The Neuroconnectionist Research Programme
With Doerig, A., Sommers, R.P., Seeliger, K., et al., Nat Rev Neurosci 24, 431–450 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00705-w.
Why Physics Should Care about the Mind, and How to Think About it Without Worrying About the Mind-Body Problem
In Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness, edited by Shan Gao, Oxford University Press, 2022.
On Being Some-One
In Surrounding Free Will, edited by Al Mele, Oxford University Press, p. 274-297.
Immunity to Error as an Artefact of Transition Between Representational Media
In Immunity to Error through Misidentification: New Essays, edited by Simon Prosser and François Recanati, Cambridge University Press, p. 62-80.
It is often claimed that there is a range of self-ascriptions that are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (IEM for short). There’s been an enormous amount written on the topic. It is connected to issues about self-knowledge, consciousness, Descartes’ arguments for dualism, and the tendency to think of the self as a special sort of private object. In this paper, I explain this phenomenon as an artefact of the interaction between representational media with different invariance classes. The explanation deflates some of the metaphysical conclusions that have been drawn from IEM.
Reflexivity, Fixed points, and Semantic Descent; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reflexivity
Acta Analytica, 26 (4), p. 295-310.
For most of the major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, human cognition was understood as involving the mind’s reflexive grasp of its own contents. But other important figures have described the very idea of a reflexive thought as incoherent. Ryle notably likened the idea of a reflexive thought to an arm that grasps itself. Recent work in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences has greatly clarified the special epistemic and semantic properties of reflexive thought. This article is an attempt to give an explicit characterization of the structure of reflexive thoughts that explains those properties and avoids the complaints of its critics.
Precis for Symposium on The Situated Self
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82 (3), p. 733-748.
Replies to Symposiasts
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82 (3), p. 752-758.
Self-Organization and Self-Governance
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, S. 41(3), 327-351.
Me, again
In Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, Volume 6: Time and Identity, edited by Keirn-Campbell, O’Rourke, and Shier, MIT Press.
Thought about the self raises some very special problems. Some of these concern indexical reference quite generally, but there is one having to do with identity over time that seems to be unique to the self. I use an historical exchange between Anscombe and Descartes to bring out the problem, and propose a resolution that casts light both on why self-directed thought presents a unique epistemic predicament and where Descartes’ cogito may have gone wrong.
Doublemindedness; a model for a dual-content cognitive architecture
Psyche, vol. 12.
There has been a confluence of interest in recent years in self- representational accounts of phenomenal consciousness. But the outstanding stumbling blocks to any reductive account of phenomenal consciousness remain the subjectivity of phenomenal properties and cognitive and epistemic gaps that plague the relationship between physical and phenomenal properties. I show how a self-representational account elucidates subjectivity and explains the source of those gaps. I remain, however, critical of self- representational accounts that aim to provide analyses of what it is to be conscious.
Saving the Baby: Dennett on Autobiography, Agency, and the Self
Philosophical Psychology, 19:3, 345-360, DOI: 10.1080/09515080600690565
Dennett argues that the decentralized view of human cognitive organization finding increasing support in parts of cognitive science undermines talk of an inner self. On his view, the causal underpinnings of behavior are distributed across a collection of autonomous subsystems operating without any centralized supervision. Selves are fictions contrived to simplify description and facilitate prediction of behavior with no real correlate inside the mind. I examine the cognitive organization of a system steering by an internal model of self and environment (what I call elsewhere a “Self-Governing System”, and argue that it provides a model that lies between the image of mind as termite colony and a naive Cartesianism that views the self as inner substance.
Nolipsism: So You Think You Exist, Do You?
With John Pollock. In Knowlege and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga (Kluwer), edited by Thomas Crisp, Matthew Davidson, and David Vander Laan, Springer Verlag.
We investigate the functional role of “I” (and also “here” and “now”) in cognition, arguing that the use of such non-descriptive “reflexive” designators is essential for making sophisticated cognition work in a general-purpose cognitive agent. Simple arguments based upon how “I” works in reasoning lead to the conclusion that it cannot designate the body or part of the body. However, for the purpose of making the reasoning work correctly, it makes no difference whether “I” actually designates anything. Why should we think we are any different? (This paper was written in a collaborative voice and a provocative spirit. Although I still accept much of the argument, in my view “I” does refer. It doesn’t refer to the brain or the body, but to something whose principle of unity is non-material. See my “Unity of Mind”).
Science and the Phenomenal
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 351-369.
A reading is given of Curie’s principle that the symmetry of a cause is always preserved in its effects. The truth of the principle is demonstrated and its importance under the proposed reading is defended.
