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Multiple drafts model - 0 views

  • Our conscious experience is of events that can usually be objectively timed quite precisely
  • there must be a quite specific moment at which each item makes its entrance in our experience.
  • the timing represented in consciousness
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  • the timing of the conscious representing
  • The work done by the imaginary homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be broken up and distributed
  • doesn’t have to be done again in a central re-presentation process
  • massively parallel process
  • Exactly when did I (as opposed to various parts of my brain) become informed, aware, conscious, of some event?’
  • replaced the metaphor of multiple drafts with the metaphor of fame in the brain
  • not a precisely datable transition in the brain
  • the accumulation of a wide variety of sequelae
  • One team in your brain has taken charge while another team is still sorting out the implications.
  • Like the transition from night to day
  • speciation, in which the same curious retrospective status can be transparently observed.
  • “retrospective coronations”
  • a “neural correlate of consciousness”
  • Andaman Islanders
  • Inuit
  • How much influence is enough for fame?
  • consciousness is not what it seems to be
  • whatever event in the brain happens to boost some aspect of the current content-fixations into prominence,
  • a new stimulus that draws attention (resources) to a particular area of visual space or a particular segment on the auditory stream, for instance, thereby promoting the influence (the fame, the clout) of whatever is occurring there and rendering it reportable and recollectable–if the other drafts competing for this influence permit it.
  • Finding the recurrent processes (which is likely, given the adroitness exhibited by those who drive on auto-pilot) would still leave open the question of whether to call those contents conscious or merely potentially conscious.
  • the historical property of having won a temporally local competition with sufficient decisiveness to linger long enough to enable recollection at some later time.
  • because our interpersonal communications, our discussions and comparisons, generate both the terms and the topics of consciousness.
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    "The multiple drafts model of consciousness (Dennett, 1991, 1996, 1998, Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) was developed as an alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of conscious experience Dennett calls Cartesian materialism, the idea that after early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged central place in the brain-which Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater --for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus. There is no such place in the brain, but many theories seem to presuppose that there must be something like it." (Dennet & Akins, Scholarpedia)
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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."
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Dennett, Consciousness Explained: Three Theses - 0 views

  • I'm worried about the verificationism here
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    "Dennett has various targets in his book; they all seem to get lumped together, but in fact some seem distinct from others. Here are three that it might be useful to distinguish." Curtis Brown
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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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Multiple Drafts - 0 views

  • cognitive discriminations need only be made once. The information does not then need to travel to any special area of the brain in order to become conscious. Without the 'theatre', there is no need for such a 'presentation' to take place
  • our brains can represent time using a medium other than time itself
  • you cannot 'freeze' time and ask what is being consciously represented at any given instant.
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  • there is no natural distinction between pre-experiential (Stalinesque) and post-experiential (Orwellian) revisions.
  • The "unconscious driving" phenomenon is better seen as a case of rolling consciousness with swift memory loss.
  • report feeling a series of equidistant taps along their arm
  • what we are conscious of is dependent upon how and when our stream(s) of consciousness is 'probed'.
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    "Dennett maintains that cognitive discriminations need only be made once. The information does not then need to travel to any special area of the brain in order to become conscious. Without the 'theatre', there is no need for such a 'presentation' to take place." - Philosophy, et cetera
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Multiple Drafts: An eternal golden braid? - 0 views

  • Enough information may often be available to fuel more than one version of reality. Then drafts compete in Pandemonium-like rivalry (Dennett 1991) and the rivalry is resolved in favor of one over the rest (the one that "makes most ecological sense")--but not for good. The competition is never- ending. There is no definitive or archival draft.
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    Response to Glicksohn and Salter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 810-11. "We have learned that the issues we raised are very difficult to think about clearly, and what "works" for one thinker falls flat for another, and leads yet another astray. So it is particularly useful to get these re-expressions of points we have tried to make. Both commentaries help by proposing further details for the Multiple Drafts Model, and asking good questions. They either directly clarify, or force us to clarify, our own account. They also both demonstrate how hard it is for even sympathetic commentators always to avoid the very habits of thought the Multiple Drafts Model was designed to combat. While acknowledging and expanding on their positive contributions, we must sound a few relatively minor alarms. "
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Similar brain cortex changes during human development and evolution - 0 views

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    Hill et al. show that expansion of the human cortex during development involves the same brain areas that have changed the most in the evolutionary expansion from monkey to human brains. They suggest that it is beneficial for regions of recent evolutionary expansion to remain less mature at birth, perhaps to increase the influence of postnatal experience on their development.
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Can Animals Think? - 0 views

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    Since antiquity, philosophers have argued that higher mental abilities -- in short, thinking and language -- are the great divide separating humans from other species. The lesser creatures, Rene Descartes contended in 1637, are little more than automatons, sleepwalking through life without a mote of self- awareness. The French thinker found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised a series of tantalizing questions for future generations: If other vertebrates are similar to humans in blood and bone, should they not share other characteristics, including intelligence? More specifically, did the earliest humanlike creatures, who split from the ancestors they shared with apes between 5 million and 7 million years ago, already possess a primitive ability to form plans, manipulate symbols, plot mischief and express sentiments?
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The Moral Behavior of Super-Duper Artificial Intelligences - 0 views

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    David Chalmers gave a talk today (at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson) arguing that it is fairly likely that sometime in the next few centuries we will create artificial intelligence (perhaps silicon, perhaps biological) considerably more intelligent than ourselves -- and then those intelligent creatures will create even more intelligent successors, and so on, until there exist creatures that are vastly more intelligent than we are. The Splintered Mind
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Ned Block on Consciousness - 0 views

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    Ned Block explores some of the philosophical problems of consciousness in conversation with Nigel Warburton in the latest episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Block believes that not all phenomena of consciousness are directly available to us. Sound contradictory?
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The origin of concepts - 0 views

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    This lecture is part of the special series of lectures 'The Study of Cognition and Culture Today' supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute.
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Beyond Human Talks - 0 views

shared by Rudy Garns on 11 Feb 10 - Cached
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    On March 27, 2009 the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin Madison held a symposium titled "What is Human?" devoted to "exploring the limits and excesses of the human across the division of the humanities and the sciences." These are some of the talks from that seminar.
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Making Sense of Dennett's Views on Introspection - 0 views

  • our judgments about our experience
  • what's in stream of experience behind those judgments
  • One can be wrong about what he sees, but can't be wrong about what he thinks he sees.
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    Dan Dennett and I have something in common: We both say that people often go grossly wrong about even their own ongoing conscious experience (for my view, see here). Of course Dennett is one of the world's most eminent philosophers and I'm, well, not. But another difference is this: Dennett also often says (as I don't) that subjects can no more go wrong about their experience than a fiction writer can go wrong about his fictions (e.g., 1991, p. 81, 94) and that their reports about their experience are "incorrigible" in the sense that no one could ever be justified in believing them mistaken (e.g., 2002, p. 13-14). - The Splintered Mind:
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Some Questions on Heterophenomenology - 0 views

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    From the blog Brains
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Ardipithecus ramidus - 0 views

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    In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.
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How to Improve on Heterophenomenology - 0 views

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    When these changes are made, heterophenomenology turns into the self-measurement methodology of first- person data that I have defended in previous papers.
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Algorithmic Inelegance - 0 views

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    There's something deeply appealing about making logic manifest and producing tools that do intense computational work for you at the click of a button; there can also be something deeply obsessive about being able to hone software to make it more elegant and efficient and, to the programmer's eye, more beautiful. The designers of software usually aspire to economy of code, clarity in its operation, and powerful algorithms that, with mathematical and logical beauty, do the work of generating a sophisticated result. We tend to look down on the "kludge," the clumsy addition to fix a problem, or the brute force approach of working case by case to force a desired result (although, to be sure, I've seen enough code to know that the awkward hack is ubiquitous). § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
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The Evolution of Language - 0 views

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    Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.
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