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67670.340761
The stereotypical drug user is a life-long addict. While stereotypes are usually good statistical approximations of the truth, I’ve long had the sense that this particular stereotype is false. The infamous heroin study, for example, found that the vast majority of U.S. soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam quit when they came home. …
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127566.340882
Using the philosophical writings of Ernst Mach as a backdrop, I explore how concepts and classifications partly constitute the phenomena studied in the science of emotion by selecting features from a larger population of features. This process of selection is a matter of decision and is not inevitable, but it promotes populating concepts with empirical content. The openness of empirical concepts suggests that this selectionist constituting does not characterise only the early stages in the development of a science because background and foreground shifts are potentially ongoing. The theory of psychological construction, which contends that emotional episodes are constructed on the fly out of shifting sets of components, exemplifies this selectionist sense of constituting to the extent that it advocates for a resemblance nominalism, similar to that of Locke, in which selection is involved in naming kinds. Examples of constituting can be seen in changing definitions of whether animals experience emotion and in the choice of causal models.
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153946.340902
A correspondent asked me how a simple God can choose. I've thought much about this, never quite happy with what I have to say. I am still not happy (nor is it surprising if "how God functions" is beyond us!) …
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236832.340917
Things are about to get really (I mean really) busy for me and so I probably won’t be doing much besides running around frantically until August 2026 (seriously even by my standards it’s going to be a rough ride for a while). …
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475854.340938
Lauren Ross has recently argued that the current philosophical enthusiasm for mechanisms poses a threat to a proper understanding of the diversity of causal structures found in biology, and of the diversity of ways in which biologists explain biological phenomena. Ross argues that new mechanists have collapsed a variety of distinct causal structures within the confining analytical strictures of mechanism, and in so doing have failed to appreciate the diversity of concepts and strategies needed to describe and explain biological phenomena. Ross grants that mechanisms are important in biology, but argues that there are other causal structures, like pathways and cascades, that are distinct from mechanisms, and that require distinctive treatments. In this paper I’ll argue that Ross’s worries arise from a failure to distinguish ontological questions about causal structure from methodological questions about modeling and explanation. I’ll argue that a mechanistic ontology is compatible with conceptual and explanatory pluralism, and along the way I will offer a new analysis of pathways and pathway models that draws on some of Ross’s insights.
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476000.340953
If an organism displays enough of the right neural, cognitive, or behavioral “markers,” researchers can generally assume it’s phenomenally conscious. But what if it doesn’t? Recently, there has been substantial disagreement on this “exclusion question.” According to one view (what I call the “symmetry” view), organisms lacking markers probably aren’t conscious (Dennett 1995; Tye 2016a; Birch 2022; Veidt 2022). However, according to another (the “asymmetry” view), we cannot conclude anything about the presence or absence of consciousness in organisms lacking markers (Prinz 2005; Schwitzgebel 2020; Andrews 2020, 2022, 2024). Here I argue that this disagreement partially reflects a deeper disagreement about how markers are identified; to this end, I point to three “paths” from specific ideas about marker identification (namely, theory-based, analogy-based, and function-based approaches) to one or the other view on exclusion. Equipped with the right auxiliary assumptions, theory- and analogy-based approaches can motivate the asymmetry view, whereas function-based approaches can motivate the symmetry view. However, this relation is not deterministic, as different auxiliary assumptions will lead to different views about exclusion. My distilled product is therefore a decision tree, which links views about marker identification to one or the other view on exclusion. I hope that this tree will serve as a means of identifying “fronts” where future debate on this question can be productively focused.
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502723.340967
How, exactly, can category theory help modeling in public health? I wrote a paper about this with two people who helped run Canada’s COVID modeling, together with a software engineer and a mathematician at the Topos Institute:
• John Baez, Xiaoyan Li, Sophie Libkind, Nathaniel D. Osgood and Eric Redekopp, A categorical framework for modeling with stock and flow diagrams, in Mathematics of Public Health: Mathematical Modelling from the Next Generation, eds. …
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572303.340981
This Target Article has been accepted for publication and has not yet been copyedited and proofread. The article may be cited using its doi (About doi), but it must be made clear that it is not the final version.
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579654.341
The fall 2025 semester is off and running. I have a lot going on this semester, with Consciousness Live! kicking off in September, and teaching my usual 5 classes at LaGuardia. Since the Graduate Center Philosophy Program recently hired Kristen Andrews I have been sitting in on her philosophy of animal consciousness and society class she is offering. …
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1082038.341013
Phenomenology of science is supposed to return to the things themselves by getting as close as possible to the level of scientific practice. In doing so, it engages with a broader landscape of scholarship on science—from sociology and STS to analytic philosophy—that likewise seeks to clarify the epistemic structures of scientific practice. What sets phenomenology apart, however, is its aim of faithfully describing the essential structures of expert experience—the very experience scientists undergo as they engage in their research—by means of a first-person perspective. This paper identifies a central methodological difficulty in this regard: the challenge of expert experience, namely the difficulty of accessing and describing experiences that require domain-specific expertise. While introducing qualitative methods into the phenomenological toolbox seems a promising route for addressing this difficulty, it brings with it its own set of challenges. Although, as I will argue, there is no straightforward solution to the challenge, a potential way forward lies in focusing more on the collaborative interactions between phenomenologists and scientists during interview-based inquiry, with the aim of fostering interactional expertise in Harry Collins’s sense of the term.
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1193849.341027
In my last post, I wrote about all the hate mail I’ve received these past few days. I even shared a Der-Stürmer-like image of a bloodthirsty, hook-nosed Orthodox Jew that some troll emailed me, after he’d repeatedly promised to send me a “diagram” that would improve my understanding of the Middle East. …
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1425529.341039
What is it for y to be objectively qualitatively overall at least as similar to x as z is? This paper defends a version of the following answer: it is for y to be at least as similar to x as z is in every qualitative respect. On the version defended in this paper, this analysis arguably entails that it is possible for some things to objectively qualitatively resemble each other more than they do other things. However, it also arguably entails that, given how the world contingently is, many things (if not all things) are incomparable in objective qualitative resemblance, where y and z are so incomparable to x iff: i) it is not the case that y is at least as objectively qualitatively similar to x as z is, and ii) it is not the case that z is at least as objectively qualitatively similar to x as y is.
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1533094.341072
The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.
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1696978.341098
What do large language models actually model? Do they tell us something about human capacities, or are they models of the corpus we’ve trained them on? I give a non-deflationary defence of the latter position. Cognitive science tells us that linguistic capabilities in humans rely supralinear formats for computation. The transformer architecture, by contrast, supports at best a linear formats for processing. This argument will rely primarily on certain invariants of the computational architecture of transformers. I then suggest a positive story about what transformers are doing, focusing on Liu et al. (2022)’s intriguing speculations about shortcut automata. I conclude with why I don’t think this is a terribly deflationary story. Language is not (just) a means for expressing inner state but also a kind of ‘discourse machine’ that lets us make new language given appropriate context. We have learned to use this technology in one way; LLMs have also learned to use it too, but via very different means.
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1799640.341111
Interactions between agents are supported through a continuous process of detecting and responding to behaviors that are contingent upon the other agent’s behavior. Here, we explore the temporal dependence of these mechanisms, focusing on the role of timescale compatibility in inter-agent interactions. Using continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) to control embodied agents in a minimal social interaction task, we demonstrate that effective interactions require agents to operate on compatible timescales. Our results indicate that time scale mismatches disrupt agents’ ability to distinguish other agents from non-social entities, revealing a timescale threshold beyond which agents begin mis-classifying slower agents as static objects and faster agents as non-social animate objects.
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1943228.341126
This paper is divided in two parts. In part I, I argue against two attempts to naturalise the notion of scientific representation, by reducing it to isomorphism and similarity. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that isomorphism and similarity are common (although not universal) means of representation; but that they are not constituents of scientific representation. I look at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to naturalise scientific representation are likely to be successful. In part II of the paper, I present a deflationary conception of scientific representation, which minimally characterises it by means of two necessary conditions: representation is essentially intentional and it has the capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. I then defend this conception by showing that it successfully meets the objections and difficulties that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception explains the success of various means of representation in their appropriate domains, and it sheds light on the truth and accuracy of scientific representations.
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1967137.341139
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
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2127357.341153
It’s widely held that we perceive not only low-level properties, such as colors and shapes, but also high-level properties, such as the property of being a dog or of being a moving train. Debate about which types of property we perceive has recently eclipsed the question of how perceiving itself operates. We focus here on that latter question, proposing an account on which perception of low-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities alone, whereas perception of high-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities together with conceptual content of the type that figures in thinking. It is central to our account that mental qualities have a type of representational character unique to them, so that mental qualities can interact representationally with conceptual content in perceiving. We present a number of advantages of this account, including how it fits with a range of experimental findings, and address several objections to it.
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2143065.341166
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.
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2491018.34118
Cognitive scientists ascribe inferential processes to (neuro)cognitive systems to explain many of their capacities. Since these ascriptions have different connotations, philosophical accounts of inference could help clarify their assumptions and forestall potential confusion. However, many existing accounts define inference in ways that are out of touch with successful scientific practice – ways that overly intellectualise inference, construe inference in complete opposition to association, and imply that inferential processes prevent minds from being in contact with the outside world. In this chapter, we combine Siegel’s (2017) Response Hypothesis with insights from basal cognition and ecological rationality to sketch a philosophically viable, updated account of inference in (neuro)cognitive systems. According to this view, inference is a kind of rationally evaluable transition from some inputs or current representations to some conclusion or output representation. This notion of inference aligns with and can illuminate scientific practices in disparate fields, while eschewing a commitment to a consciously accessible language-like neural code or a formal system of mental logic, highlighting the continuity between inferential and associative processes, and allowing for a non-indirect mind-world relationship, where minds are genuinely open and responsive to their environment.
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2688703.341196
Despite its growing appeal for the study of consciousness, the notion of entropy has yet to lead to widely supported new insights about the nature of phenomenal experience. Typically, entropy measures of brain activity are found to correlate with cognitive functions that are assumed to index consciousness. Taking a very different approach, this theoretical framework does not conflate consciousness with any function. It presents a series of premises to argue that consciousness is fundamentally characterized as inactionable perception, i.e. that does not give rise to macrophysical action. This is then fitted in a framework of perception and action as informational changes in a dynamical neural state space. In this model, inactionable perception naturally arises as the prediction-driven increase of concept-related entropy. This entails an increase of (Shannon) information while its efficacy to produce macrophysical effects decreases, which is here referred to as information dissipation, analogously to energy dissipation in thermodynamic systems. It results from inefficient sensorimotor coupling with the environment, which occurs when behavior is not fixed relative to the stimulus. Despite the posited inefficacy of conscious perception, it consists of action-specific information and can therefore be interpreted as potential behavior. Starting from fundamental properties, this framework may provide a new and coherent conceptual basis for a fuller understanding of what consciousness is and how it relates to the physical world. Although many of its implications remain to be explored, it appears consistent with empirical findings, and prompts subtle reinterpretations of some classical results in perception research.
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2803996.34121
Perspectival realism claims that scientific knowledge is always situated into a vantage point. We argue that ecological psychology offers a suitable framework to develop perspectival epistemologies. Ecological psychology stresses that perception is focused on affordances, i.e. the possibilities of interactions afforded by reality given the abilities of an organism. We call the integrating view as ecological perspectivism. It claims that science offers knowledge of reality in terms of affordances, which are relational to the instruments and abilities of scientific communities. Cognition is of affordances, and what a domain affords for scientists depends on which skills and technologies they avail. We connect this proposal with the main arguments for perspectivism. First, regarding instrumental detections, ecological perspectivism offers a realist account of perception that treats the use of instruments as tools that scaffold and extend embodied cognition. Second, regarding model pluralism, ecological perspectivism supports an artifactualist account of modelling as embodied cognition extended by tools.
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2908834.341228
Poseidon who has the power to inflict a vengeful wrath. Yet Odysseus is overcome by pride at his own cleverness and shouts his own name from the prow of his ship, carelessly jeopardizing the safety of his crew. The parable of Odysseus and the Cyclops is a uniquely rich and compelling story, but it involves an utterly ordinary kind of failure to respond to reasons: ego eclipses prudence. In this moment, Odysseus is irrational and is responsible for this irrationality. His irrationality stems from the fact that he has violated the rational requirement to respond to his reasons. While we often meet this requirement in everyday life, we also often violate it by failing to respond to reasons due to ego, closed-mindedness, carelessness, or other poor epistemic habits. In such cases, our failures render us irrational.
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2908916.341242
moment or not at all. Nonetheless, Lessing thought that there is at the disposal of the poet an indirect means to capture the beauty of material objects. Homer would have put it to good use in the Iliad, where the beauty of Helen of Troy was conveyed not by a description of her beauty-making features, but by a description of the effect of her beauty: “What Homer could not describe in detail he makes us understand by the effect: oh! poets paint for us the pleasure, inclination, love, rapture, which beauty causes, and you will have painted beauty itself” (Lessing 1836[1766], ). At the very least, what this passage makes clear is that
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3008897.341255
Christopher Devlin Brown’s The Hope and Horror of Physicalism works through different ways of understanding the content of physicalism, evaluates the “existential consequences” of physicalism so understood, and attempts to defend one form of physicalism – “Russellian physicalism” – from consciousness-based objections. I first raise some minor-but-not-too-minor concerns about Brown’s historical account of physicalism. Second, I discuss one version of physicalism (the “theory-based version”) that Brown works with in assessing physicalism’s existential consequences. Third, I raise some questions about Brown’s preferred way of understanding physicalism, which he labels “Russellian physicalism”, and which is a version of “via negativa physicalism”. My discussions are offered in a constructive spirit.
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3196875.341268
The self represents a multifactorial entity made up of several interrelated constructs. It is suggested that self-talk orchestrates interactions between most self-processes—especially those entailing self-reflection. A review of the literature is performed, specifically looking for representative studies (n = 12) presenting correlations between self-report measures of self-talk and self-reflective processes. Self-talk questionnaires include the Self-Talk Scale, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire, the General Inner Speech Questionnaire, and the Inner Speech Scale. The main self-reflection measures are the Rumination and Reflection Questionnaire, the Self-Consciousness Scale, and the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale. Most measures comprise subscales which are also discussed. Findings include: (1) positive significant correlations between self-talk used for self-management/assessment and self-reflection, arguably because the latter entails self-regulation, which itself relies on self-directed speech; (2) positive significant correlations between critical self-talk and self-rumination, as both may recruit negative, repetitive, and uncontrollable self-thoughts; (3) negative associations between self-talk and the self-acceptance aspect of mindfulness, likely because thinking about oneself in the present in a non-judgmental way is best achieved by repressing one’s inner voice. Limitations are discussed, including the selective nature of the reported correlations. Experimentally manipulating self-talk would make it possible to further explore causal associations with self-processes.
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3265888.341282
Daniel Dennett’s view about consciousness in nonhuman animals has two parts. One is a methodological injunction that we rely on our best theory of consciousness to settle that issue, a theory that must initially work for consciousness in humans. The other part is Dennett’s application of his own theory of consciousness, developed in Consciousness Explained (1991), which leads him to conclude that nonhuman animals are likely never in conscious mental states. I defend the methodological injunction as both sound and important, and argue that the alternative approaches that dominate the literature are unworkable. But I also urge that Dennett’s theory of consciousness and his arguments against conscious states in nonhuman animals face significant difficulties. Those difficulties are avoided by a higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, which is close to Dennett’s theory, and provides leverage in assessing which kinds of mental state are likely to be conscious in nonhuman animals. Finally, I describe a promising experimental strategy for showing that conscious states do occur in some nonhuman animals, which fits comfortably with the higher-order-thought theory but not with Dennett’s.
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3438872.341296
Hypotheses about how and why animals behave the way they do are frequently labelled as either associative or cognitive. This has been taken as evidence that there is a fundamental distinction between two kinds of behavioural processes. However, there is significant disagreement about how to define this distinction whether it ought to be rejected entirely. Rather than seeking a definition of the associative-cognitive distinction, or advocating for its rejection, I argue that it is an artefact of the way that comparative psychologists generate hypotheses. I suggest that hypotheses for non-human animal behaviour are often generated by analogy with hypotheses drawn from human psychology and associative learning theory, a justifiable strategy since analogies help to establish the pursuit-worthiness of a hypothesis. Any apparent distinction is a misleading characterisation of what is a complex web of hypotheses that explain diverse behavioural phenomena. The analogy view of the distinction has three advantages. It motivates the apparent existence of the distinction based on a common inference strategy in science, analogical reasoning. It accounts for why the distinction has been difficult to articulate, because of the diversity of possible analogies. Finally, it delimits the role of the distinction in downstream inferences about animal behaviour.
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3471766.341311
This commentary aims to support Tim Crane’s account of the structure of intentionality by showing how intentional objects are naturalistically respectable, how they pair with concepts, and how they are to be held distinct from the referents of thought. Crane is right to reject the false dichotomy that accounts of intentionality must be either reductive and naturalistic or non-reductive and traffic in mystery. The paper has three main parts. First, I argue that the notion of an intentional object is a phenomenological one, meaning that it must be understood as an object of thought for a subject. Second, I explain how Mark Sainsbury’s Display Theory of Attitude Attribution pairs well with Crane’s notion of an intentional object and allows for precisification in intentional state attributions while both avoiding exotica and capturing the subject’s perspective on the world. Third, I explain the reification fallacy, the fallacy of examining intentional objects as if they exist independently of subjects and their conceptions of them. This work helps to bring out how intentionality can fit in the natural world while at the same time not reducing aboutness to some non-intentional properties of the natural world.
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3486265.34133
— We present a reformulation of the model predictive control problem using a Legendre basis. To do so, we use a Legendre representation both for prediction and optimization. For prediction, we use a neural network to approximate the dynamics by mapping a compressed Legendre representation of the control trajectory and initial conditions to the corresponding compressed state trajectory. We then reformulate the optimization problem in the Legendre domain and demonstrate methods for including optimization constraints. We present simulation results demonstrating that our implementation provides a speedup of 31-40 times for comparable or lower tracking errors with or without constraints on a benchmark task.