Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings pot

[...]... soul or mind—the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness My point of view had lagged somewhat behind, but I had already noted the indirect bearing of point of view on personal location I could not see how a physicalist philosopher could quarrel with this except by taking the dire and counter-intuitive route of banishing all talk of persons Yet the notion of personhood was so well entrenched... the causal efficacy of neural events, but because they believe that behavior offers a higher and more appropriate level of analysis The radical behaviorist movement pressed for nothing less than redefining the scientific study of mind as the scientific study of behavior And for many years, they succeeded in changing the agenda of psychology The behaviorist movement began with the writings of psychologist... central to the enterprise of cognitive science because the validity of such arguments rests on the answer Formulating adequate criteria for consciousness is one of the thorniest problems in all of science How could one possibly decide? Asking how to discriminate conscious from nonconscious beings brings us face to face with another classic topic in the philosophy of mind: the problem of other minds The issue... given time a person has a point of view, and the location of the point of view (which is determined internally by the content of the point of view) is also the location of the person Such a proposition is not without its perplexities, but to me it seemed a step in the right direction The only trouble was that it seemed to place one in a heads-I-win/tails-you-lose situation of unlikely infallibility as... Scientists would then speak exclusively of the characteristic pattern of neural firings in the appropriate nuclei of the lateral hypothalamus and leave all talk about ‘‘being hungry’’ or ‘‘the desire to eat’’ to historians of science who study archaic and discredited curiosities of yesteryear Even the general public would eventually come to think and talk in terms of these neuroscientific explanations for... spiking frequency of about 40 times per second If something like one of these assertions were true— and, remember, we are just making up stories here—could we then define consciousness objectively in terms of that form of neural activity? If we could, would this definition then replace the subjective definition in terms of experience? And would such a biological definition then constitute a theory of consciousness?... experiences are occurring that fail to take place when they are not Our hypothetical examples in terms of a specific cortical location, a particular neurotransmitter, or a particular rate of firing are good examples The common feature of these hypotheses is that they are merely correlational: They only claim that the designated feature of brain activity is associated with consciousness; they don’t explain... analysis is almost bound to break down An adequate causal theory of consciousness might have a fighting chance, however, because the structure of the theory itself could provide the lines along which generalization would flow Consider the analogy to a causal theory of life based on the structure of DNA The analysis of how the double helical structure of DNA allows it to reproduce itself in an entirely mechanistic... connections of M and L cones to other cells of the visual system are not completely symmetrical, they can be differentiated by these connections independently of their pigments Second, they may be differentiable by their relation to the genetic codes that produced them References Armstrong, D M (1968) A materialist theory of the mind London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Baars, B (1988) A cognitive theory of consciousness... similar to each other in terms of their essential biological constituents We are all made of the same kind of flesh, blood, bone, and so forth, and we have roughly the same kinds of sensory organs Many other animals also appear to be made of similar stuff, although they are morphologically different to varying degrees Such similarities and differences may enter into our judgments of the likelihood that other . emphasize the trees at the expense of the forest. Therefore, the goal of this anthology is to combine the best of both kinds of readings. By compiling an anthology. on cognitive psychology or cognitive science at the uni- Preface xv versity level. The order of the readings could certainly be varied without loss of coherence,