sense of embodiment. I argue that the body schema lacks the theoretical resources needed to explain this phenomenology. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that a deficient sense of embodiment is not associated with a deficient body schema. The data de Vignemont uses to argue that the body image d…Read more
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632A metacognitive model of the feeling of agency over bodily actionsPsychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. forthcoming.I offer a new metacognitive account of the feeling of agency over bodily actions. On this model the feeling of agency is the metacognitive monitoring of two cues: i) smoothness of action: done via monitoring the output of the comparison between actual and predicted sensory consequences of action and ii) action outcome: done via monitoring the outcome of action and its success relative to a prior intention. Previous research has shown that the comparator model offers a powerful explanation of the…Read more
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97Toward a Cognitive Model of the Sense of Embodiment in a (Rubber) HandJournal of Consciousness Studies 20 (3-4). 2013.The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is the experience of an artificial body part as being a real body part and the experience of touch coming from that artificial body part. An explanation of this illusion would take significant steps towards explaining the experience of embodiment in one’s own body. I present a new cognitive model to explain the RHI. I argue that the sense of embodiment arises when an on-line representation of the candidate body part is represented as matching an off-line prototype …Read more
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1111Who am I in out of body experiences? Implications from OBEs for the explanandum of a theory of self-consciousnessPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (1): 183-197. 2015.Contemporary theories of self-consciousness typically begin by dividing experiences of the self into types, each requiring separate explanation. The stereotypical case of an out of body experience may be seen to suggest a distinction between the sense of oneself as an experiencing subject, a mental entity, and a sense of oneself as an embodied person, a bodily entity. Point of view, in the sense of the place from which the subject seems to experience the world, in this case is tied to the sense …Read more
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76Reply to Tsakiris and Fotopoulou “Is my body the sum of online and offline body representations?’’Consciousness and Cognition 17 (4): 1323. 2008.I thank Tsakiris and Fotopoulou for their insightful commentary on my target article. In particular I welcome the opportunity to revisit how the online /offline representation of the body distinction is drawn. Tsakiris and Fotopoulou raise three major points of concern with my model. First they argue that the sense of embodiment is not sufficient for self recognition. Second they show that the relationship between online and offline representations of the body cannot be the simple ‘serial constr…Read more
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777A problem for Wegner and colleagues' model of the sense of agencyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (3): 341-357. 2010.The sense of agency, that is the sense that one is the agent of one’s bodily actions, is one component of our self-consciousness. Recently, Wegner and colleagues have developed a model of the causal history of this sense. Their model takes it that the sense of agency is elicited for an action when one infers that one or other of one’s mental states caused that action. In their terms, the sense of agency is elicited by the inference to apparent mental state causation. Here, I argue that this mode…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Philosophy of Mind |