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Child soldiers, executive functions, and culpabilityIn Caroline Fournet & Anja Matwijkiw (eds.), Biolaw and international criminal law: towards interdisciplinary synergies, Brill Nijhoff. 2020.
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155Mindmelding, Chapter 9: Sharing conscious statesIn Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy, Oxford University Press. 2012.This chapter explains how mindmelding — the direct experience by one person of another's conscious states — is in fact possible. The temporal lobes causally interact with the prefrontal lobes by way of fiber bundles that run underneath the cortical surface. This provides the perfect first experiment in mindmelding: to ‘branch’ those fiber bundles and run the other end into the brain of another person. Evidence is provided that these bundles have close connections to consciousness, in that whatev…Read more
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154Mindmelding, Chapter 11: Disentangling self and consciousnessIn Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy, Oxford University Press. 2012.This chapter shows that mindmelding is metaphysically possible, i.e., that it does not violate any laws governing the metaphysical nature of reality. Metaphysical issues are fundamental and lie at the core of the most difficult parts of the problems of privacy and the mind-body problem itself. There is nothing stopping us from placing the idea of mindmelding on clear, unproblematic, and plausible metaphysical foundations. It is argued that the position of privacy is the one on shaky metaphysical…Read more
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121Mindmelding, Chapter 2: An alternative frameworkIn Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy, Oxford University Press. 2012.This chapter presents the following hypothesis: There is a perfectly sensible conception of the mind, consciousness, the self, what we mean by ‘I,’ how we perceive and know, and how we remember and decide, all of which cohere amongst one another as well as with what we know about the brain, according to which it is possible for one person to experience directly the conscious states of another person. Not only can one person be directly aware of the conscious states of another person, he can be m…Read more
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22Neuroscience and Normativity: How Knowledge of the Brain Offers a Deeper Understanding of Moral and Legal ResponsibilityCriminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2): 327-351. 2022.Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their…Read more
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52The evolution of aesthetic experienceIai.Tv: Philosophy for Our Times. 2021.Our love for art is a compound byproduct of four different evolutionary events which attached reward to conscious experience itself, to the direction of attention to significant items in consciousness, to representations of scenarios in the brain's default mode network, and to the experience of novel stimuli. Aesthetic experiences contain varying amounts of these rewards, which helps to explain their diversity.
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625Neuroscience and Normativity: How Knowledge of the Brain Offers a Deeper Understanding of Moral and Legal ResponsibilityCriminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2): 327-351. 2022.Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their…Read more
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350Juvenile Self-Control and Legal Responsibility: Building a Scalar StandardIn Alfred Mele (ed.), Surrounding Self-Control, Oxford University Press, Usa. 2020.US criminal courts have recently moved toward seeing juveniles as inherently less culpable than their adult counterparts, influenced by a growing mass of neuroscientific and psychological evidence. In support of this trend, this chapter argues that the criminal law’s notion of responsible agency requires both the cognitive capacity to understand one’s actions and the volitional control to conform one’s actions to legal standards. These capacities require, among other things, a minimal working se…Read more
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107ConfabulationIn Harold Pashler (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Mind, Sage Publications. pp. 183-186. 2013.
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1060Responsible Brains: Neuroscience, Law, and Human CulpabilityMIT Press. 2018.[This download includes the table of contents and chapter 1.] When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant on trial for murder…Read more
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The Problem of Self-BeliefDissertation, University of California, Davis. 1994.In John Perry's 'messy shopper' example, a man in a supermarket sees a trail of sugar on the floor and follows it, intending to inform the mess-maker. When he later discovers that he in fact is making the mess, this discovery seems intuitively to involve a change in belief. The discovery also seems to bring about certain actions, and belief ascriptions made to the shopper can be seen to contain referential opacities. All of these should be accounted for, in a proper treatment of the 'shopper pro…Read more
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39Three Laws of QualiaIn Jonathan Shear & Shaun Gallagher (eds.), Models of the Self, Imprint Academic. pp. 83. 1999.Neurological syndromes in which consciousness seems to malfunction, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, visual scotomas, Charles Bonnet syndrome, and synesthesia offer valuable clues about the normal functions of consciousness and ‘qualia’. An investigation into these syndromes reveals, we argue, that qualia are different from other brain states in that they possess three functional characteristics, which we state in the form of ‘three laws of qualia ’ based on a loose analogy with Newton’s three la…Read more
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1214Ethics and the Brains of Psychopaths: The Significance of Psychopathy for our Ethical and Legal TheoriesIn Charles Wolfe (ed.), Brain Theory: Essays in Critical Neurophilosophy, Springer. pp. 149-170. 2014.The emerging neuroscience of psychopathy will have several important implications for our attempts to construct an ethical society. In this article we begin by describing the list of criteria by which psychopaths are diagnosed. We then review four competing neuropsychological theories of psychopathic cognition. The first of these models, Newman’s attentional model, locates the problem in a special type of attentional narrowing that psychopaths have shown in experiments. The second and third, Bla…Read more
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662The Legal Self: Executive processes and legal theoryConsciousness and Cognition 20 (1): 151-176. 2011.When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but what is important to the law is what is done with the workspace content rather than the content itself. …Read more
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692On the Criminal Culpability of Successful and Unsucessful PsychopathsNeuroethics 6 (1): 129-140. 2013.The psychological literature now differentiates between two types of psychopath:successful (with little or no criminal record) and unsuccessful (with a criminal record). Recent research indicates that earlier findings of reduced autonomic activity, reduced prefrontal grey matter, and compromised executive activity may only be true of unsuccessful psychopaths. In contrast, successful psychopaths actually show autonomic and executive function that exceeds that of normals, while having no differenc…Read more
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7Legal Insanity and Executive FunctionIn Mark White (ed.), The Insanity Defense: Multidisciplinary Views on Its History, Trends, and Controversies, Praeger. pp. 215-242. 2017.In this chapter we will argue that the capacities necessary to moral and legal agency can be understood as executive functions in the brain. Executive functions underwrite both the cognitive and volitional capacities that give agents a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing: to recognize their acts as immoral and/or illegal, and to act or refrain from acting based upon this recognition. When a person’s mental illness is serious enough to cause severe disruption of executive functions, she is very …Read more
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1088Child Soldiers, Executive Functions, and CulpabilityInternational Criminal Law Review 16 (2): 258-286. 2016.Child soldiers, who often appear to be both victims and perpetrators, present a vexing moral and legal challenge: how can we protect the rights of children while seeking justice for the victims of war crimes? There has been little stomach, either in domestic or international courts, for prosecuting child soldiers—but neither has this challenge been systematically addressed in international law. Establishing a uniform minimum age of criminal responsibility would be a major step in the right direc…Read more
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379Grounding responsibility in something (more) solidBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.The cases that Doris chronicles of confabulation are similar to perceptual illusions in that, while they show the interstices of our perceptual or cognitive system, they fail to establish that our everyday perception or cognition is not for the most part correct. Doris's account in general lacks the resources to make synchronic assessments of responsibility, partially because it fails to make use of knowledge now available to us about what is happening in the brains of agents.
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244ConfabulationIn Harold Pashler (ed.), Encyclopedia of the mind, Sage Publications. pp. 183-186. 2013.
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The Name and Nature of ConfabulationIn Sarah Robins, John Francis Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. pp. 647-658. 2009.
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575Confabulations about Personal Memories, Normal and AbnormalIn Suzanne Nalbantian (ed.), The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives, Mit Press. pp. 217-232. 2010.
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440The Paradoxical SelfIn Narinder Kapur (ed.), The Paradoxical Brain, Cambridge University Press. pp. 94-109. 2011.
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Phantom Limbs, Body Image, and Neural PlasticityInternational Brain Research Organization News 26 (1): 10-21. 1998.
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1084Self-deception and confabulationPhilosophy of Science 67 (3). 2000.Cases in which people are self-deceived seem to require that the person hold two contradictory beliefs, something which appears to be impossible or implausible. A phenomenon seen in some brain-damaged patients known as confabulation (roughly, an ongoing tendency to make false utterances without intent to deceive) can shed light on the problem of self-deception. The conflict is not actually between two beliefs, but between two representations, a 'conceptual' one and an 'analog' one. In addition, …Read more
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598Aesthetics and the Experience of BeautyIn William Banks (ed.), The Elsevier Encyclopedia of Consciousness, Elsevier. pp. 1-7. 2009.
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431The perception of phantom Limbs: The D. O. Hebb lectureBrain 121 1603-1630. 1998.Almost everyone who has a limb amputated will experience a phantom limb--the vivid impression that the limb is not only still present, but in some cases, painful. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence demonstrating changes in cortical topography in primates following deafferentation or amputation, and this review will attempt to relate these in a systematic way to the clinical phenomenology of phantom limbs. With the advent of non-invasive imaging techniques such as MEG (magnetoencephalogr…Read more
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14On SearleWadsworth. 2001.This brief text assists students in understanding Searle's philosophy and thinking so they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the Wadsworth Notes Series, (which will eventually consist of approximately 100 titles, each focusing on a single "thinker" from ancient times to the present), ON SEARLE is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this co…Read more
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403Conscious states: Where are they in the brain and what are their necessary ingredients?Mens Sana Monographs 11 (1): 230-238. 2013.One of the final obstacles to understanding consciousness in physical terms concerns the question of whether conscious states can exist in posterior regions of the brain without active connections to the brain's prefrontal lobes. If they can, difficult issues concerning our knowledge of our conscious states can be resolved. This paper contains a list of types of conscious states that may meet this criterion, including states of coma, states in which subjects are absorbed in a perceptual task, st…Read more
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590Capgras Syndrome: A Novel Probe for Understanding the Neural Representation of the Identity and Familiarity of PersonsProceedings of the Royal Society of London B 264 437-444. 1997.
Albuquerque, NM, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Aesthetics |