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Rudy Garns

The Extended Mind (Andy Clark and David Chalmers) - 0 views

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    "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes." Published in Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. Reprinted in (P. Grim, ed) The Philosopher's Annual, vol XXI, 1998.
Rudy Garns

Evolution of the Human Mind - 0 views

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    "Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover? Or our minds largely the product of language, culture, and civilization, with evolution having supplied only the most basic hardware and operating system? John and Ken welcome Leda Cosmides to shed some light on the human mind."
Rudy Garns

Consciousness (van Gulick) - 0 views

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    "Perhaps no aspect of mind is more familiar or more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and world. The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind. Despite the lack of any agreed upon theory of consciousness, there is a widespread, if less than universal, consensus that an adequate account of mind requires a clear understanding of it and its place in nature. We need to understand both what consciousness is and how it relates to other nonconscious aspects of reality."
Rudy Garns

Evolution of a theory of mind - 0 views

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    This paper appeared in Corballis, M, & Lea, S (eds) The descent of mind: psychological perspectives on hominid evolution. Oxford University Press 1999
Rudy Garns

What Is It Like To Be A Bat? (Nagel) - 0 views

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    "... it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it." Published in The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
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    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
Rudy Garns

How we know our own minds... - 0 views

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    Carruthers defends the idea that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves, not from introspection for propositional attitudes. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)
Rudy Garns

Feelings about Jaynes - 0 views

  • Jaynes put forward a surprising theory of consciousness which suggested it had a relatively recent origin. According to Jaynes ancient human beings, right up into early historical times, had minds that were divided into two chambers. One of these chambers was in charge of day-to-day life, operating on a simple, short-term emotional basis for the most part (though still capable of turning out some substantial pieces of art and literature, it seems). The occasional interventions of the second chamber, the part which dealt in more reflective, longer-term consideration were not experienced as the person’s own thoughts, but rather as divine or ancestral voices restraining or instructing the hearer, which explains why interventionist gods feature so strongly in early literature. The breakdown of this bicameral arrangement and the unification of the two chambers of the mind were, according to Jaynes, what produced consciousness as we now understand it.
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    Conscious Entities
Rudy Garns

The Breakdown of Consciousness (Paige Arthur) - 0 views

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    "Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat."
Rudy Garns

Qualia (Tye) - 0 views

  • something it is like
  • I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character.
  • a mental picture-like representation
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  • its content and its intrinsic, non-representationational features
  • relations to sensory objects
  • identified with neural events
  • irreducible
  • intrinsic, consciously accessible features that are non-representational
  • introspection
  • counterparts
  • intrinsic properties of experiences that are also ineffable, nonphysical, and ‘given’ to their subjects incorrigibly
  • something it is like for you subjectively to undergo
  • The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience.
  • experience of understanding a sentence
  • some thoughts have qualia.
  • desires
  • feeling angry that the house has been burgled or seeing that the computer is missing
  • Mary acquires certain abilities,
  • Talk of the ways things look and feel is intensional.
  • provide further support for the contention that some sort of representational account is appropriate for qualia.
  • qualities represented by experiences
  • belong to external things
  • qualia are really representational contents of experiences into which the represented qualities enter
  • just as meaning is something a word has
  • there can be differences in the representational contents of experiences without any phenomenal difference.
  • Phenomenally, our experiences are all very much alike, notwithstanding certain higher-level representational differences
  • This content is plausibly viewed as nonconceptual. It forms the output of the early, largely modular sensory processing and the input to one or another system of higher-level cognitive processing
  • properties represented by experiences.
  • my current visual experience of a red object not only represents the object as red (this is my focal awareness) but also represents itself as red
  • Representationalists about qualia are often also externalists about representational content
  • If these differences in content are of the right sort then, according to the wide representationalist, microphysical twins cannot fail to differ with respect to the phenomenal character of their experiences.
  • Qualia are not intrinsic qualities of inner ideas of which their subjects are directly aware, qualities that are necessarily shared by internal duplicates however different their environments may be. Rather, they are representational contents certain inner states possess, contents whose nature is fixed at least in part by certain external relations between individuals and their environments
  • qualia are supposedly one and the same as certain representational contents.
  • qualia are one and the same as certain representational properties of experiences;
  • experiences have the same representational content but different phenomenal character
  • experience of one sort or another is present but in which there is no state with representational content.
  • deny that there really is any change in normal tracking with respect to color,
  • The sensory state that nature designed in your species to track blue in the setting in which your species evolved will continue to do just that even if through time, on Inverted Earth, in that alien environment, it is usually caused in you by looking at yellow things.
  • feeling pain or having a visual sensation of red are phylogenetically fixed
  • Swampman is not human
  • His inner states play no teleological role.
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    "Philosophers often use the term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this standard, broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem."
Rudy Garns

A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind (Marco Nani and Massimo Marraffa (eds)) - 0 views

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    "Philosophy of mind and the philosophical issues arising in the allied domain of cognitive sciences constitute a fast developing territory, which is very well introduced by a number of excellent web resources...."
Rudy Garns

Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind (Chris Eliasmith (ed)) - 0 views

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    Searchable encyclopedia of topic in the philosophy of mind.
Rudy Garns

Review of Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare - 0 views

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    by Trevor Stone, University of Colorado, Boulder Issues and Methods in Cognitive Science, Spring 2002; completed Spring 2003
Rudy Garns

Zombies and Human Consciousness (transcript), Natasha Mitchell with Phil South, Daniel ... - 0 views

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    "The time honoured star of the B grade horror flick - the Zombie, the brain-eating living dead, a body without a soul - has entered the world of philosophy. The Zombie sits at the centre of a charged debate about the mystery of human consciousness. Whilst you can be confident that you're not a Zombie, how can you be sure about the next person? Your mother, neighbour or boss? Join two of the world's great philosophers of the mind, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, and a B grade movie maker...it's zombie mania."
Rudy Garns

Evolution, Error, and Intentionality (Dennett) - 0 views

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    "Are original intentionality and intrinsic intentionality the same thing? We will have to approach this question indirectly, by pursuing various attempts to draw a sharp distinction between the way our minds (or mental states) have meaning, and the way other things do."
Rudy Garns

Quining Qualia (Dennett) - 0 views

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    "My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise." Found in in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993.
Rudy Garns

The art of digital synaesthesia - 0 views

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    Artist and researcher Mitchell Whitelaw wrote an interesting and in-depth article on the links between audio-visual fusion art and synaesthesia for the Senses and Society journal. Whitelaw has just put the piece online, has illustrated it with embedded videos of some of the stunning pieces he references, but also discusses the neuroscience of synaesthesia with considerable care and insight. (Mind Hacks)
Rudy Garns

Synaesthesia induced by hypnosis - 0 views

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    Wired Science has an interesting preview of an upcoming study that used hypnosis to induce colour-number synaesthesia in highly hypnotisable participants. (Mind Hacks)
Rudy Garns

The Inner Argument - 0 views

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    "At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence and attention. In this sense, the mind is really an extended argument." The Frontal Cortex
Rudy Garns

Dennett on the "Cartesian Theater" - 0 views

  • The central "Cartesian" claim Dennett targets is that there is a specific location in the brain "arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience"
  • The only question is how large that center is.
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    "The central "Cartesian" claim Dennett targets is that there is a specific location in the brain "arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience" (p. 106). His argument consists mainly in denying that there's always a fact of the matter about when, exactly, an experience occurs, if one considers events at very small time scales (on the order of tenths of a second). He appears to draw from this argument what seems to be the fairly radical anti-"Cartesian" conclusion that there are, in general, no definitive facts of the matter about the flow of conscious experiences independent of the changing "narratives" we construct about them." The Splintered Mind
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