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157Is the grain of vision finer than the grain of attention? Response to BlockThought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 20-28. 2013.In many theories in contemporary philosophy of mind, attention is constitutively linked to phenomenal consciousness. Ned Block has recently argued that ‘identity crowding’ provides an example of subjects consciously seeing something to which they are unable to attend. Here I examine the reasons that Block gives for thinking that this is a case of a consciously perceived item that we are unable to attend to, and I offer a different interpretation
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72Against Unifying Accounts of AttentionErkenntnis 80 (1): 39-56. 2015.There have recently been a number of attempts to put forth a philosophical account of the nature of attention. Many such theories aim at giving necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be attention. In this paper I will argue that any such theory must meet two criteria. Then I shall examine four prominent accounts of attention in some detail, and argue that all of them face problems meeting one or the other of the criteria. I propose an alternative view, which involves taking serious…Read more
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7Toward the Where and What of Consciousness in the BrainJournal of Intelligent Systems 9 (5-6): 473-506. 1999.
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2The importance of the parietal lobes for consciousnessConsciousness and Cognition 10 (3): 379-417. 2001.
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42The central role of the parietal lobes in consciousnessConsciousness and Cognition 10 (3): 379-417. 2001.There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of ''perspectivalness.'' In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the cre…Read more
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92In Defence of Powerful QualitiesMetaphysica 14 (1): 93-107. 2013.The ontology of ‘powerful qualities’ is gaining an increasing amount of attention in the literature on properties. This is the view that the so-called categorical or qualitative properties are identical with ‘dispositional’ properties. The position is associated with C.B. Martin, John Heil, Galen Strawson and Jonathan Jacobs. Robert Schroer ( 2012 ) has recently mounted a number of criticisms against the powerful qualities view as conceived by these main adherents, and has also advanced his own …Read more
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21Does the corollary discharge of attention exist?Consciousness and Cognition 21 (1): 325-339. 2012.We discuss experimental support for the existence of a corollary discharge signal of attention movement control and its formulation in terms of the corollary discharge of attention model of attention movement . The data is from fMRI, MEG and EEG activity observed about 200 ms after stimulus onset in various attention paradigms and in which the activity is mainly sited in parietal and extra-striate visual areas. Moreover the data arises from neural activity observed before report of a subject’s e…Read more
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53Cortical activity and the explanatory gapConsciousness and Cognition 7 (2): 109-48. 1998.An exploration is given of neural network features now being uncovered in cortical processing which begins to go a little way to help bridge the ''Explanatory Gap'' between phenomenal consciousness and correlated brain activity. A survey of properties suggested as being possessed by phenomenal consciousness leads to a set of criteria to be required of the correlated neural activity. Various neural styles of processing are reviewed and those fitting the criteria are selected for further analysis.…Read more
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27Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Phenomenal Consciousness?Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (11-12): 173-194. 2013.There has recently been a flurry of interest over how attention and phenomenal consciousness interact. Felipe De Brigard and Jesse Prinz have made the bold claim that attention is necessary and sufficient for phenomenal consciousness. If this turns out to be true, then we will have taken significant steps toward naturalizing the mind, which is a particularly exciting prospect. Against this position, several thinkers have presented empirical data which apparently show that consciousness is possib…Read more
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51J. Phys. A, to appear, quant-ph/0506173.
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25New avenues in supersymmetry and supergravityFoundations of Physics 13 (3): 395-407. 1983.We analyze the problem of constructing supersymmetric versions of gauge theories of particles and of gravity which have a closed supersymmetric algebra. Inparticular we present the basic no-go theorems that indicate that in four dimensions it is not possible to construct suitably extended supersymmetric versions of the above theories without drastic modification of the supersymmetric algebra. Two ways past the“N=3” barrier are discussed; that of central charges involved highly constrained versio…Read more
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85The Aharonov-Bohm effect: Still a thought-provoking experiment (review)Foundations of Physics 18 (7): 731-740. 1988.In the Aharonov- Bohm effect, electromagnetic potentials alter the two-slit interference pattern formed by an electron beam. We discuss here a curious feature of this effect, namely that, even though the interference pattern changes, none of its moments are shifted