Journal ArticleDOI
Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience.
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This target article argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility and can be found a neural realizer of this overflow.Abstract:
How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We see the problem in stark form if we ask how we can tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: Find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases - when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their authority - and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: Do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is "Yes," then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is "Yes"? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! This target article argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. I argue that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if we assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified (other things being equal) by the explanations it allows.read more
Citations
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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
TL;DR: To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology the authors require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind.
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The New York Review of Books
TL;DR: The New York Review ofBooks as mentioned in this paper is now over twenty years old and it has attracted controversy since its inception, but it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history, especially an admittedly impressionistic survey, must give some attention.
Journal Article
A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness-Authors' Response-Acting out our sensory experience
J. Kevin O'Regan,Alva Noë +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that the brain produces an internal representation of the world, and the activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing, but it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness.
Journal ArticleDOI
The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory
TL;DR: In this article, a clutch of '-isms' characterises the approach to consciousness which David Chalmers defends: dualism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, anti-reductionism, and -probably -panpsychism.
Journal ArticleDOI
Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues
TL;DR: Emotion feeling is a phase of neurobiological activity, the key component of emotions and emotion-cognition interactions, and the relation of memes and the mirror neuron system to empathy, sympathy, and cultural influences on the development of socioemotional skills are unresolved issues.
References
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Journal Article
The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
TL;DR: The theory of information as discussed by the authors provides a yardstick for calibrating our stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of our subjects and provides a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions.
Book
The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
TL;DR: The theory provides us with a yardstick for calibrating the authors' stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of their subjects, and the concepts and measures provided by the theory provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions.
Journal ArticleDOI
A default mode of brain function.
Marcus E. Raichle,Ann Mary MacLeod,Abraham Z. Snyder,William J. Powers,Debra A. Gusnard,Gordon L. Shulman +5 more
TL;DR: A baseline state of the normal adult human brain in terms of the brain oxygen extraction fraction or OEF is identified, suggesting the existence of an organized, baseline default mode of brain function that is suspended during specific goal-directed behaviors.
Book
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
TL;DR: A fun and exciting textbook on the mathematics underpinning the most dynamic areas of modern science and engineering.