Kouider et al have recently reported that infants’ cortical activity (when viewing faces) is isomorphic to that of adults who consciously perceive faces. They take their data to suggest that conscious perception develops between 5 months of age and 12-15 months of age. After reading their paper, I wonder whether we should take the data to be indicating something else.

In what follows, I will explain my understanding of the experiment and its results. Then I will point out some strange features of their data. Finally, I will argue that what they have found is not a neural marker of conscious perception, but a marker of unconscious perception.

Read more »

One of my ongoing projects is a natural account of what goes on (cognitively, neurally, psychologically) when philosophers do philosophy. Though no one does research on this precise topic—something I hope to change in the future—some studies provide hints about philosophical cognition. I take these studies to serve as starting points for the kind of research I wish to conduct. Below I will outline a couple of these “starting point” studies. For links to the papers I reference, see the works cited at the bottom.

Anthony Jack & colleagues

Anthony Jack and Philip Robbins have published some research on human judgment of mentality in other creatures.  Their work studies these judgments on the behavioral level and the functional level. I will begin with this functional stuff. In this case, there are two distinct functional networks of interest: the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Task Positive Network (TPN).

Read more »

You may have noticed a trend in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Every few years there are papers published with titles like “The Cognitive Science of ______: A New Research Program.” This is my cartoon-esque take on how it happens: researchers want to study cognition that is particularly interesting from the lens of cultural anthropology (e.g. political orientation), an awesomely generous benefactor (e.g. Templeton) agrees to fund the project, and research commences. After a few papers have been published and awareness of the research grows, then the program is ready to emerge.

A splendid example of this is what is being called “the Cognitive Science of Religion” (CSR for short). Its forerunner was “Psychology of Religion” and is quickly being accompanied by “Neuroscience of Religion.” Rather than fight this trend, I have embraced it—with due criticism…I hope. I have spent the past year or so trying to promote the study of philosophical cognition. The idea is to see what psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience can tell us about philosophy. That way, if there is a neuro-cognitive narrative behind our philosophical judgments and intuitions, then we can learn about it—kind of like experimental philosophy, but aimed at much more than undergraduates’ self-reported judgments about trolley problems.

In the next post, I will outline what cognitive science of philosophy (CSP) could look like. After I present the program and rationale, I will mention a couple of experiments that have paved the way. If I am really dedicated, I will even have something to say about “where we should go from here.”

That being said…if in a few years you start seeing papers entitled “The Cognitive Science of Philosophy: …,” then you might know who to blame.

Recovered post: from a year ago? two? more?

Here I will attempt to articulate, as briefly and as precisely as possible, some of my commitments concerning personal identity. These could very well be similar to other views, and will probably arrive at some of the same conclusions as other views. Still, I think it might be worth writing them down and receiving your feedback.

How is personal identity different than identity in general? Personal identity is unique because a person is an abstract object. When philosophers talk about persons, they are not talking about entities that can be described with only empirical facts. That is not to say that persons do not instantiate any observable features, however. For instance we could say the following about a person: Read more »

Leben’s Abstract

This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (ii) can be explained by a psychological mechanism that is (iii) unreliable for the task of believing p; and (iv) any other evidence for belief p is based on rationalization. I will also consider and defend two equally valid arguments for establishing unreliability: Read more »

I have ventured into areas of philosophy that I find to be massively complicated (in virtue of their contingency upon lots of unsettled empirical questions): ethics and political philosophy. As a result, I thought I would reach out to the wiser.

I have finally read some of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice [PDF]. While I am sympathetic to most of it (and perhaps naively so), I am curious about Rawls’s theory would apply to not just a single society, but a plurality of societies (like the plurality of nations on our planet). I have surveyed the first 3 chapters, paying special attention to section 58 (where he deals, briefly, with this very question). I have also skimmed Leif Wenar’s “Why Rawls is Not a Cosmopolitan Egalitarian” [PDF] (2006).

The trouble I am having is the following. It seems that Rawls allows for redistribution within societies, but not between societies—that is, per his principle of self-determination in section 58. Read more »

I will be at the University of Utah presenting a paper at the Intermountain Philosophy Conference tomorrow entitled “Neurobiological Correlates of Philosophical Belief & Judgment: What This Means for Philosophy.” An abstract is below. The conference website is here.

It is becoming increasingly common to find journals publishing articles that demonstrate psychological correlates (e.g. Adelstein, Deyong, Arvan) and biological correlates (e.g. Harris, Hsu, Stern) of various self-reported beliefs and judgments. It is perhaps most common to find articles reporting the correlates of political beliefs and judgments (e.g. Amodio, Arvan, Hatemi, Kanai, Tost). This paper sets out to show that other types of belief are also worthy of study—for example, self-reported philosophical beliefs. Read more »

Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, tells about his recent “near death experience” at The Daily Beast. Below are some excerpts from his article. Below that are some comments.

“…what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.”

“the universe [that is] defined by unity…is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

Read more »

Many people claim that voting for someone else is a waste of a vote. Here’s why that is myopic and false.

Consider the two-party system. Ask yourself, “Is this the best system for nominating the greatest quantity of competent and viable candidates?” Obviously not. In fact the only system that can produce fewer viable candidates is a dictatorship—and you know how we feel about dictatorships in the West! So any other (democratic) election system would be better than the one we’ve got.

Read more »

 “…we think that the world would be improved if we could substitute for the best works of representative art real objects equally beautiful.” _GE Moore, Principia Ethica (§117,¶ 2)

This statement seems false. Allow an explanation:

Imagine the statue of David. If you have seen the statue in person, try to remember what it was like to behold it. Now ask yourself, “Would this be more or less beautiful if it were an actual man standing on the pedestal?”

Read more »

Philosophers, and perhaps others, will be familiar with the naturalistic fallacy. It is committed when someone tries to say that something can be good or right in virtue of its being natural. In this post, I wish to suggest that if the naturalistic fallacy is indeed a fallacy, then philosophers might commit it when they appeal to the intuitiveness, conceivability, or the “seeming” truth (Huemer 2001) of a proposition.

To begin, I ask you to imagine that your brain and my brain are radically different from one another. If this were the case, then it would be unsurprising if our intuitions, (mental) conceptions, and judgments about what ‘seems’ true (or possible) would vary. Indeed, evidence suggests that even minor differences (or developments) between brains can have these effects (Adelstein et al, Amodio et al, Costa et al, De Drue et al, DeYoung et al, Harris et al, and Kanai et al).

This implies that our appeals to intuition (etc.) might be contingent upon brains being a certain way. In other words, our intuitions could be a ‘natural’ consequence of neural properties. If they are, then when philosophers appeal to them in order to convince their audience that a proposition is better or worse (more or less true, or more or less probable, etc.) they commit the naturalistic fallacy. After all, getting buy-in from these appeals could depend on an audiences’ intuitions (etc)—and certain natural properties—being a certain way.

Read more »

The past few decades have been spent trying to make sense of Libet’s Studies and their ilk. Even though the experiments were conducted decades ago, scientists and philosophers (and philosophers of science) still disagree. I suppose that is not surprising since free will is a concept that is tough to translate into a measurable outcome and one that we have strong feelings about. So it’s not just that the data are difficult to interpret, it’s that the debate is monumental.

Read more »

David Benatar’s chapter “Why Coming Into Existence is Always a Harm” from his book Better Never To Have Been (2006) is delightfully clever in the way that it challenges our intuitions and seemingly escapes objection. However, after examining the structure of his argument—with the help of others—I have realized that his argument relies on an alleged qualitative commensurability between existence and non-existence. So in order for Benatar’s arguments to hold, it must be the case that non-existent states of affairs can be better off or worse off than existing states of affairs. In what follows, I will outline why we do not find qualitative comparisons between existence and non-existence satisfactory. But before I do that, I will need to say a bit about Benatar’s argument.

Read more »

Welcome to the 142nd instantiation of The Philosophers’ Carnival.* The posts are below. In parentheses are the categories into which each post might fit and below is an excerpt. Special thanks to Jared Smith over at Philosophy & Polity who resurrected this edition after it was tragically erased from my server!

Read more »

This link is a poster I presented in Tuscon at the Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference (April 2012). Use the link to see a full size PDF that will allow you to zoom ad nauseum without the usual blurriness—vector graphics are so cool!

Summary: we should not be surprised if some of the philosophical differences between philosophers correlate with neurobiological and cognitive differences between philosophers. Whether or not this discounts philosophy or not is an open question, but it sure would be an interesting research program either way!

I’d like to get some feedback on an argument. It will go something like this.

1. Our intuitions and our ability  (or inability) to imagine are contingent upon cognitive capacities.
2. Our cognitive capacities are contingent upon our material composition.
3. Our intuitions and ability (or inability) to imagine is contingent upon our material composition (1,2 HS). Read more »