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12Information without TruthIn Armen T. Marsoobian, Brian J. Huschle, Eric Cavallero & Patrick Allo (eds.), Putting Information First, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-04-22.This chapter contains sections titled: Information and the Veridicality Thesis Information as a Mongrel Concept Natural Information Without Truth Nonnatural Information: The Case for the Veridicality Thesis Nonnatural Information Without Truth An Objection Conclusion Acknowledgments References.
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16Knowledge as Factually Grounded BeliefAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4): 403-417. 2022.Knowledge is factually grounded belief. This account uses the same ingredients as the traditional analysis—belief, truth, and justification—but posits a different relation between them. While the traditional analysis begins with true belief and improves it by simply adding justification, this account begins with belief, improves it by grounding it, and then improves it further by grounding it in the facts. In other words, for a belief to be knowledge, it's not enough that it be true and justifie…Read more
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8Neurocognitive Mechanisms Some ClarificationsJournal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8): 226-250. 2022.
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16Neurocognitive Mechanisms A Situated, Multilevel, Mechanistic, Neurocomputational, Representational Framework for Biological CognitionJournal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8): 167-174. 2022.
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55The Myth of Mind UploadingIn Inês Hipólito, Robert William Clowes & Klaus Gärtner (eds.), The Mind-Technology Problem : Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artefacts, Springer Verlag. pp. 125-144. 2021.It’s fashionable to maintain that in the near future we can become immortal by uploading our minds to artificial computers. Mind uploading requires three assumptions: that we can construct realistic computational simulations of human brains; that realistic computational simulations of human brains would have conscious minds like those possessed by the brains being simulated; that the minds of the simulated brains survive through the simulation. I will argue that the first two assumptions are imp…Read more
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21An Egalitarian Account of Composition and RealizationThe Monist 105 (2): 276-292. 2022.I argue that wholes are neither identical to nor distinct from their parts. Instead, wholes are invariants under some transformations in their parts. Similarly, higher-level properties are neither identical to nor distinct from their lower-level realizers. Instead, higher-level properties are aspects of their realizers that are invariant under some transformations in their realizers. Nowhere in this picture is there any ontological hierarchy between levels of composition or realization. Neither …Read more
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6Activities Are Manifestations of Causal PowersIn Marcus P. Adams, Zvi Biener, Uljana Feest & Jacqueline Anne Sullivan (eds.), Eppur Si Muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Peter Machamer, Springer. 2017.I reduce activities to properties, where properties include causal powers. Activities are manifestations of causal powers. Activities occur when an entity’s causal powers encounter partners for their manifestation. Given this reduction of activities to properties, entities and properties are all we need for an ontology of mechanisms.
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13Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological CognitionOxford University Press. 2020.Gualtiero Piccinini presents a systematic and rigorous philosophical defence of the computational theory of cognition. His view posits that cognition involves neural computation within multilevel neurocognitive mechanisms, and includes novel ideas about ontology, functions, neural representation, neural computation, and consciousness.
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11We define mereologically invariant composition as the relation between a whole object and its parts when the object retains the same parts during a time interval. We argue that mereologically invariant composition is identity between a whole and its parts taken collectively. Our reason is that parts and wholes are equivalent measurements of a portion of reality at different scales in the precise sense employed by measurement theory. The purpose of these scales is the numerical representation of …Read more
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25Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of IntentionalityMinds and Machines 28 (1): 119-139. 2018.We situate the debate on intentionality within the rise of cognitive neuroscience and argue that cognitive neuroscience can explain intentionality. We discuss the explanatory significance of ascribing intentionality to representations. At first, we focus on views that attempt to render such ascriptions naturalistic by construing them in a deflationary or merely pragmatic way. We then contrast these views with staunchly realist views that attempt to naturalize intentionality by developing theorie…Read more
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12Conceived This Way: Innateness DefendedPhilosophers' Imprint 18. 2018.We propose a novel account of the distinction between innate and acquired biological traits: biological traits are innate to the degree that they are caused by factors intrinsic to the organism at the time of its origin; they are acquired to the degree that they are caused by factors extrinsic to the organism. This account borrows from recent work on causation in order to make rigorous the notion of quantitative contributions to traits by different factors in development. We avoid the pitfalls o…Read more
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9The Evolution of Psychological AltruismPhilosophy of Science 85 (5): 1054-1064. 2018.We argue that there are two different kinds of altruistic motivation: classical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms at least partly for those organisms’ sake, and nonclassical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms for the sake of the organism providing the help. We then argue that classical psychological altruism is adaptive if the desire to help others is intergenerationally reliable and, thus, need not be l…Read more
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17According to pancomputationalism, all physical systems – atoms, rocks, hurricanes, and toasters – perform computations. Pancomputationalism seems to be increasingly popular among some philosophers and physicists. In this paper, we interpret pancomputationalism in terms of computational descriptions of varying strength—computational interpretations of physical microstates and dynamics that vary in their restrictiveness. We distinguish several types of pancomputationalism and identify essential fe…Read more
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41Neural Representations ObservedMinds and Machines 28 (1): 191-235. 2018.The historical debate on representation in cognitive science and neuroscience construes representations as theoretical posits and discusses the degree to which we have reason to posit them. We reject the premise of that debate. We argue that experimental neuroscientists routinely observe and manipulate neural representations in their laboratory. Therefore, neural representations are as real as neurons, action potentials, or any other well-established entities in our ontology.
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11Mechanistic AbstractionPhilosophy of Science 83 (5): 686-697. 2016.We provide an explicit taxonomy of legitimate kinds of abstraction within constitutive explanation. We argue that abstraction is an inherent aspect of adequate mechanistic explanation. Mechanistic explanations—even ideally complete ones—typically involve many kinds of abstraction and therefore do not require maximal detail. Some kinds of abstraction play the ontic role of identifying the specific complex components, subsets of causal powers, and organizational relations that produce a suitably g…Read more
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16Neural Computation and the Computational Theory of CognitionCognitive Science 37 (3): 453-488. 2013.We begin by distinguishing computationalism from a number of other theses that are sometimes conflated with it. We also distinguish between several important kinds of computation: computation in a generic sense, digital computation, and analog computation. Then, we defend a weak version of computationalism—neural processes are computations in the generic sense. After that, we reject on empirical grounds the common assimilation of neural computation to either analog or digital computation, conclu…Read more
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14Functionalism, computationalism, and mental contentsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 375-410. 2004.Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional relations between them, we should reject these assumptions…Read more
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44Computing mechanismsPhilosophy of Science 74 (4): 501-526. 2007.This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of computing, n…Read more
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20Despite its significance in neuroscience and computation, McCulloch and Pitts's celebrated 1943 paper has received little historical and philosophical attention. In 1943 there already existed a lively community of biophysicists doing mathematical work on neural networks. What was novel in McCulloch and Pitts's paper was their use of logic and computation to understand neural, and thus mental, activity. McCulloch and Pitts's contributions included (i) a formalism whose refinement and generalizati…Read more
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2Book review: John Von Neumann, the computer and the brain, 2nd edition (review)Minds and Machines 13 (2): 327-332. 2003.
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1Review of Russell T. Hurlburt, Eric Schwitzgebel, Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (4). 2008.
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330The cognitive neuroscience revolutionSynthese 193 (5): 1509-1534. 2016.We outline a framework of multilevel neurocognitive mechanisms that incorporates representation and computation. We argue that paradigmatic explanations in cognitive neuroscience fit this framework and thus that cognitive neuroscience constitutes a revolutionary break from traditional cognitive science. Whereas traditional cognitive scientific explanations were supposed to be distinct and autonomous from mechanistic explanations, neurocognitive explanations aim to be mechanistic through and thro…Read more
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29Information processing, computation, and cognitionJournal of Biological Physics 37 (1): 1-38. 2011.Computation and information processing are among the most fundamental notions in cognitive science. They are also among the most imprecisely discussed. Many cognitive scientists take it for granted that cognition involves computation, information processing, or both – although others disagree vehemently. Yet different cognitive scientists use ‘computation’ and ‘information processing’ to mean different things, sometimes without realizing that they do. In addition, computation and information pro…Read more
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27Computation without representationPhilosophical Studies 137 (2): 205-241. 2008.The received view is that computational states are individuated at least in part by their semantic properties. I offer an alternative, according to which computational states are individuated by their functional properties. Functional properties are specified by a mechanistic explanation without appealing to any semantic properties. The primary purpose of this paper is to formulate the alternative view of computational individuation, point out that it supports a robust notion of computational ex…Read more
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16The Resilience of ComputationalismPhilosophy of Science 77 (5): 852-861. 2010.Roughly speaking, computationalism says that cognition is computation, or that cognitive phenomena are explained by the agent‘s computations. The cognitive processes and behavior of agents are the explanandum. The computations performed by the agents‘ cognitive systems are the proposed explanans. Since the cognitive systems of biological organisms are their nervous 1 systems (plus or minus a bit), we may say that according to computationalism, the cognitive processes and behavior of organisms ar…Read more
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16Computational explanation in neuroscienceSynthese 153 (3): 343-353. 2006.According to some philosophers, computational explanation is proprietary
to psychology—it does not belong in neuroscience. But neuroscientists routinely offer computational explanations of cognitive phenomena. In fact, computational explanation was initially imported from computability theory into the science of mind by neuroscientists, who justified this move on neurophysiological grounds. Establishing the legitimacy and importance of computational explanation in neuroscience is one thing; shedd…Read more -
25Symbols, strings, and spikesUnpublished. 2005.I argue that neural activity, strictly speaking, is not computation. This is because computation, strictly speaking, is the processing of strings of symbols, and neuroscience shows that there are no neural strings of symbols. This has two consequences. On the one hand, the following widely held consequences of computationalism must either be abandoned or supported on grounds independent of computationalism: (i) that in principle we can capture what is functionally relevant to neural processe…Read more
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