•  1
    Let me decide
    Journal of Medical Ethics 20 (1): 57-57. 1994.
  •  6
    Availability of organs
    Journal of Medical Ethics 22 (1): 55-55. 1996.
  •  28
    Altruism towards the end of life
    Journal of Medical Ethics 19 (2): 111-113. 1993.
    In the author's experience most normal healthy adults would like to have the choice of medical help to die if they become incurably ill and find their suffering intolerable. The reasons for this are explored, based on ten years of listening and talking about the subject to a wide variety of people in many countries. The most familiar and common are the avoidance of futile suffering and the desire to retain autonomy. This paper concentrates on the dislike of losing independence and its closely as…Read more
  •  91
    Visual models in analogical problem solving
    with Nancy J. Nersessian and Ashok K. Goel
    Foundations of Science 10 (1): 133-152. 2005.
    Visual analogy is believed to be important in human problem solving. Yet, there are few computational models of visual analogy. In this paper, we present a preliminary computational model of visual analogy in problem solving. The model is instantiated in a computer program, called Galatea, which uses a language for representing and transferring visual information called Privlan. We describe how the computational model can account for a small slice of a cognitive-historical analysis of Maxwell’s …Read more
  •  43
    Coherence in the Visual Imagination
    with Michael O. Vertolli and Matthew A. Kelly
    Cognitive Science 42 (3): 885-917. 2018.
    An incoherent visualization is when aspects of different senses of a word are present in the same visualization. We describe and implement a new model of creating contextual coherence in the visual imagination called Coherencer, based on the SOILIE model of imagination. We show that Coherencer is able to generate scene descriptions that are more coherent than SOILIE's original approach as well as a parallel connectionist algorithm that is considered competitive in the literature on general coher…Read more
  •  13
    Authority and the Future of Consent in Population-Level Biomedical Research
    with Mark Sheehan, Rachel Thompson, Jon Fistein, Michael Dunn, Michael Parker, Julian Savulescu, and Kerrie Woods
    Public Health Ethics. forthcoming.
    Population-level biomedical research has become crucial to the health system’s ability to improve the health of the population. This form of research raises a number of well-documented ethical concerns, perhaps the most significant of which is the inability of the researcher to obtain fully informed specific consent from participants. Two proposed technical solutions to this problem of consent in large-scale biomedical research that have become increasingly popular are meta-consent and dynamic c…Read more
  •  7
    The Neural Correlates of Analogy Component Processes
    with John-Dennis Parsons
    Cognitive Science 46 (3). 2022.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.
  •  720
    This essay uses a mental files theory of singular thought—a theory saying that singular thought about and reference to a particular object requires possession of a mental store of information taken to be about that object—to explain how we could have such thoughts about abstract mathematical objects. After showing why we should want an explanation of this I argue that none of three main contemporary mental files theories of singular thought—acquaintance theory, semantic instrumentalism, and sema…Read more
  •  75
    I explore how many within modern industrial societies currently understand, manage, and respond to their emotional suffering. I argue that this understanding and management of suffering has radically altered in the last 30 years, creating a new model of suffering, “the negative model” (suffering is purposeless), which has largely replaced the “positive model” (suffering is purposeful) that prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries. This shift has been hastened by what I call the “rationalization …Read more
  •  19
    Many mental phenomena involve thinking about people who do not exist. Imagined characters appear in planning, dreams, fantasizing, imaginary companions, bereavement hallucinations, auditory verbal hallucinations, and as characters created in fictional narratives by authors. Sometimes these imagined persons are felt to be completely under our control, as when one fantasizes about having a great time at a party. Other times, characters feel as though they are outside of our conscious control. Drea…Read more
  •  14
    Imagination and Belief: The Microtheories Model of Hypotheical Thinking
    with J. Bicknell
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (3-4): 31-49. 2016.
    Beliefs about hypothetical situations need to be 'quarantined' from factual representations, so that our inference processes do not make false conclusions about the real world. Nichols argued for the existence of a place where these special beliefs are kept: the pretence box. We show that this theory has a number of drawbacks, including its inability to account for simultaneously keeping track of multiple imagined worlds. We offer an explanation that remedies these problems: beliefs of content i…Read more
  •  72
    The cognitive importance of testimony
    Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 16 (2): 297-318. 2012.
    As a belief source, testimony has long been held by theorists of the mind to play a deeply important role in human cognition. It is unclear, however, just why testimony has been afforded such cognitive importance. We distinguish three suggestions on the matter: the number claim, which takes testimony’s cognitive importance to be a function of the number of beliefs it typically yields, relative to other belief sources; the reliability claim, which ties the importance of testimony to its relative …Read more
  •  8
    Development, databases and the internet
    with Jonathan B. L. Bard
    Bioessays 17 (11): 999-1001. 1995.
    There is now a rapidly expanding population of interlinked developmental biology databases on the World Wide Web that can be readily accessed from a desk‐top PC using programs such as Netscape or Mosaic. These databases cover popular organisms (Arabidopsis, Caenorhabditis, Drosophila, zebrafish, mouse, etc.) and include gene and protein sequences, lists of mutants, information on resources and techniques, and teaching aids. More complex are databases relating domains of gene expression to embryo…Read more