Larry > Recent Status Updates

So far the paper on fragmented mind was crap and Rakoczy’s paper on implicit ToM was brutal and very useful. Looking forward

Absolute page turner. The schéma are so clear a donkey would understand how ion channels and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors work

Underwhelming so far. Outdated perhaps

So people who are like us are intentionally describable and those who are not, are not, and that’s it

The first two chapters deal with a priori and a posteriori cases for rationality: in the a priori case, intentional ascription rests on rationality assumptions, but then there is no independence that people are rational. In the a posteriori case, rational beliefs are naturally selected, but there is no evidence for that.

Finally everything makes sense

The computational level is in the same relation to the physical level as the syntactic to the semantic, and there is no correlation between the computational and semantic levels of content in the sense that semantic characterizations of content can be explanatory independently of their computational implementations (eg sameness of semantic content does not guarantee sameness of computational state)

Predictive processing as wide computationalism

It’s so good my mind is hanging on to its seat

OR’s theory is that experience, qualia, are not generated by the brain, but constituted by interaction in the world. While it looks like it’s “interaction” that’s doing the explanatory work here, I have the feeling it’s “constituted”: and so why can’t we say that experience is “constituted” by brain states? Well, because brain states don’t “generate” experience the way the world does.

Facial vision in blind people: experienced pressure on the face when approaching obstacles functions as human echolocation

The problem with colors: colors are not wavelengths, because of color constancy and chromatic induction. They are not reflectance either, because the dimensionality of photoreceptors and that of colors changes with the species, and there is nothing in reflectance (?) to reflect the difference between primary and secondary colors.

Incipient epileptic seizures can be stopped by having the patient focus on a math problem

Even though it’s impossible to have a red phenomenal experience, but be aware of it as of green. Yet if the can’t be any mismatch, then the self-representational content is empty!

Self-representationalism is a 2-level theory of content: an experience of something red (t) represents that it is reddish, so t involves focal awareness of something red, and peripheral awareness of a reddish experience. Tye contends that it’s not ruled out that there be a mismatch between the phenomenal content of the experience, and the self-representational content