Martha Nussbaum’s _Justice for Animals_ calls upon humanity to secure for all sentient beings the central capabilities they need to flourish. This essay review critically examines the ethical and scientific foundations of Nussbaum’s position. On the ethical side, we explore the tension between a robust defence of animal rights and political liberalism, which requires tolerance of a range of reasonable views. On the scientific side, we reflect on how our uncertainty regarding the distribution of sentience in the natural world leaves (...) us uncertain about how many claimants of justice there are and about the relative strength of their claims. We bring out some further problems with Nussbaum’s views on animal killing and pest control. We also reflect on how animal welfare science might be done differently if guided by Nussbaum’s framework. (shrink)

A persisting question in the philosophy of animal minds is which nonhuman animals share our capacity for episodic memory. Many authors address this question by primarily defining EM, trying to capture its seemingly unconstrained flexibility and independence from environmental and bodily constraints. EM is therefore often opposed to clearly context-bound capacities like tracking environmental regularities and forming associations. The problem is that conceptualizing EM in humans first, and then reconstructing how humans evolved this capacity, provides little constraints for understanding the (...) evolution of memory abilities in other species: it defines “genuine” EM as independent from animals’ evolved sensorimotor setup and learning abilities. In this paper, I define memory in terms of perceptual learning: remembering means “knowing what to do in later situations because of past experience in similar earlier situations”. After that, I explain how episodic memory can likewise be explained in terms of perceptual learning. For this, we should consider that the information in animals’ ecological niches is much richer than has hitherto been presumed. Accordingly, instead of asking “given that environmental stimuli provide insufficient information about the cache, what kind of representation does the jay need?” we ask “given that the animal performs in this way, what kind of information is available in the environment?” My aim is not to give a complete alternative explanation of EM; rather, it is to provide conceptual and methodological tools for more zoocentric comparative EM-research. (shrink)

Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common individual symptoms of psychosis, such approaches (...) face some issues when we look at a more general clinical picture. In this paper, we propose an update on the current accounts of psychosis based on the realization that a neurotypical brain constantly generates non-actual, de-coupled, counterfactual hypotheses as part of healthy cognition. We suggest that what is going on in psychosis, at least in some cases, is not so much a generation of erroneous hypotheses, but rather an inability to correctly use the counterfactual ones. This updated view casts “accurate” cognition as more fragile and delicate, but also closes the gap between psychosis and typical cognition. (shrink)

This paper aims to bridge philosophical and psychological research on causation, counterfactual thought, and the problem of backtracking. Counterfactual approaches to causation such as that by Lewis have ruled out backtracking, while on prominent models of causal inference interventionist counterfactuals do not backtrack. However, on various formal models, certain backtracking counterfactuals end up being true, and psychological evidence shows that people do sometimes backtrack when answering counterfactual questions in causal contexts. On the basis of psychological research, I argue that while (...) ordinarily both kinds of counterfactuals may be employed, non-backtracking counterfactuals are more easily used in causal inference because they are consistent with temporal order information embedded in the mental simulation heuristic, and they match reasoners’ experience of causation. While this approach is incompatible with the ambitions of counterfactual theories that seek to establish the non-backtracking interpretation as the only legitimate one, it can provide support for perspectival views on causation and open further inquiry on the functions of causal and counterfactual thought in the context of causal models. (shrink)

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future (...) pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but prefer their pleasure to lie in the past, and do not predict that others’ levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible. (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Cerebral energy supply is insufficient to support continuous neuronal processing of the plethora of time-constant objects that we are aware of. As a result, the brain is forced to limit processing resources to cases of change. The neuronally generated world is thus temporally discontinuous. This parallels the fact that, in all relevant microscopic fundamental equations of nature, temporal change plays a dominant role. When a scientist calculates a “solution” to such an equation, integration over time is an essential step. The (...) present Hypothesis expresses that the step from neuronal activity to phenomenal content of consciousness is reflective of a “solution:” the main source of the incomprehensibility of consciousness is proposed to result from the introduction of phenomenal time-constant entities. These are “filled-in” via integration, even though neuronal data only exists for changes to these entities. In this way, a temporally continuous picture of the world phenomenally appears. Qualia are “initial conditions,” which are required for integration and cannot be deduced from present data. Phenomenal “identity” is related to qualia. Inattentive visual perception, which is only rarely investigated, offers insights into these relationships. Introspectively, unattended vision appears rich because percepts are cumulated over long time spans, whereas attentive perception relies purely on present neuronal signals. The present Hypothesis is that a brief neuronal activity can signify long-lasting and constant phenomenal content of consciousness. Experimental support is presented that comes from discrepancies between neuronal activity and perception: transient neuronal responses to sustained stimuli, “filling-in,” change blindness, identity vs. close resemblance. (shrink)

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

A possible solution is offered to help resolve the “two times problem” regarding the veridical and illusory nature of time. First it is recognized that the flow of time is part of a wider array of temporal experiences referred to as manifest time, all of which need to be reconciled. Then, an information gathering and utilizing system model is used as a basis for a view of manifest time. The model IGUS robot of Hartle that solves the “unique present” debate (...) is enhanced with veridical and illusory components of not only the flow of time but also the larger entity of manifest time, providing a dualistic IGUS robot that represents all of the important temporal experiences. Based upon a variety of prior experiments, that view suggests that the veridical system is a reflection of accepted spacetime cosmologies and through natural selection begets the illusory system for functional purposes. Thus, there are not two opposing times, one outside and one inside the cranium. There is just one fundamental physical time which the brain developed, now possesses and is itself sufficient for adaption but then enhances. The illusory system is intended to provide a more satisfying experience of physical time, and better adaptive behavior. Future experiments to verify that view are provided. With a complete veridical system of temporal experiences there may be less need to reify certain temporal experiences so that the two times problem is less of a problem and more of a phenomenon. (shrink)

The world as we perceive it is structured into objects, actions and places that form parts of events. In this article, my aim is to explain why these categories are cognitively primary. From an empiricist and evolutionary standpoint, it is argued that the reduction of the complexity of sensory signals is based on the brain's capacity to identify various types of invariances that are evolutionarily relevant for the activities of the organism. The first aim of the article is to explain (...) why places, object and actions are primary cognitive categories in our constructions of the external world. It is shown that the invariances that determine these categories have their separate characteristics and that they are, by and large, independent of each other. This separation is supported by what is known about the neural mechanisms. The second aim is to show that the category of events can be analyzed as being constituted of the primary categories. The category of numbers is briefly discussed. Some implications for computational models of the categories are also presented. (shrink)

According to a thesis I call the linguistic assumption, the structure of language is a guide to the fundamental nature of reality. It is deployed in the metaphysical debate over the nature of time. In that debate, it is more radical than the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and should be rejected. A weak interpretation of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes the empirical claim that speakers of different languages experience, perceive, or think about aspects of the world differently. I survey recent experimental evidence that (...) supports this hypothesis which, I argue, gives us further reason to reject the linguistic assumption. (shrink)

Human reasoning is often conceived as an interplay between a more intuitive and deliberate thought process. In the last 50 years, influential fast-and-slow dual-process models that capitalize on this distinction have been used to account for numerous phenomena – from logical reasoning biases, over prosocial behavior, to moral decision making. The present paper clarifies that despite the popularity, critical assumptions are poorly conceived. My critique focuses on two interconnected foundational issues: the exclusivity and switch feature. The exclusivity feature refers to (...) the tendency to conceive intuition and deliberation as generating unique responses such that one type of response is assumed to be beyond the capability of the fast-intuitive processing mode. I review the empirical evidence in key fields and show that there is no solid ground for such exclusivity. The switch feature concerns the mechanism by which a reasoner can decide to shift between more intuitive and deliberate processing. I present an overview of leading switch accounts and show that they are conceptually problematic – precisely because they presuppose exclusivity. I build on these insights to sketch the groundwork for a more viable dual-process architecture and illustrate how it can set a new research agenda to advance the field in the coming years. (shrink)

If we focus on current debates on how creatures revise or correct their beliefs, we can identify two opposing approaches that we propose to call “intellectualism” and “minimalism.” In this paper, we outline a new account of doxastic revision — “the first-order model”— that is neither as cognitively demanding as intellectualism nor as deflationary as minimalism. First-order doxastic revision, we argue, is a personal-level process in which a creature rejects some beliefs and accepts others based on reasons. However, it does (...) not involve second-order thinking or sophisticated semantic and epistemic concepts. Besides defending that there is conceptual space for this alternative, we explore the possibility of extending it to some non-human animals. Based on our interpretation of some empirical evidence, we conclude that there are initial reasons to think that some animals — i.e., great apes— might be able to correct their beliefs in the way that our first-order model suggests. (shrink)

Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations and durations—sharply distinguish representation from mere sensitivity. A common, important picture of inter-temporal rationality is that it consists in maximizing total expected discounted utility across time. By analyzing reinforcement learning algorithms, this article shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and inter-temporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve inter-temporal rationality without temporal representation. It then explores (...) potential upshots of this result for theorizing about rationality and representation. (shrink)

Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. In (...) this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. (shrink)