In _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker's _Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience_ (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond. Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central (...) themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness. In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Using a parallel with stage magic, it is argued that far from being seen as an extreme alternative, illusionism as articulated by Frankish should be considered the front runner, a conservative theory to be developed in detail, and abandoned only if it demonstrably fails to account for phenomena, not prematurely dismissed as 'counterintuitive'. We should explore the mundane possibilities thoroughly before investing in any magical hypotheses.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection unifies the world of physics with the world of meaning and purpose by proposing a deeply counterintuitive ‘‘inversion of reasoning’’ (according to a 19th century critic): ‘‘to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it’’ [MacKenzie RB (1868) (Nisbet & Co., London)]. Turing proposed a similar inversion: to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is. Together, these (...) ideas help to explain how we human intelligences came to be able to discern the reasons for all of the adaptations of life, including our own. (shrink)

Philosophical controversy about the mind has flourished in the thin air of our ignorance about the brain. The humble toad, it now seems, may provide our first instance of a creature whose whole brain is within the reach of our scientific understanding. What will happen to the traditional philosophical issues as our theoretical and factual ignorance recedes? Discussion of the issues explored in the target article is, as Ewert says, "often too theoretical, sometimes philosophical and even [as if that weren't (...) bad enough?--DCD] emotion-laden." The research reported by Ewert has interesting philosophical implications, as he probably recognizes, but he wisely leaves the philosophy to the philosophers. Being one, I would like to draw some of the conclusions he eschews. (shrink)

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

The differences Block attempts to capture with his putative distinction between P-consciousness and A-consciousness are more directly and perspicuously handled in terms of differences in richness of content and degree of influence. Block's critiques, based on his misbegotten distinction, evaporate on closer inspection.

Incompatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are incompatible, subsists on two widely accepted, but deeply confused, theses concerning possibility and causation: (1) in a deterministic universe, one can never truthfully utter the sentence "I could have done otherwise," and (2) in such universes, one can never really take credit for having caused an event, since in fact all events have been predetermined by conditions during the universe's birth. Throughout the free will.

commentary on Fodor, “Against Darwinism.”.

There could be no more gratifying response to a philosopher's work than such a bounty of challenging, high-quality essays. I have learned a great deal from them, and hope that other readers will be as delighted as I have been by the insights gathered here. One thing I have learned is just how much hard work I had left for others to do, by underestimating the degree of explicit formulation of theses and arguments that is actually required to bring these (...) issues into optimal focus. These essays cover my work from top to bottom. Just about every nook and cranny is probed and tested in ways I could never do for myself. The essays thus highlight the areas of weakest exposition of my views; they also show the weak points of the views themselves--and suggest repairs, which I am sometimes happy to accept, but not always, since there are a few cases in which one critic deftly disarms another, sight unseen. I will be fascinated to learn how the individual authors react to each other's essays, since they side with me on different points, and disagree about what is still in need of revision or repair. (shrink)

There could be no more gratifying response to a philosopher's work than such a bounty of challenging, high-quality essays. I have learned a great deal from them, and hope that other readers will be as delighted as I have been by the insights gathered here. One thing I have learned is just how much hard work I had left for others to do, by underestimating the degree of explicit formulation of theses and arguments that is actually required to bring these (...) issues into optimal focus. These essays cover my work from top to bottom. Just about every nook and cranny is probed and tested in ways I could never do for myself. The essays thus highlight the areas of weakest exposition of my views; they also show the weak points of the views themselves--and suggest repairs, which I am sometimes happy to accept, but not always, since there are a few cases in which one critic deftly disarms another, sight unseen. I will be fascinated to learn how the individual authors react to each other's essays, since they side with me on different points, and disagree about what is still in need of revision or repair. (shrink)

There could be no more gratifying response to a philosopher's work than such a bounty of challenging, high-quality essays. I have learned a great deal from them, and hope that other readers will be as delighted as I have been by the insights gathered here. One thing I have learned is just how much hard work I had left for others to do, by underestimating the degree of explicit formulation of theses and arguments that is actually required to bring these (...) issues into optimal focus. These essays cover my work from top to bottom. Just about every nook and cranny is probed and tested in ways I could never do for myself. The essays thus highlight the areas of weakest exposition of my views; they also show the weak points of the views themselves--and suggest repairs, which I am sometimes happy to accept, but not always, since there are a few cases in which one critic deftly disarms another, sight unseen. I will be fascinated to learn how the individual authors react to each other's essays, since they side with me on different points, and disagree about what is still in need of revision or repair. (shrink)

If Saul Steinberg's 1967 New Yorker cover is the metaphorical truth about consciousness, what is the literal truth? What is going on in the world that makes it the case that this gorgeous metaphor is so apt?

essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit.

Mesoudi et al. overlook an illuminating parallel between cultural and biological evolution, namely, the existence in each realm of a continuum from intelligent, mindful evolution through to oblivious, mindless evolution. In addition, they underplay the independence of cultural fitness from biological fitness. The assumption that successful cultural traits enhance genetic fitness must be sidelined, as must the assumption that such traits will at least be considered worth having. (Published Online November 9 2006).

What I find particularly valuable in the juxtaposition of these three essays on my book is the triangulation made possible by their different versions of much the same story. I present my view as a product of cognitive science, but all three express worries that it may involve some sort of ominous backsliding towards the evils of behaviorism. I agree with Baars and McGovern when they suggest that philosophy has had some baleful influences on psychology during this century. Logical positivism (...) at its best was full of subtle softenings, but behaviorist psychologists bought the tabloid version, and sold it to their students in large quantities. George Miller's account of those dreary days is not an exaggeration, and the effects still linger in some quarters. (Philosophers are often amused--but they should really be disconcerted--to note that the only living, preaching logical positivists today are to be found in psychology departments.). (shrink)

in Evolution and Culture eds.Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson, published by The MIT Press, 2006.

tephen Jay Gould complains that in Darwin's Dangerous Idea I attack his views via "hint, innuendo, false attribution," and "caricature" [NYR, June 26]. That is false. On the contrary, I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that my account of his views was fair and accurate. One does not lightly embark on the course of demonstrating that a figure as famous and as honored as Stephen J a y Gould—"America's evolutionist laureate"—has misled his huge public about the theories in his (...) field. I knew he was going to hate my book, and given the effectiveness of his past public attacks on sociobiology, IQ testing, and other targets of his disfavor, prudence alone would dictate that I should secure my criticisms against easy rebuttal and condemnation. (shrink)

for the Bioethics Commission, August 16, 2006.

If there is one proposition that would-be memeticists agree on, it is that the flourishing of an idea-its success at replicating through a population of minds-and the value of an idea-its truth, its scientific or political or ethical excellence-are only contingently and imperfectly related. Good ideas can go extinct and bad ideas can infect whole societies. The future prospects of the meme idea are uncertain on both counts, and the point of this book is not to ensure that the meme (...) meme flourishes, but to ensure that if it does , it ought to. It works toward this worthy end by creating a landmark, a fixed point not of doctrine but of evidence and methods, some shared acknowledgment among some leading proponents and critics about how the issues ought to be addressed. (shrink)

The problem for Sellars here, as in many earlier papers, can be crudely but vividly summarized as follows: it seems that science has taught us that everything is some collection or other of atoms, and atoms are not colored. Hence nothing is colored; hence nothing is yellow. Shocking! Where did the yellow go? Sellars has for years been wondering where the yellow went, in a series of intricate, patient, metaphysically bold but argumentatively shrewd papers, and in his third Carus Lecture (...) we can see the strands of doctrine woven into a single cable. Along the way Sellars explores a wide variety of imaginable ways of rejecting, revising, or adjusting the premises of the crudely expressed argument above. Might we deny that everything is some collection or other of atoms? Yes, in several different ways. Might we claim that a collection of colorless atoms could be colored? Yes, in several different ways. Sellars surveys the smorgasbord of views and eliminates all but one, which he advances tentatively, not surprisingly, since it is metaphysically extravagant: an “ontology of absolute processes” among which are absolute sensory processes, such as E-flattings and reddings, which are not analyzable at all into the aggregate doings of particulate objects. (shrink)

Paul Churchland's book (hereafter ER)is an entertaining and instructive advertisement for a "neurocomputational" vision of how the brain (and mind) works. While we agree with its general thrust, and commend its lucid pedagogy on a host of difficult topics, we note that such pedagogy often exploits artificially heightened contrast, and sometimes the result is a misleading caricature instead of a helpful simplification. In particular, Churchland is eager to contrast the explanation of consciousness that can be accomplished by his "aspiring new (...) structural and dynamic cognitive prototype: recurrent PDP networks" (p.266) with what strikes him as the retrograde introduction by Dennett of a virtual von Neumannesque machine--a "failed prototype"--as the key element in an explanation of human consciousness (in Consciousness Explained, 1991, hereafter, CE). We will try to show that by oversimplifying Dennett's alternative, he has taken a potential supplement to his own view--a much needed supplement--and transformed it in his imagination into a subversive threat. In part 1, we will expose and correct the mistaken contrasts. In part 2, we will compare the performance of the two views on Churchland's list of seven features of consciousness any theory must account for, showing that Dennett's account provides more than Churchland has recognized, and indeed offers answers to key questions that Churchland's account is powerless to address. At that point, Churchland's project and Dennett's could be seen to collaborate in a useful division of labor instead of being in mortal combat, were it not for what appears to be a fairly major disagreement about consciousness in non-human animals. Part 3 briefly examines this issue. It may be due to a misunderstanding, which when cleared up might restore the happy prospect of unification. (shrink)

I want to try to do something rather more speculative than the rest of you have done. I have been thinking recently about how one might explain some features of human reflective consciousness that seem to me to be very much in need of an explanation. I'm trying to see if these features could be understood as solutions to design problems, solutions arrived at by evolution, but also, in the individual, as a result of a process of unconscious self-design. I've (...) been trying to think of this in the context of work in AI on the attempt to design intelligent robots – not "bed-ridden" expert systems, but systems that have to act in real time in the real world. If you want to think about something like this, you have to stray fairly far from experiments and hard empirical data; you have to get fairly speculative. Nevertheless the design efforts of people in AI do seem to bring home to conviction – if not to prove – various design constraints looming large and inescapable. If we can come to see why a system – or an organ or a behavior-pattern – must have certain features or a certain structure in order to do its task, this may help us ask the right questions, or at least keep us from dwelling on some of the wrong questions when we try to explain the machinery in the brain that is responsible for intelligent action. (shrink)

The problem for Sellars here, as in many earlier papers, can be crudely but vividly summarized as follows: it seems that science has taught us that everything is some collection or other of atoms, and atoms are not colored. Hence nothing is colored; hence nothing is yellow. Shocking! Where did the yellow go? Sellars has for years been wondering where the yellow went, in a series of intricate, patient, metaphysically bold but argumentatively shrewd papers, and in his third Carus Lecture (...) we can see the strands of doctrine woven into a single cable. Along the way Sellars explores a wide variety of imaginable ways of rejecting, revising, or adjusting the premises of the crudely expressed argument above. Might we deny that everything is some collection or other of atoms? Yes, in several different ways. Might we claim that a collection of colorless atoms could be colored? Yes, in several different ways. Sellars surveys the smorgasbord of views and eliminates all but one, which he advances tentatively, not surprisingly, since it is metaphysically extravagant: an “ontology of absolute processes” among which are absolute sensory processes, such as E-flattings and reddings, which are not analyzable at all into the aggregate doings of particulate objects. (shrink)

David Haig propounds and illustrates the unity of a radically revised set of definitions of the family of terms at the heart of philosophy of cognitive science and mind: information, meaning, interpretation, text, choice, possibility, cause. This biological re-grounding of much-debated concepts yields a bounty of insights into the nature of meaning and life. An interpreter is a mechanism that uses information in choice. The capabilities of the interpreter couple an entropy of inputs to an entropy of outputs is dispelled (...) by observation. The second entropy is dispelled. I propose that an interpreter’s response to inputs meaning of the information for the interpreter. In this conceptual framework, the mechanisms of interpreters provide the much-debated link between Shannon information and semantics. (shrink)