Philosophy of Mind

03 Oct 1994 12:02

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The academic discpline formerly known as philosophical psychology. Not quite the same thing as cognitive science, or neuroscience, or even artificial intelligence; unless the philosopher of mind decides that it is, and polemicizes accordingly.

See also: Connectionism; Dynamics and Cognition; Neutral Monism

Recommended:
• David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind [Revision of his doctoral thesis, which is online someplace]
• Daniel Dennett, especially Consciousness Explained
• Clark Glymour
  • "Silicon Reflections", phil-sci/141
  • "A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste", Philosophy of Science 66 (1999): 455--471 [An entertaining, and pretty strong, attack on large swathes of contemporary philosophy of mind, by way of a review of Kim's Mind in a Physical World. Concludes: "whether the mechanisms underlying conscious mental states are separable from the mechanisms of purposive action is what matters to our conception of ourselves, and that is an empirical, not a metaphysical, question." PDF reprint]
  • "When Is a Brain Like the Planet?", Philosophy of Science 74 (2007): 330--347
• Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • Complexity and the Function of the Mind in Nature
  • "Enviromental Complexity and the Evolution of Cognition" [Summary of Complexity and the Function of the Mind; PDF]
• Carsten Griesel, "The Type-Token Distinction and the Mind and Brain Sciences", phil-sci/3860
• David Hume
• William James, Principles of Psychology [Online]
• Pete Mandik and Andy Clark, "Selective Representing and World-Making,", Minds and Machines 12 (2002): 383--395 [PDF. I've commented on this paper in my blog.]
• Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories [To be honest, I'm not quite finished with it yet, but unless it takes a drastic turn for the worse in the last few chapters, this is excellent]
• Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy
• Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [While thoroughly wrong-headed in opposing non-behavioristic psychology and mechanistic accounts of the mind, it's at the very least useful to think against, and quite well-written.]

To read:
• Phil Agre, Computation and Human Experience
• Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens
• Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie, "Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness", Synthese 159 (2007): 475--491
• Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction
• Radu J. Bogdan
  • Interprreting Minds
  • Minding Minds: Evolving a Reflexive Mind by Interpreting Others
• Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind ["Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. ... [A]rgues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in this ... examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue."]
• Sue Campbell, Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings
• Peter Carruthers, The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought
• William J. Clancey, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations
• Andy Clark, Being There
• Murray Clarke, Reconstructing Reason and Representation
• Rodney Cotterill, Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers
• Carl F. Craver, Explaining the Brain
• Stanislas Dehaene (ed.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind
• Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience
• Carrie Figdor, "Neuroscience and the Multiple Realization of Cognitive Functions", Philosophy of Science 77 (2010): 419--456
• David H. Finkelstein, Expression and the Inner
• Owen Flanagan
  • Self-Expressions
  • The Problem of the Soul
• Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • "Model-Based Science and the Representational Theory of Mind" [PDF]
  • Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [Presumably elaborating on his On Being an Octopus]
• Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading
• George Graham, Disordered Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness
• Steven Harnad, "The Symbol Grounding Problem", cs/9906002
• Jakob Hohwy, The Predictive Mind
• Ray Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind
• Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages
• Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umiltà, Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science [Favorable review in Science]
• Keith Lehrer, Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy [Precis in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (1999): 1039--1041]
• Tiago V. Maia and Axel Cleeremans, "Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 397--404 ["Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective attention, working memory and cognitive control involve competition between widely distributed representations. This competition is biased by top-down projections (notably from prefrontal cortex), which can selectively enhance some representations over others. This view has now been implemented in several connectionist models. In this review, we emphasize the relevance of these models to understanding consciousness. Interestingly, the models we review have striking similarities to others directly aimed at implementing 'global workspace theory'. All of these models embody a fundamental principle that has been used in many connectionist models over the past twenty years: global constraint satisfaction."]
• Drew V. McDermott, Mind and Mechanism
• Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
• Marcin Milkowski, Explaining The Computational Mind
• Ruth Garrett Millikan
  • A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More Mama, more milk, and more mouse
  • Varieties of Meaning
  • White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice
• Albert Newen, Andreas Bartels, and Eva-Maria Jung (eds.), Knowledge and Representation
• Thomas W. Polger, Natural Minds
• Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science
• William J. Rapaport, "How Hellen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room", Minds and Machines 16 (2006): 381--436
• Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will
• Matthias Scheutz, "When Physical Systems Realize Functions...", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 161--196 ["I argue that standard notions of computation together with a 'state-to-state correspondence view of implementation' cannot overcome difficulties posed by Putnam's Realization Theorem and that, therefore, a different approach to implementation is required. The notion 'realization of a function', developed out of physical theories, is then introduced as a replacement for the notional pair, 'computation-implementation'. After gradual refinement, taking practical constraints into account, this notion gives rise to the notion 'digital system' which singles out physical systems that could be actually used, and possibly even built."]
• Susan Schneider, The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction
• Sydney Shoemaker, Physical Realization
• David Shulman, More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India
• Kim Sterelny
  • The Representational Theory of Mind: An Introduction
  • Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition
• Patrick Suppes, "Voluntary Motion, Biological Computation, and Free Will", in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling and H. K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, Philosophical Naturalism (Univiersity of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 452--467
• Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind
• Joshua T. Vogelstein, R. Jacob Vogelstein, Carey E. Priebe, "Are mental properties supervenient on brain properties?", arxiv:0912.1672 [The philosophy here seems deeply confused to me, since "supervenes on" just means "is a function of"]
• Bruce N. Waller, Against Moral Responsibility
• Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition