Philosophers and psychologists have experimentally explored various aspects of people’s understandings of subjective experience based on their responses to questions about whether robots “see red” or “feel frustrated,” but the intelligibility of such questions may well presuppose that people understand robots as experiencers in the first place. Departing from the standard approach, I develop an experimental framework that distinguishes 20 between “phenomenal consciousness” as it is applied to a subject (an experiencer) and to an (experiential) mental state and experimentally test (...) folk understandings of both subjective experience and experiencers. My findings (1) reveal limitations in experimental approaches using “artificial experiencers” like robots, (2) indicate that the standard philosophical conception of subjective experience in terms of qualia is distinct from that of the folk, and (3) show that folk intuitions do support a conception of qualia that departs from the philosophical conception in that it is physical rather than metaphysical. These findings have implications for the “hard problem” of consciousness. (shrink)

Giulio Tononi (2008) has offered his integrated information theory of consciousness (IITC) as a “provisional manifesto.” I critically examine how the approach fares. I point out some (relatively) internal concerns with the theory and then more broadly philosophical ones; finally I assess the prospects for IITC as a fundamental theory of consciousness. I argue that the IITC’s scientific promise does carry over to a significant extent to broader philosophical theorizing about qualia and consciousness, though not as directly as Tononi suggests, (...) since the account is much more focused on the qualitative character of experience rather than on consciousness itself. I propose understanding it as “integrated information theory of qualia” (IITQ), rather than of consciousness. (shrink)

Much of the current thought concerning mathematical ontology in volves in some way the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument. The indispensability approach needs to be more thoroughly specified, however, before substantive progress can be made in assessing it. To this end I examine in some detail the ways in which pure mathematics is applied to physical theory; such considerations give rise to three specific issues with which the indispensability approach must come to grips.

Understanding probabilities as something other than point values has often been motivated by the need to find more realistic models for degree of belief, and in particular the idea that degree of belief should have an objective basis in “statistical knowledge of the world.” I offer here another motivation growing out of efforts to understand how chance evolves as a function of time. If the world is “chancy” in that there are non-trivial, objective, physical probabilities at the macro-level, then the (...) chance of an event e that happens at a given time is \ until it happens. But whether the chance of e goes to one continuously or not is left open. Discontinuities in such chance trajectories can have surprising and troubling consequences for probabilistic analyses of causation and accounts of how events occur in time. This, coupled with the compelling evidence for quantum discontinuities in chance’s evolution, gives rise to a “continuity bind” with respect to chance probability trajectories. I argue that a viable option for circumventing the continuity bind is to understand the probabilities “imprecisely,” that is, as intervals rather than point values. I then develop and motivate an alternative kind of continuity appropriate for interval-valued chance probability trajectories. (shrink)

Behavioral and physiological synchronization have important implications for work teams with regard to workload management, coordinated behavior and overall functioning. This study extended previous work on the nonlinear statistical structure of GSR series in dyads to larger teams and included subjective ratings of workload and contributions to problem solving. Eleven teams of 3 or 4 people played a series of six emergency response (ER) games against a single opponent. Seven of the groups worked under a time pressure instruction at the (...) beginning of the first game. The other four groups were not given that instruction until the beginning of the fourth game. The optimal lag length for the teams, which appeared to be phase-locked, was substantially shorter than that obtained previously for loosely-coupled dyads. There was a complex nonlinear effect from the time pressure manipulation on the autocorrelation over time that reflected workload and fatigue dynamics that were operating. The R2 values for linear and nonlinear statistical models differed by less than.01. The average amount of influence from one ER team member to another was 4.5-4.7% of the variance in GSR readings. ER team members were classified as drivers and empaths, based on the autocorrelations and transfer influences to and from other players in the GSR time series. Empaths were rated by their peers as making more types of positive contributions to the problem solving discussions than others, and drivers received the lowest ratings. Larger Lyapunov exponents that were calculated from the GSR time series were positively correlated with individuals’ ratings of subjective workload and were negatively correlated with leadership indicators. Several directions for further research are outlined. (shrink)

The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I (...) then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work. (shrink)

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society’s (...) resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. (shrink)

Analyses of singular causation often make use of the idea that a cause increases the probability of its effect. Of particular salience in such accounts are the values of the probability function of the effect, conditional on the presence and absence of the putative cause, analysed around the times of the events in question: causes are characterized by the effect’s probability function being greater when conditionalized upon them. Put this way, it becomes clearer that the ‘behaviour’ of probability functions in (...) small intervals about the times in question ought to be of concern. In this article, I make an extended case that causal theorists employing the ‘probability raising’ idea should pay attention to the continuity question. Specifically, if the probability functions are ‘jumping about’ in ways typical of discontinuous functions, then the stability of the relevant probability increase is called into question. The rub, however, is that sweeping requirements for either continuity or discontinuity are problematic and, as I argue, this constitutes a ‘continuity bind’. Hence more subtle considerations and constraints are needed, two of which I consider: utilizing discontinuous first derivatives of continuous probability functions, and abandoning point probability for imprecise probability. _1_ Introduction _2_ Probability Trajectories and Continuity _2.1_ Probability trajectories _2.2_ Causation as discontinuous jumps _2.3_ Against systematic discontinuity _3_ Broader Discontinuity Concerns _4_ The Continuity Bind _4.1_ Retaining continuity with discontinuous first derivatives _4.2_ Imprecise probability trajectories _5_ Concluding Remarks Appendix. (shrink)

The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I (...) then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the nature of Russell's ramified type theory resolution of paradoxes. In particular, I consider the effect of construing the types in Church's cumulative sense, that is, the range of a variable of a given type includes the range of every variable of directly lower type. Contrary to what seems to be generally assumed, I show that the decision to make the levels cumulative and allow this to be reflected in the semantics is not neutral with (...) respect to the solution of the paradoxes. I introduce a distinction between syntactical and semantical cumulativeness. It turns out that noncumulative type theories (in either sense) are equally capable of dealing with the paradoxes. Furthermore, whether cumulativeness is appropriate appears to be context dependent. (shrink)

Synchronization is a special case of self-organization in which one can observe close mimicry in behavior of the system components. Synchrony in body movements, autonomic arousal, and EEG activity among human individuals has attracted considerable attention for their possible roles in social interaction. This article is specifically concerned with autonomic synchrony and finding the best model for the dyadic relationships, with regard to both theoretical and empirical accuracy, that could be extrapolated to synchrony levels for groups and teams of three (...) or more people. The four models that are compared in this study have different theoretical origins: the two-variable linear regression function, a three-parameter nonlinear regression function, the logistic map function stated in polynomial form, and the logistic map function stated as an exponential regression structure. The data for this study were electrodermal responses collected from a team of four people engaged in an emergency response simulation that produced 12 dyadic time series. Results shows strong levels of fit between the data and all four models, although there were significant differences among them. Further research directions point toward finding conditions that favor one model over another and exploring other possible nonlinear structures. (shrink)

Synchronization of autonomic arousal levels within dyads and larger teams has been associated with several types of social-behavioral outcome. One previous study reported greater physiological influence of leaders on followers than of followers on leaders; influence was measured pairwise within triadic problem solving groups. The present study explored synchronized autonomic arousal with leadership outcomes in two experiments with group sizes of three to eight members. Drivers, who had the greatest physiological impact on other team members were consistently less like the (...) leader of the group. Empaths, who were the most receptive to autonomic signals from others, were not consistently associated with leadership roles, although they did show sensitivity to team dynamics in their ratings of cognitive and social sources of workload. The tentative conclusion, subject to future research, is that successful leadership requires a balance between the driver and empath orientations. (shrink)

To further the understanding of how to build or reduce synchrony in a work team, we examined two principles for defining the optimal condition to produce or limit synchrony: the empath-driver ratio, and the balance between autocorrelated autonomic arousal and the degree of influence that transfers from each group member to other group members. In study 1, we employed a series of computational simulations designed to manipulate the four variables. The results indicated that there is a four-way balance between driver (...) strength, empath strength, autocorrelational and transfer effects among team members. The relationship between the synchronization coefficient and the empath-driver ratio was moderated by whether the group adopted a network structure for group problem solving or command-and-control. In study 2 we analyzed autonomic arousal in four teams of five participants playing a first-person shooter computer game. The correlation between the synchronization coefficient and the empath-driver ratio was 0.280 based on 64 pairs of observations. The relationship was moderated by both the network structure and the statistical model that one adopted to analyze dyadic relationships within the group. The implications of these relationships for a growing theory of team synchrony are discussed. (shrink)

This study investigated the stationarity of electrodermal time series collected in situations where turn taking in human interactions are involved. In this context, the stationarity of the time series is the extent to which a simple model can be used to fit the entire time series. The experiment involved seven participants in an emergency response simulation against one opponent. They generated 48 time series across six simulations, which were split and re-spliced to separate the team’s turns and the opponent’s turns. (...) Significant differences in R2 coefficients were found for both linear and nonlinear statistical models between experimental conditions, but the difference only amounted to 3% of the accuracy of those models relative to the original data. It was thus concluded that the impact of turn taking on stationarity was a small effect at most. A comparison of synchronization coefficients for the team data, which rely on the collective accuracy of the individual time series models, indicated stronger synchronization during periods when the team was watching the opponent’s actions compared to when they took their own turns. It was thus concluded, furthermore, that the common focus of attention prevailed against any non-stationarity that was introduced by turn taking. (shrink)

I argue that a broad conception of behavior makes considerable headway toward an account of psychological explanation that preserves the intuitive correctness of belief/desire psychological explanations and whose explanatory utility is not undercut by neurophysiological explanations. The rough idea behind a broad conception of behavior is that the basic units of behavior, which constitute the primary explananda of psychology, are themselves essentially goal-directed. As such, behavior supervenes on more than the physical properties of the bodily motions which comprise it; it (...) supervenes also on the historical/teleological properties that give it its goal. (shrink)

Otávio Bueno* * and Steven French.** ** Applying Mathematics: Immersion, Inference, Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-19-881504-4 978-0-19-185286-2. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198815044. 001.0001. Pp. xvii + 257.

The subject with which Mark Colyvan's book deals is timely indeed. While discussions of mathematical ontology have been a mainstay in philosophy of mathematics for the last century (at least), for the last thirty years or so this discussion has begun with (and often not left) the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument. Though the argument is widely cited, to my knowledge this is the first book-length project exclusively dedicated to articulating and defending the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. In the first (...) section below, I shall run through a summary of the book (following its chapter layout) with a few critical remarks. In the second section I shall raise a few critical issues organized topically. (shrink)