Ch 0. Introduction: Consciousness and the Invisible Brain
Part One: Metaphysics Groundwork
Ch 1. The Metaphysics of the Neuron
Ch 2. Introspecting Brain States as Such
Ch 3. Beware the Unicorn: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Inexistence
Part Two: Explaining Consciousness
Ch 4. The Neurophilosophy of Consciousness
Ch 5. Transcending Zombies
Ch 6. The Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Theory of Consciousness
Part Three: Objective and Subjective Representation
Ch 7. Animat Semantics
Ch 8. The Neural Accomplishment of Objectivity
Ch 9. The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity

I assume physicalism and argue against non-reductive physicalism on the following grounds. Extant forms of non-reductive physicalism spell out their commitment to physicalism in terms of a notion of supervenience incapable of ruling out obviously unappealing scenarios that I call "doubled-qualia" and "mental-mental-supervenience." Such scenarios involve multiple minds supervening on all and only the same physical properties. Such scenarios can be ruled out by a natural extension of the supervenience thesis that I call "fine-grained supervenience." I argue further that the combination of non-reductive physicalism with fine-grained supervenience leads to a regress. I argue further still that if the regress is to be avoided, the form of reductive physicalism most preferable is one in which mental properties reduce to neural properties.

My aim is to raise problems based on intentional inexistence for current philosophical projects that seek to explain phenomenal consciousness in terms of intentionality. I target both Higher-Order Representational theories like Rosenthal's and Carruthers' and First-Order Representational theories like Tye's and Dretske's. I interpret the key common thread of these theories as trying to explain the property of being conscious or being phenomenal in terms of the property of being represented. The key premise in my argument against such theories is that there is no such property as being represented and contemplation of intentional inexistence helps to support this premise. Things that don't exist don't have any properties. They may nonetheless be represented. So whatever representing something consists in, it does not consist in conferring to that thing the property of being represented.

Draft file coming soon.

Draft file coming soon.

As Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine's brief flirtation with a "mitigated phenomenalism" (Gibson's phrase) in the late 1940's and early 1950's, Quine's ontology of 1953 ("On Mental Entities") and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation. Chalmers (1996a, 2003a) has been a prominent member of the neo-dualists, though he does not leave Quine unmentioned. Neo-dualist arguments proceed by inferring from an epistemic gap between the physical and the phenomenal to an ontological gap between the physical and the phenomenal. Chalmers sorts various materialist responses to these arguments as follows: Type-A materialism denies that there's any epistemic gap in the first place. Type-B materialism accepts that there is an epistemic gap, but denies that the epistemic gap entails any ontological gap. Type-C materialism is like type-B materialism except it thinks the epistemic gap in question is only temporary. Type-Q materialism (Q for "Quine"), according to Chalmers (2003a), rejects the kinds of distinctions needed to formulate both the neo-dualist arguments and the type-A , type-B, and type-C materialist responses to them. Such rejected distinctions include the conceptual vs. the empirical, the a priori vs. the a posteriori, and the contingent vs. the necessary. Chalmers (2003a, 123) charges Type-Q materialism with being incapable of avoiding the problems alleged to arise for the types from earlier in the alphabet. The aim of the current paper is to argue the contrary point that Quineans are inoculated against these so-called problems. We spell out how Quinean allegiance to holism and pragmatic criteria for ontic commitment protect Type-Q materialism from the complaints of the qualia-freaks.

The so-called subjectivity of conscious experience is central to much recent work in the philosophy of mind. Subjectivity is the alleged property of consciousness whereby one can know what it is like to have certain conscious states only if one has undergone such states oneself. I review neurophilosophical work on consciousness and concepts pertinent to this claim and argue that subjectivity eliminativism is at least as well supported, if not more supported, than subjectivity reductionism.

This article tackles problems concerning the reduction of phenomenal consciousness to brain processes that arise in consideration of specifically epistemological properties that have been attributed to conscious experiences. In particular, various defenders of dualism and epiphenomenalism have argued for their positions by assuming special epistemic access to phenomenal consciousness. Many physicalists have reacted to such arguments by denying the epistemological premises. My aim in this paper is to take a different approach in opposing dualism and argue that when we correctly examine both the phenomenology and neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness we will see that granting the epistemological premises of special access are the best hope for a scientific study of consciousness. I argue that essential features of consciousness involve both their knowability by the subject of experience as well as their egocentricity, that is, their knowability by the subject as belonging to the subject. I articulate a neuroscientifically informed theory of phenomenal consciousness - the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface theory of consciousness - whereby states of recurrent cortical networks satisfy criteria for an epistemological theory of consciousness. The resultant theory shows both how the epistemological assumptions made by dualists are sound but lead to a reductive account of phenomenal consciousness.

In this paper I explore the question of how artificial life might be used to get a handle on philosophical issues concerning the mind-body problem. I focus on questions concerning what the physical precursors were to the earliest evolved versions of intelligent life. I discuss how cellular automata might constitute an experimental platform for the exploration of such issues, since cellular automata offer a unified framework for the modeling of physical, biological, and psychological processes. I discuss what it would take to implement in a cellular automaton the evolutionary emergence of cognition from non-cognitive artificial organisms. I review work on the artificial evolution of minimally cognitive organisms and discuss how such projects might be translated into cellular automata simulations.

A movement dedicated to applying neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and using philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience began about twenty-five years ago. Results in neuroscience have affected how we see traditional areas of philosophical concern such as perception, belief-formation, and consciousness. There is an interesting interaction between some of the distinctive features of neuroscience and important general issues in the philosophy of science. And recent neuroscience has thrown up a few conceptual issues that philosophers are perhaps best trained to deal with. After sketching the history of the movement, we explore the relationships between neuroscience and philosophy and introduce some of the specific issues that have arisen.

We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that explain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evolution. 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 environments and further can do so only if their neural states are appropriately isomorphic to environmental states. Further, these informational and isomorphism relations are what are tracked by content attributions in folk-psychological and cognitive scientific explanations of these intelligent behaviors.

In this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in "Of Conspiracy Theories" the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.

In this paper I attempt to show how Wittgenstein's Tractatarian views on solipsism follow from a certain construal and elaboration of the picture theory of intentionality. I do this by first reconstructing Wittgenstein's famous distinction between showing and saying in terms of the key notion of the picture theory: that intentionality is equivalent to resemblance. I interpret the distinction between showing and saying as a distinction between two different ways that facts can manifest intentionality. It is only with this construal of the distinction in hand that Wittgenstein's remarks on solipsism can be properly understood.

The neurophilosophy of consciousness brings neuroscience to bear on philosophical issues concerning phenomenal consciousness, especially issues concerning what makes mental states conscious, what it is that we are conscious of, and the nature of the phenomenal character of conscious states. Here attention is given largely to phenomenal consciousness as it arises in vision. The relevant neuroscience concerns not only neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data, but also computational models of neural networks. The neurophilosophical theories that bring such data to bear on the core philosophical issues of phenomenal conscious construe consciousness largely in terms of representations in neural networks associated with certain processes of attention and memory.

I propose and defend the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Theory of Consciousness. Mental processes form a hierarchy of mental representations with maximally egocentric (self-centered) representations at the bottom and maximally allocentric (other-centered) representations at the top. Phenomenally conscious states are states that are relatively intermediate in this hierarchy. More specifically, conscious states are hybrid states that involve the reciprocal interaction between relatively allocentric and relatively egocentric representations. Thus a conscious state is composed of a pair of representations interacting at the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface. What a person is conscious of is determined by what the contributing allocentric and egocentric representations are representations of. The phenomenal character of conscious states is identical to the representational content of the reciprocally interacting egocentric and allocentric representations.

A combination of neuroscience and philosophy may raise the eyebrows of more than a few neuroscientists and philosophers, not to mention the lay reader. But upon a bit of reflection, the connection becomes quite clear. Philosophers have long been concerned to think about thinking, and the mind in general. Among their concerns is the question of the relation of mental phenomena to physical reality. Is the human soul the sort of thing that can survive the destruction of the body? In a world of causes and effects, what room can there be for free will? Such questions are the natural province of philosophers, but are not theirs alone. Recent centuries have witnessed an explosion of scientific approaches to the topic of the mind, among them cognitive neuroscience. In addition to addressing the many versions of the age-old question of the relation of mind to brain, the cognitive neurosciences raise many novel questions of interest to philosophers. In this chapter we provide a historical sketch of developments in philosophy and neuroscience that eventuated in their contemporary interaction. This chapter also provides broad backgrounds on two major areas in contemporary philosophy that are especially pertinent to neurophilosophical investigation: the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind.