Consciousness, Function, and Representation

Consciousness, Function, and Representation PDF Author: Ned Joel Block
Publisher: Bradford Book
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 654

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first of a planned two-volume collection of Ned Block's writings on philosophy of mind; this volume treats consciousness, functionalism, and representation and can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness.

Consciousness, Function, and Representation

Consciousness, Function, and Representation PDF Author: Ned Joel Block
Publisher: Bradford Book
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 654

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first of a planned two-volume collection of Ned Block's writings on philosophy of mind; this volume treats consciousness, functionalism, and representation and can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness.

Consciousness, Function, and Representation, Volume 1

Consciousness, Function, and Representation, Volume 1 PDF Author: Ned Block
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262524627
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume of Ned Block's writings collects his papers on consciousness, functionalism, and representationism. A number of these papers treat the significance of the multiple realizability of mental states for the mind-body problem—a theme that has concerned Block since the 1960s. One paper on this topic considers the upshot for the mind-body problem of the possibility of a robot that is functionally like us but physically different—as is Commander Data of Star Trek's second generation. The papers on consciousness treat such conceptual issues as phenomenal versus access consciousness, Dennett's theory of consciousness, and the function of consciousness, as well as such empirical matters as "How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness," and (in an expanded version of a paper originally in Trends in Cognitive Sciences) an argument that there are distinct neural correlates for access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Turning to the mind-body problem, Block defends physicalism against Max Black's argument concerning phenomenal modes of presentation. The papers on representationism consider "mental paint" as well as the "Inverted Earth" thought experiment—a world in which colors are reversed but there is a compensating reversal in the words that are used to describe them. Consciousness, Function, and Representation, bringing together papers that have appeared primarily in journals and conference proceedings, can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness.

The Nature of Consciousness

The Nature of Consciousness PDF Author: Ned Block
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262522106
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 884

Get Book Here

Book Description
Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the field, and imposes structure on a vast and complicated literature, with sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, consciousness and representation, the function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, qualia, and monitoring conceptions of consciousness. Of the 49 contributions, 18 are either new or have been adapted from a previous publication.

The Conceptual Representation of Consciousness

The Conceptual Representation of Consciousness PDF Author: Thomas Natsoulas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316432041
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Get Book Here

Book Description
Consciousness is familiar to us first hand, yet difficult to understand. This book concerns six basic concepts of consciousness exercised in ordinary English. The first is the interpersonal meaning and requires at least two people involved in relation to one another. The second is a personal meaning, having to do with one's own perspective on the kind of person one is and the life one is leading. The third meaning has reference simply to one being occurrently aware of something or as though of something. The fourth narrows the preceding sense to one having direct occurrent awareness of happenings in one's own experiential stream. The fifth is the unitive meaning of consciousness and has reference to those portions of one's stream that one self-appropriates to make up one's conscious being. The last is the general-state meaning and picks out the general operating mode in which we most often function.

Action in Perception

Action in Perception PDF Author: Alva Noë
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262640635
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.

Blockheads!

Blockheads! PDF Author: Adam Pautz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038722
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 649

Get Book Here

Book Description
New essays on the philosophy of Ned Block, with substantive and wide-ranging responses by Block. Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block. The essays and responses not only address Block's past contributions but are rich with new ideas and argument. They importantly clarify many key elements of Block's work, including his pessimism concerning such thought experiments as Commander Data and the Nation of China; his more general pessimism about intuitions and introspection in the philosophy of mind; the empirical case for an antifunctionalist, biological theory of phenomenal consciousness; the fading qualia problem for a biological theory; the link between phenomenal consciousness and representation (especially spatial representation); and the reducibility of phenomenal representation. Many of the contributors to Blockheads! are prominent philosophers themselves, including Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and Hilary Putnam. Contributors Ned Block, Bill Brewer, Richard Brown, Tyler Burge, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Hakwan Lau, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, William G. Lycan, Brian P. McLaughlin, Adam Pautz, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, Nicholas Silins, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tye, Sebastian Watzl

Representation in Mind

Representation in Mind PDF Author: Hugh Clapin
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 008054052X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Representation in Mind' is the first book in the new series 'Perspectives on Cognitive Science' and includes well known contributors in the areas of philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science.The papers in this volume offer new ideas, fresh approaches and new criticisms of old ideas. The papers deal in new ways with fundamental questions concerning the problem of mental representation that one contributor, Robert Cummins, has described as "THE problem in philosophy of mind for some time now". The editors' introductory overview considers the problem for which mental representation has been seen as an answer, sketching an influential framework, outlining some of the issues addressed and then providing an overview of the papers. Issues include: the relation between mental representation and public, non-mental representation; misrepresentation; the role of mental representations in intelligent action; the relation between representation and consciousness; the relation between folk psychology and explanations invoking mental representations

Consciousness

Consciousness PDF Author: Peter Carruthers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199277362
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hardproblem' for a scientific world view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' (fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-orderanalog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings ofanimals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include abelief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science.

Quality and Content

Quality and Content PDF Author: Joseph Levine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198800088
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.

Mental Representation and Consciousness

Mental Representation and Consciousness PDF Author: E. Marbach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789401722407
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description