Brain Hammerings 06/14/2011

• Inducing disbelief in free will alters brain corre... [Psychol Sci. 2011] - PubMed result

  The feeling of being in control of one's own actions is a strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology and neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What would happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous research has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and motivation. Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed that the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.

  tags: will use your delusion

• about | Entoforms

  Entoforms are life, grown in the computer, printed in 3D, collected by macouno.

  tags: real artificial life

• Human cell becomes living laser : Nature News

  Scientists have for the first time created laser light using living biological material: a single human cell and some jellyfish protein.

  tags: future body mods

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

Doing More with Mary

Jackson's Mary thought experiment is primarily discussed in connection with qualia. However, a couple of recent papers extend the thought experiment to raise problems concerning intentionality.

Martina Fürst, What Mary's Aboutness Is About | PhilPapers

The aim of this paper is to reinforce anti-physicalism by extending the hard problem to a specific kind of intentional states. For reaching this target, I investigate the mental content of the new intentional states of Jackson’s Mary. I proceed in the following way: I start analyzing the knowledge argument, which highlights the hard problem tied to phenomenal consciousness. In a second step, I investigate a powerful physicalist reply to this argument: the phenomenal concept strategy. In a third step, I propose a constitutional account of phenomenal concepts that captures the Mary scenario adequately, but implies anti-physicalist referents. In a last step, I point at the ramifications constitutional phenomenal concepts have on the constitution of Mary’s new intentional states. Therefore, by focusing the attention on phenomenal concepts, the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be carried over to the alleged easy problem of intentional states as well.

Philip Goff, Does Mary know I experience plus rather than quus? A new hard problem | PhilPapers

Realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology, the view that certain conscious states are intrinsically such as to ground thought or understanding, is increasingly being taken seriously in analytic philosophy. The principle aim of this paper is to argue that it is extremely difficult to be a physicalist about cognitive phenomenology. The general trend in later 20th century/early 21st century philosophy of mind has been to account for the content of thought in terms of facts outside the head of the thinker at the time of thought, e.g. in terms of causal relations between thinker and world, or in terms of the natural purposes for which mental representations have developed. However, on the assumption that consciousness is constitutively realised by what is going on inside the head of a thinker at the time of experience, the content of cognitive phenomenology cannot be accounted for in this way. Furthermore, any internalist account of content is particularly susceptible to Kripkensteinian rule following worries. It seems that if someone knew all the physical facts about what is going on in my head at the time I was having a given experience with cognitive phenomenology, they would not thereby know whether that state had ‘straight’ rather than ‘quus-like’ content, e.g. whether the experience was intrinsically such as the ground the thought that two plus two equals four or intrinsically such as to ground the thought that two quus two equals four. The project of naturalising consciousness is much harder for realists about cognitive phenomenology.

Champalimaud Neuroscience Symposium

http://symposium.neuro.fchampalimaud.org/

The Champalimaud Neuroscience Symposium will bring together researchers from around the world who are interested in solving the puzzle of the brain. The Programme includes 30 distinguished speakers and poster sessions. The invited speakers reflect the interests of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme and cover a broad range of areas within neuroscience. The Symposium will take place at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown on the waterfront in central Lisbon, Portugal. We are looking forward to a lively and stimulating scientific meeting, and we hope that you will join us.

Megan R. Carey
Zachary Mainen

Marta Moita
Scientific Committee

Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars

I just received word of acceptance of my paper, "Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars" (PDF) forthcoming in Consciousness and Cognition (this is for Richard Brown's special issue associated with the 2nd annual Consciousness Online conference).

Abstract: I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, "Color-Consciousness Conceptualism." I resist Berger's suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling's proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks.

Brain Hammerings 06/06/2011

• Conscious Entities

  There has been quite a furore over some remarks made by Chomsky at the recent MIT symposium Brains, Minds and Machines; Chomsky apparently criticised researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce simulations without addressing the meaning of the behaviour being simulated – there’s a brief account of the discussion in Technology Review. The wider debate was launched when Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig issued a response to Chomsky. So far as I can tell the point being made by Chomsky was that applications like Google Translate, which uses a huge corpus of parallel texts to produce equivalents in different languages, do not tell us anything about the way human beings use language.

  tags: singularity without sapience

• On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

  tags: singularity without sapience

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

Punctate Monday

A snapshot from the archive of my art blog, Punctate Mind:

"A radically punctate mind is no mind at all." --Andy Clark, Microcognition (1991)

Brain Hammerings 05/26/2011

• Impossible colors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  tags: other colors

• Imaginary color - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Impossible color

  tags: other colors

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

photo: malware

photo by Pete Mandik

Useful Obviously False Beliefs

"You've got to believe!" That's the advice professional magician Mark Mitton gave at his recent talk in the CUNY Cognitive Science Symposium. Here's the idea: in order for an illusion to be believable to the audience, the magician has to believe it too. This is, of course, puzzling for all of the sorts of reasons familiar to philosophers debating doxastic voluntarism and self-deception. How do you make yourself believe something that you know you don't?

I've been thinking about something similar to self-deception since Mark's remark. There's a kind of advice given in all sorts of areas of human performance, music and sports to name two, that involves believing (or pretending?) something obviously absurd but is efficacious nonetheless. Here's a quick list:

• Vocal coaches tell their singers stuff like "breath out of your back" or "quit singing out of the top of your head." Or so I hear.
• In martial arts, if you are going to punch someone really hard in the solar plexus, it helps to aim for their back, as if your fist can just bore right through.
• In ball sports (you know, sports with balls?) there's this stuff about "following through" which I guess is something like throwing the ball after it's already been thrown. I dunno, I hate sports.
• Acting? Maybe this is like the magic thing? I dunno, I'm not an actor (but I've played one on TV).

Anyway, hammer-heads are hereby invited to multiply examples and submit pointers to work done in the relevant areas. That would be awesome. You'd better believe it!

Re Portugal

I'm back in NYC from a week of sun, beer, neuroscience, qualia, and zen in lovely Lisboa at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

Zach Mainen, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, ran a week-long course on consciousness and first-person methodology for the 2010 class of students in the International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme (with assistance from 2008 student Scott Rennie). Brian Keeley (who knows Zach from like a million years ago when they were together at University of California, San Diego) and I were brought on board to hang out in general as well as provide neurophilosophical overviews of consciousness, free will, and personal identity.



Each morning, the class kicked off with a half-hour of meditation led by monks from a local zen dojo. Then we set off to do things like coach opposing teams of students in constructing arguments about whether the self was something that could survive teleportation.

Thursday afternoon I presented "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" in the Neuroscience Seminar Series (abstract and answer here). It was fun to see so many neuroscientists get passionate about qualia!



Saturday afternoon, Brian and I took a teleporter to Cascais, where someone accidentally hit the "receive" button too many times.





(Photos from my flickr set, Lisbon 2011: Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown)