Pete to Portugal

This looks pretty cool.

Next week, my good buddy Brian Keeley and I are heading to Lisbon to help run a week-long course on consciousness for the Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. While there, I'll also be giving a talk, "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" More news, plus the answer to that titular question, when I get back to NYC later in May.

Brain Hammerings 04/27/2011

• Lemmings: Color Workshop and Conference

  "The deadline for early career participants in our deviant color workshop and conference in Vancouver in August has been extended. Go ahead and apply."
  
  I hope the phrase "deviant color" catches on.

  tags: other colors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Dennett's Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Daniel C. Dennett final draft for SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS. Edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid. Oxford U.P. March 25, 2011

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/kindsofthingsfin.pdf

The main goal in the rest of this paper is simply to draw attention to the riotous assembly of candidate things that we find in the manifest image. Wilfrid Sellars (1963) “discovered” the manifest image much the way Columbus discovered the western hemisphere, but he, like Columbus, was more the explorer than the systematic cartographer, and, as just noted, our Mercator has yet to appear. But what about a Linnaeus, a systematic taxonomist of all the things we find in this new, if all too familiar, world? Ontology, it seems to me, has been resolutely reductive and minimalist in its attempts to come up with an exhaustive list of kingdoms, classes, genera and species of things. No doubt the motivation has been the right one: to prepare the disheveled cornucopia for scientific accounting, with everything put ultimately in terms of atoms and the void, space-time points, or (by somewhat different reductive trajectories) substances and universals, events and properties and relations, As is well known, these procrustean beds provide metaphysicians with no end of difficult challenges, trying to fit all the candidates into one austere collection of pigeonholes or another. Where do we put numbers, or melodies, or ideas, for instance? Do numbers even exist, and are there different kinds of existence? Instead of attempting any answers of my own to these oft-asked questions of systematic taxonomy, I am going to push, informally, in the opposite direction, like the bestiarists of yore, recounting with as much ontological tolerance as I can, a few of the neglected candidates for thinghood that everyday folks have no trouble countenancing in their casual ontologies. Metaphysics as folklore studies, you might say.

My review of Cave's Do Llamas Fall in Love?

The THE

My review of Peter Cave's Do Llamas Fall In Love? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles is out now in the latest Times Higher Education [link to electronic version].

Excerpt:

Do Llamas Fall in Love? has almost nothing to do with llamas, but plenty to do with love, especially that love of wisdom that is philosophy. This smart and funny jaunt through philosophy's core issues serves as a fine introduction for the phi-curious and the wonderers about wisdom who may have had no prior exposure to philosophy. It is also a delightful read for those who may already have a bunch of philosophy under their belts.

The highly abstract nature of philosophy often leads to dry and inaccessible expositions. Attempts to overcome this problem often result in dumbing-downs that are effectively useless in accurately conveying what's really going on in the field. Peter Cave masterfully balances the need to inform and the need to entertain.

The 33 "perplexing puzzles" that he discusses in 33 short chapters manage to cover many, if not most, of philosophy's key topics: ethics, rights, knowledge, mind, rationality, aesthetics, logic, law, politics, metaphysics, language and religion. The chapter titles are quirky and intriguing, enticing one to keep on reading to find out what could possibly be intended. Here are a few: "A goat with gaps"; "Time for zoological investigations - from the bedroom"; "Creamy philosophers: who knows who knows..."; and "Preferences: avoiding the money pump".

[...]

So, what's the deal with the llamas? As explained in the chapter "Addicted to love", many non-human animals form monogamous pair bonds. In their outward behaviour at least, they resemble people who are deeply in love. And there are certain biochemical similarities between the nervous systems of humans in love and these animals. But are such similarities sufficient to ascribe similar mental states to humans and non-humans? And if such similarities don't suffice to justify treating animals as psychologically similar to humans, what similarities would suffice?

Third Online Consciousness Conference: The Papers

Richard Brown says:

The Online Consciousness Conference begins in one week on Friday February 18th and will last until Friday March 4th. The papers for this year's conference are now available here: http://consciousnessonline.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/co3-papers/

Please help me in spreading the word by forwarding this to any interested parties. Thanks! 

Richard Brown, Conference Organizer

NOVA | How Does the Brain Work?

Just watched this last night. It was pretty darn entertaining.

NOVA | How Does the Brain Work?

Henry Rollins + David Eagleman

Sweet: I've got tickets to go check this out tonight:

Rubin Museum of Art:Henry Rollins David Eagleman

Brain Hammerings 02/03/2011

• A Minimal Model of Metabolism Based Chemotaxis « Life & Mind seminars

  In this paper, we connect Life and Mind by simulating metabolism-based behaviour. More specifically, the concentration of a product of the metabolism directly modulates running/tumbling behaviour of simulated bacteria-like agents, producing a variety of sometimes surprising adaptive behaviours.

  tags: miniminds

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Vancouver Workshop and Conference on Cortical Color Vision

This summer I'm going to this pretty sweet looking conference and workshop, "More or Less: Varieties of Human Cortical Color Vision", that Kathleen Akins and Brit Brogaard are organizing. The call for participants is open now, see this website (http://www.sfu.ca/colour/) for full details. Below is a blurby excerpt. I hope to see lots of Hammer Heads there!

BLURB:


Philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychologists and researchers within the cognitive sciences are warmly invited to attend the conference and to submit posters.
The focus of this conference is “colour beyond the retina”, both the normal neurophysiology of human cortical colour mechanisms and a variety of cortical colour ‘anomalies’, in particular:

• Cerebral Achromatopsia 
• Colour Synaesthesias 
• Colour Blindsight 
• Cortical Colour Development

Early career researchers and graduate students are  invited to apply for a two day intensive workshop held prior to the conference.

what it's like: what's HOT got to do with it?

hot hot hot hot hot hot hot

Here's a little something for you aficionados of the debate over the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Adherents of the theory, HOT-heads, need a response to problems surrounding the puzzling case of empty HOTs: higher-order thoughts that, so the story goes, would make a state conscious if only there existed a first-order mental state for the HOT to be about, but are unaccompanied by any such first-order state. What to say about such a case? Well, one thing they can and do say (sometimes) about such a case is to embrace it as an unproblematic possibility: sometimes there's a HOT, but no first order target, and thus, no state that is conscious. Call this scenario (H &  ~C).

Is embracing (H &  ~C) bad for the HOT-heads? It would be bad if they also embraced an entailment from there being a HOT to there being a conscious state, call this (H -> C). Clearly (H & ~C) and (H -> C) can't both be true. So, what to do? If you're a HOT-head who's also embracing (H & ~C), then you better find some grounds for denying (H -> C). Can any grounds be found? Let's see.

One way an objector, an anti-HOT-head, might try to defend (H -> C) is by linking H to C by way of the notion of what-it's-like. So, the existence of a HOT entails the existence of a state in virtue of which there's "something it's like", a what-it's-like-ness, and the existence of a what it's like state entails the existence of a conscious state. Abbreviating: (H -> W) & (W -> C).

At this point the HOT-head can attempt a case against this linking move by suggesting the separable instantiability of state consciousness and what-it's-like consciousness. Just because there's a state in virtue of which there's something it's like, they might say, it doesn't follow that that very state is one that is conscious. Going just a bit further, the HOT-head might, following a recent suggestion by Richard Brown, say that in the empty HOT case, even though there's no state that has state consciousness, there's a state that has phenomenal consciousness, and further, the phenomenally conscious state is the HOT itself.

At this point, an unsympathetic reader may find the resultant view insufficiently motivated. Here's what strikes me as a problem: If state consciousness and phenomenal consciousness are separably instantiable like this, then what motivates saying, for instance, that phenomenality or what-it's-like-ness attaches only to HOTs? Given the scouted severing of what it's like and state consciousness, why couldn't a plain-old first-order thought give rise to "something it's like"?

Consider: why is it plausible that HOTs give rise to what-it's-like-ness? Well, it seems (pun!) to do with the fact that HOTs give rise to (or are) appearances: if I have a HOT to the effect that I have a first-order green perceiving, then that's how things will seem to me regardless of whether the HOT is true, false, or empty. Phenomena, phenomenality, phenomenology, phenomenal consciousness  -  all those fancy "ph" ways of talking about what's like - are all in the service of tracking appearances, the ways things seem. But appearances go along with first-order states too: If I have a first order thought that there's a dog on the blanket, then that's how things seem to me regardless of whether the thought is true, false, or empty. It will seem like there's a dog on the blanket. What is it like to be me? It's like thinking that there's a dog on the blanket, dude!

So what's the big deal about HOTs vis a vis phenomenal consciousness? Why not phenomenal consciousness without HOTs, say, first-order cognitive phenomenology? One sort of answer I've come across on a few occasions goes like this: what's crucial concerning what it's like is what it's like for me, and in order for some mental representation to give rise to the relevant appearance, it has to represent me in some way, a way that makes it higher order. The plain old first order thought that there's a doggy on the blanky doesn't represent me and thus it doesn't give rise to an appearance of how things are for me.

I'm having a hard time seeing this line of thought here as at all convincing, so maybe I'm misremembering it. But anyway, I'm not seeing why the representation's being in me doesn't suffice to make the subsequent appearances for me. It seems to me that once you get comfortable with the idea that HOTs give rise to there being something it's like, AND you're happy severing phenomenal consciousness from state consciousness, then there's no real basis for denying phenomenality to mere first order thoughts.

Anyway, I'm undoubtedly missing something here. Maybe some friendly HOT-head or HH sympathizer will drive by and lay some knowledge on me?