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  1. Reevaluating the Dead Donor Rule.Mike Collins - 2010 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35 (2):1-26.
    The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable and unjustified but (...)
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  2. Evolving artificial minds and brains.Alex Vereschagin, Mike Collins & Pete Mandik - 2007 - In Drew Khlentzos & Andrea Schalley (eds.), Mental States Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature. John Benjamins.
    We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that ex- plain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evo- lution. We present the results of computer simulations of evolved neural network controllers and discuss the similarity of the simulations to real-world examples of neural network control of animal behavior. We argue that focusing on the simplest cases of evolved intelligent behavior, in both simulated and real organisms, reveals that evolved representations must carry information about the creature’s environ- ments (...)
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  3. Consent for organ retrieval cannot be presumed.Mike Collins - 2009 - HEC Forum 21 (1):71-106.
  4. The Nature and Implementation of Representation in Biological Systems.Mike Collins - 2009 - Dissertation, City University of New York
    I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...)
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