SpaceTimeMind Podcast Episode 13: Neurophilosophy and Consciousness (with Brit Brogaard)

The latest episode of my podcast with Richard Brown is out today, Episode 13: Neurophilosophy and Consciousness (with Brit Brogaard) — Space Time Mind.

From the show notes:

Hide your brains; the neurophilosophers are coming! Philosopher and neuroscientist Berit (Brit) Brogaard joins Richard Brown and Pete Mandik on the SpaceTimeMind podcast to discuss what makes some states of the mind or brain conscious and others unconscious. Is this sort of question answerable from a psychological or philosophical perspective that makes no essential reference to neuroscience? Or, instead, are neuroscientific data unavoidable in this domain? And: Can Brit go a full ten minutes without using the word “brain?"

New Mandik Paper: What's It Like When Your Eyes Move?

Image source: Pete Mandik on flickr

Is there a distinctive visual phenomenology that accompanies saccadic eye movement? I suggest that there is none in my short piece "What's It Like When Your Eyes Move?" appearing starting today at the Brain's blog symposium on Wayne Wu's “Against Division: Consciousness, Information, and the Visual Streams.”

Here's an excerpt from my contribution:

On this alternative to Wu’s hypothesis, the best way to account for so-called spatial constancy is [...] instead of treating it as the appearance of an absence of motion, we treat it as an absence of an appearance of motion. So, back to my visual inspection of my yard, I see the chairs and the tree trunk, which involves, I presume, neural processes encoding relevant information concerning shape, location, and color, and during saccades I just don’t have any representations of those things as moving, which, I presume, is different from having representations of the things as not moving. 

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness: