•  1121
    Sliders
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 154-163. 2023.
    'Sliders' are a speculative introspection-enhancing future technology allowing humans with cybernetic brain implants to precisely and voluntarily modulate moods and other mental states that vary along a one-dimensional scale. Such future humans may, for example, use the Sliders interface to temporarily present a COWARDLY–COURAGEOUS 'slider' in their visual field, and with a mere act of will change their level of courage from a 60 to a 65 on the 100-point scale. The present article discusses the …Read more
  •  6
    The Neurophilosophy of Consciousness
    In Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley. 2017.
    Neurophilosophical appeals to neuroscience involve explicit and detailed use of contemporary neuroscientific literature. Neurophilosophy is not to be distinguished from other forms of naturalism by the philosophical conclusions that might be reached but by the role that contemporary neuroscience plays in the premises of the arguments for those conclusions. This chapter examines the neurophilosophical theories, and these theories will be useful to look at a small sample of some of the relevant ne…Read more
  • The Philosophy of Neuroscience
    with Bickle John and Anthony Landreth
    In Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
  • Synthetic neuroethology
    In James Moor & Terrell Ward Bynum (eds.), Cyberphilosophy: the intersection of philosophy and computing, Blackwell. 2002.
  •  314
    Robot Pain
    In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. pp. 200-209. 2017.
    I have laid out what seem to me to be the most promising arguments on opposing sides of the question of whether what humans regard as the first-person accessible aspects of pain could also be implemented in robots. I have emphasized the ways in which the thought experiments in the respective arguments attempt to marshal hypothetical first- person accessible evidence concerning how one’s own mental life appears to oneself. In the Chinese room argument, a crucial premise involves the thesis that f…Read more
  •  274
    Conscious-state Anti-realism
    In Carlos Muñoz-Suárez & Filipe De Brigard (eds.), Content and Consciousness Revisited, Springer. pp. 184-197. 2015.
    Realism about consciousness conjoins a claim that consciousness exists with a claim that the existence is independent in some interesting sense. Consciousness realism so conceived may thus be opposed by a variety of anti-realisms, distinguished from each other by denying the first, the second, or both of the realist’s defining claims. I argue that Dennett’s view of consciousness is best read as an anti-realism that affirms the existence of consciousness while denying an important independence cl…Read more
  •  31
    Philosophy Illustrated: Forty-two Thought Experiments to Broaden Your Mind (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 96 114-116. 2022.
  •  753
    The most promising approaches to understanding phenomenal consciousness are what I’ll call cognitive approaches, the most notable exemplars of which are the theories of consciousness articulated by David Rosenthal and Daniel Dennett. The aim of the present contribution is to review the core similarities and differences of these exemplars, as well as to outline the main strengths and remaining challenges to this general sort of approach.
  •  1702
    Meta-Illusionism and Qualia Quietism
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12): 140-148. 2016.
    Many so-called problems in contemporary philosophy of mind depend for their expression on a collection of inter-defined technical terms, a few of which are qualia, phenomenal property, and what-it’s-like-ness. I express my scepticism about Keith Frankish’s illusionism, the view that people are generally subject to a systematic illusion that any properties are phenomenal, and scout the relative merits of two alternatives to Frankish’s illusionism. The first is phenomenal meta-illusionism, the vie…Read more
  •  269
    Evolving artificial minds and brains
    with Alex Vereschagin and Mike Collins
    In Drew Khlentzos & Andrea Schalley (eds.), Mental States Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature, John Benjamins. 2007.
    We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that ex- plain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evo- lution. We present the results of computer simulations of evolved neural network controllers and discuss the similarity of the simulations to real-world examples of neural network control of animal behavior. We argue that focusing on the simplest cases of evolved intelligent behavior, in both simulated and real organisms, reveals that e…Read more
  •  130
    Representational parts
    with Rick Grush
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 389-394. 2002.
    In this reply we claim that, contra Dreyfus, the kinds of skillful performances Dreyfus discusses _are_ representational. We explain this proposal, and then defend it against an objection to the effect that the representational notion we invoke is a weak one countenancing only some global state of an organism as a representation. According to this objection, such a representation is not a robust, projectible property of an organism, and hence will gain no explana- tory leverage in cognitive scie…Read more
  •  201
    The philosophy of neuroscience
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2006.
    Over the past three decades, philosophy of science has grown increasingly “local.” Concerns have switched from general features of scientific practice to concepts, issues, and puzzles specific to particular disciplines. Philosophy of neuroscience is a natural result. This emerging area was also spurred by remarkable recent growth in the neurosciences. Cognitive and computational neuroscience continues to encroach upon issues traditionally addressed within the humanities, including the nature of …Read more
  •  9
    Synthetic Neuroethology
    Metaphilosophy 33 (1‐2): 11-29. 2002.
    Computation and philosophy intersect three times in this essay. Computation is considered as an object, as a method, and as a model used in a certain line of philosophical inquiry concerning the relation of mind to matter. As object, the question considered is whether computation and related notions of mental representation constitute the best ways to conceive of how physical systems give rise to mental properties. As method and model, the computational techniques of artificial life and embodied…Read more
  •  66
    Review of Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
  • Objectivity Without Space
    Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6. 1998.
  •  679
    Color-Consciousness Conceptualism
    Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 617-631. 2012.
    The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented across a memory…Read more
  •  866
    Shit Happens
    Episteme 4 (2): 205-218. 2007.
    Abstract In this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations
  •  626
    s Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine’s brief flirtation with a “mitigated phenomenalism” (Gibson’s phrase) in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Quine’s ontology of 1953 (“On Mental Entities”) and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation.
  •  661
    Swamp Mary’s revenge: deviant phenomenal knowledge and physicalism
    Philosophical Studies 148 (2): 231-247. 2010.
    Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underp…Read more
  •  36
    Points of view from the brain's eye view: Subjectivity and neural representation
    In William P. Bechtel, Pete Mandik, Jennifer Mundale & Robert S. Stufflebeam (eds.), Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader, Blackwell. pp. 312. 2001.
  •  139
    Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars
    Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 641-643. 2012.
    I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some con…Read more
  •  362
    Higher-Order Representational theories of consciousness — HORs — primarily seek to explain a mental state’s being conscious in terms of the mental state’s being represented by another mental state. First-Order Representational theories of consciousness — FORs — primarily seek to explain a property’s being phenomenal in terms of the property being represented in experience. Despite differences in both explanans and explananda, HORs and FORs share a reliance on there being such a property as being…Read more
  •  256
    The neurophilosophy of subjectivity
    In John Bickle (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    The so-called subjectivity of conscious experience is central to much recent work in the philosophy of mind. Subjectivity is the alleged property of consciousness whereby one can know what it is like to have certain conscious states only if one has undergone such states oneself. I review neurophilosophical work on consciousness and concepts pertinent to this claim and argue that subjectivity eliminativism is at least as well supported, if not more supported, than subjectivity reductionism
  •  2070
    Among our conscious states are conscious thoughts. The question at the center of the recent growing literature on cognitive phenomenology is this: In consciously thinking P, is there thereby any phenomenology—is there something it’s like? One way of clarifying the question is to say that it concerns whether there is any proprietary phenomenology associated with conscious thought. Is there any phenomenology due to thinking, as opposed to phenomenology that is due to some co-occurring sensation o…Read more
  •  471
    Selective representing and world-making
    with Andy Clark
    Minds and Machines 12 (3): 383-395. 2002.
    In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing — the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing is full…Read more