Mental Representation

Many philosophers think that human animals are the only normative creatures. In this paper, I will not provide reasons against such a claim, but I will engage in a related task: delineating and comparing two deflationary accounts of what non-human animal normativity could consist in. One of them is based on Hannah Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity and the other on my conjecture that some creatures may have first-order robust “ought-thoughts”, composed by secondary representations about how things should be or about how one should act. Once I have sketched both models, I will focus on identifying some cognitive differences between creatures merely having primitive normativity and those also having robust ought-thoughts. Finally, I will draw a few tentative remarks on the kind of empirical evidence that would suggest that an animal has one or another of these two kinds of normativity.

In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the unpleasantness determinable. According to this theory unpleasant pains feel bad, and this explains why we are motivated and justified in avoiding them. This explains, for example, why we are motivated and justified to take painkillers. This theory allows us to account for the heterogeneity of unpleasantness, i.e., we can explain how different unpleasant experiences feel unpleasant even if they feel so different.

The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, where I analyse two reductive accounts of unpleasantness: the content theories and the desire theories. I deal with the second theme in the third and fourth chapter, where I analyse different theories that try to account for the phenomenal property of unpleasantness. In the fifth and sixth chapter, I focus on the third theme, where I consider different cases that suggest the existence of pains that are not unpleasant. In the final chapter, I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain.

Bilinen canlılığın 3.8 milyar Dünya yılı evvel başladığını tahmin ediyoruz. Kategorilendirdiğimiz milyonlarca canlı türü var. Hepsi bu gezegen üzerinde yaşıyor. 1957’ye kadar da Dünya dışında hiçbir canlı gözlenmemişti. Dünya dışında gördüğümüz ilk canlının ismi Layka. Bir köpek. Bir uydu içinde Dünya’dan yörüngeye fırlatılmıştı. Dünya dışında gördüğümüz ilk “üstün zekalı yaşam formu” yine insan. Bizden biri. İsmi Yuri Gagarin. Bir kozmonot. O da Dünya’dan fırlatıldı. Dünya dışında başka bir gök cismi üzerinde gözlenen ilk canlı yine bir insandı. Dünya’nın uydusu olan Ay’da görüldü. İsmi Neil Armstrong. Ondan sonra on iki canlı daha gözlendi Ay yüzeyinde. Hepsi yine özel araçlar içinde, Dünya’dan Ay’a fırlatılmış insanlardı. Dünya dışında gözlenen canlıların hepsi Dünyalı ve Dünya’nın uzağında sadece belirli bir süre yaşayabiliyorlar. Şanslı olanlar Dünya’ya geri dönüyor. Layka şanssızdı mesela. Dünya’dan uzaklaşabilen bu Dünyalılar dışında, evrenin herhangi bir köşesinde Dünyalı olmayan bir tek-hücreli bile göremedik hala.

In “Steps toward Origins of Propositional Thought”, Burge claims that animals of different species are capable of making deductive inferences. According to Burge, that is why propositional thought is extended beyond the human mind to the minds of other kinds of creatures. But, as I argue here, the inferential capacities of animals do not guarantee a propositional structure. According to my argument, propositional content has predicates that might involve a quantificational structure. And the absence of this structure in animal thought might explain some of the differences with the propositional content of human thought.

This presentation is about an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety. It is a continuation of other works (2011, 2014).
Aim: Present a scenario describing an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness that introduces a human specific anxiety which is active in our human lives.
Method: The scenario starts with our pre-human ancestors which were capable to manage representations and to partly identify with their conspecifics (Olds 2006, DeWaal 2008). These identifications brought our ancestors to merge the representations of their conspecifics with the limited auto-representation of their own entity. The result was an auto-representation becoming about an entity existing in environment. This process is proposed as having progressively generated an ancestral form of self-consciousness as object and as subject. These identifications took place also with suffering conspecifics and have imposed to our ancestors a huge anxiety increase that had to be limited. Tools developed for that limitation (caring, collaboration, empathy, ToM, ...) have linked consciousness to anxiety management while also procuring evolutionary benefits. Human minds now contain an unconscious part of that ancestral anxiety that guides many of our mental states.
Result: An evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness is made available as linked to a specific anxiety management that characterizes human minds. Continuations are introduced, some related to mental health.
Conclusion: The proposed evolutionary scenario presents self-consciousness and a specific human anxiety as sharing a same evolutionary nature. This new source of anxiety needs more investigations.

In "Real Patterns" Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett's analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported by empirical evidence. No description can do justice to the richness and specificity or "noisiness" of what someone believes, and the same belief can be described by different sentences or propositions (which is illustrated by Dennett's analogy, some Gettier cases, and Frege's puzzle), but in some contexts some of these competing descriptions are misleading or even false. Faithful (or truthful) description must be guided by a principle (or principles) related to the principle of charity: belief descriptions should not attribute irrationality to the believer or have other kinds of "deviant" implications.

Self-Consciousness Theoretical Background: Philosophy of the Mental

1. Initial theoretical situation. The analytical philosophy of self-consciousness has not been adequately included within the mainstream of the philosophy of mind since the 1960s. This longstanding neglect is surprising, because the era of classical analytical theories of self-consciousness covers the period from 1966 to 1991 and has taken effect continually. These dates mark the publication of Hector-Neri Castañeda's "'He': A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness" and the year of its author's death. One of the main subjects was the de se constraint/emphatic self-reference/essential indexicals (see, for example, Hector-Neri Castañeda, Roderick M. Chisholm, David Lewis, and, on essential indexicals, John Perry); one should also mention Sydney Shoemaker, with his critiques on the inward glance (inner sense) account. But on the other hand, such a state of affairs is not surprising because the philosophy of mind was dominated by naturalism and materialism. With the analysis of the de se constraint since the second part of the 1970s, the theory of self-consciousness has been restacked by the property theory into a critique of the propositional theory. The overall problem is that self-consciousness is pre-reflective and non-relational (irreflective), as well as non-objective (Aron Gurwitsch: anonymous field); no I is an inhabitant of this domain. The problem reference takes effect in parts of the philosophy of consciousness till the present day. We need an ontology of non-objective consciousness and subjectivity in the philosophy of the mental.

Jakob von Uexküll is mostly known for his concept of Umwelt-the meaningful surrounding of animals. von Uexküll insisted vehemently on the fact that Umwelt vindicated Kant's subjectivist epistemology in the biological domain. However, we argue that a crucial yet widely overlooked development in von Uexküll's theory of meaning implies a more radical vision strikingly germane to J. J. Gibson's own direct realist epistemology-ontology and in tension with his own subjectivist concept of Umwelt. Gibson argued that organism and environment are complementary and meaning is not constructed via a subjective act but is directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances. We show that von Uexküll's notion of "functional tone" is similar to Gibson's concept of affordance in that it includes action in perception. More important, von Uexküll introduces the musical metaphor of harmony to characterize the relationship between animal and environment. Like Gibson's reciprocity , harmony implies an unmediated isomorphism between the dispositions of the animal and those of the environment that allows for direct perceptual contact with the world and action upon it.

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real-world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state-of-the-art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets.

(Forthcoming) The idea that cognition makes use of one or more "languages of thought" remains central to much cognitive-scientific and philosophical theorizing. And yet, virtually no attention has been paid to the question of how a language of thought might evolve in the first place. In this article, I take some steps towards addressing this issue. With the aid of the so-called Sender-Receiver framework, I elucidate a family of distinctions and processes which enable us to see how languages of thought might evolve via a series of small, incremental changes. While much work doubtlessly remains to be done in this area, I hope to at least show that there need be nothing mysterious about the existence of languages of thought on evolutionary grounds.

The searing pain in my pinky is much more intense than the gnawing pain in my thumb. But the latter feels worse I’d much rather it stop. On a representationalist theory of the mind, pains are nothing more than representations of body damage. Any difference in how they feel is a difference in what they represent. But what could the differences in character, intensity, and badness be representing? Work on their general theory seems to keep most representationalists too busy to go into this sort of detail for pain. Fortunately, I’m not a representationalist. But I would like to help. In this paper I explore what representationalists could, and perhaps should, say about what these aspects of pain represent.

[MOTHBALLED
This was an attempt to work through the specific details of pain’s alleged representational content in service of trying to better understand views like Tye’s. I gave versions of it at a couple of talks, but couldn’t figure out how to make it into a useful paper. Then (to my mind) more plausible representationalist accounts like Colin Klein’s came along and I lost interest in this project. ]

Affordances offer AI research an alternative from representations for linking perception to action in autonomous systems. Affordances are based in the informational structure of the environment and the somatic capacities of the agent and arise in their interaction. AI implementations of affordance perception typically utilize relatively basic, natural affordances such as the graspability of a handle. Culturally-scaffolded affordances, such as the letter-mailing capacity of a postbox, pose a more intractable problem for affordance-based robotics. This class of affordances requires acculturation and is highly culture-specific. AI implementations of affordance perception typically bypass this difficulty by making recourse to representations. I begin by reviewing affordance perception and the difference between natural and cultural affordances. I then critically discuss implementations of cultural affordance perception in autonomous agents. Finally, I argue that AI affordance perception does not require a robust representationalism in order to implement cultural affordances.

Die Applikation von Maschinen transformiert unsere Welt, setzt aber zugleich eine bestimmte Wahrnehmung dieser Welt voraus. Maschinen sind somit zu einem exemplarischen Modell kultureller Weltkonstruktion geworden, sowohl in der Bewältigung der Vergangenheit wie in der Bändigung der Zukunft, und damit zum Gegenstand einer Semiotik kultureller Repräsentationen.
»Transhumane sind die erste Manifestation einer neuen Art evolutionärer Wesen«, so der amerikanische Futurist FM-2030 (1989, 23f). Transhumanisten beschwören in immer größer werdender Zahl das Zeitalter von der Fusion Mensch-Maschine. Neben der biotechnologischen Manipulation des Genoms sind es zunehmend Neurotechnologien, mit denen der Mensch sein eigenes Selbst modifiziert. Mit dem therapeutischen Erfolg dieser Technologien stehen uns bisher kaum vorstellbare neurotechnologische Umbaumaßnahmen von Körper und Geist bevor, die auf die absolute »Optimierung« des Menschen angelegt sind. Welche Auswirkungen hat der Homo Roboticus auf unser Selbstverständnis?
Formen der Selbstinstrumentalisierung, der Selbstverdinglichung und der Selbstcyborgisierung werden exemplarisch anhand Kubricks Space Odyssey und kaleidoskopisch durch die (Philosophie-)Geschichte hindurch beleuchtet.

este artículo, "¿Qué es un diccionario de datos y por qué quisiera construir uno?" un diccionario de datos fue descrito y comparado a otras alternativas para documentar, auditar y versionar una base de datos. Este artículo también describió la diferencia entre un diccionario de datos "Tonto" y uno "Inteligente"..." Recordemos: Diccionario "tonto" vs Diccionario Inteligente El diccionario de Datos puede ser usado después para varias cosas, como consultar para ver el historial completo de cambios de objetos, o crear exportaciones agregadas mostrando estadísticas de cambios en la base de datos, que serán cubiertas en un artículo separado.

Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content just is to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication.

(Forthcoming) Modeling work by Brian Skyrms and others in recent years has transformed the theoretical role of David Lewis's 1969 model of signaling. The latter can now be understood as a minimal model of communication in all its forms. In this article, we explain how the Lewis model has been generalized, and consider how it and its variants contribute to ongoing debates in several areas. Specifically, we consider connections between the models and four topics: the role of common interest in communication, signaling within the organism, meaning, and the evolution of human communication and language. The orientation to communication and representation created by these models, what we call "the sender-receiver framework," treats coordination between behaviors of sign production and interpretation as the core phenomenon of communication. In some cases, that coordination will be the product of intentional foresight and agency, while in others it will be due to simpler selective processes operating over phylogenetic, ontogenetic, or cultural timescales. The unifying character of this framework also depends on its recognizing both clear and partial cases of sender-receiver systems, where this is understood in terms of how closely a real-world system matches the entities and relations treated by the models.