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Detailed Reading List Neuroscience and the Mind Dr. Ellen Fridland 2013/2014 I. Mental Disorders and the Mind Primary Objectives: • Gain an understanding of how mental disorders contribute to and challenge various theories of mind • Develop an understanding of how dissociations in perception impact theories of epistemology • Learn to evaluate what kinds of empirical evidence counts in favor of or against various theories of language, meaning, and comprehension. • Consider the relationship between memory and personal identity • Gain an understanding of how disorders of agency and ownership challenge pre-­‐theoretical notions of the self • Become familiar with how autism and mirror neurons inform competing accounts of our access to and knowledge of other minds September 30, 2013 Week 1. Perceptual Disorders • Sacks, “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” • Sacks and Wasserman, “The Colorblind Painter” • Sacks, “Eyes Right!” Further Reading: Locke, Selections from The Essay Goodale & Milner, “Separate visual pathways for perception and action.” Byrne & Hilbert, “Color Realism and Color Science” Treisman, “The binding problem” Dennett, “The dissolution of the binding problem”/youtube video October 7, 2013 Week 2. Language and Meaning • Sacks, “The President’s Speech” • Grice, “Logic and Conversation” Further Reading: Neale, “Paul Grice’s Philosophy of Language” Glenberg & Kaschak, “Grounding Language in Action” Schneider. “Language of Thought” (For the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology) Fodor, Selections from LOT revisited Fodor, “Why there still has to be a language of thought.” Fodor, “Propositional Attitudes” October 14, 2013 Week 3. Memory Loss and Personal Identity • Sacks, “The Lost Mariner” • Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Book 2: Chapter 27 Further Reading: Reid, “Memory” from The Intellectual Powers of Man. Hume, “Of Personal Identity”, Selection from Book I, Part 4, Section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature. Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity” October 21, 2013 Week 4. Disorders of Ownership/Agency • Sacks, “The man who fell out of bed” • Campbell, “Schizophrenia, The Space of Reasons, and Thinking as a Motor Process” Further Reading: Botvinick & Cohen, “Rubber hand ‘feel’ touch that eye sees.” Zahavi, “Schizophrenia and Self-­‐Awareness” Wittgenstein, Selection from The Blue and Brown Books Shoemaker, "Self-­‐Reference and Self-­‐Awareness." October 28, 2013 Week 5. Autism, Theory of Mind, and Meta-­‐representation • Frith&Happe, “Theory of Mind and Self Consciousness: what is it like to be autistic?” Further Reading: Goldman, “Interpretation Psychologized” Gopnik, & Wellman, “Why the child's theory of mind really is a theory.” Stitch & Nichols, “Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?” Gallese & Goldman, “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of Mindreading.” Jacob, “What Do Mirror Neurons Contribute to Human Social Cognition?” Spaulding, “Mirror neurons are not evidence for the simulation theory.” Mead, From Mind Self and Society, Section 20 “Play, the Game and the Generalized Other.” First Formative Essay Due: November 8, 2013 II. Free Will, Responsibility, and Neuroscience Primary Objectives: • Develop an understanding of various philosophical theories of freedom: incompatibilism and compatibilism • Arrive at understanding of the challenges associated with each theory • Develop a grasp of the neuroscientific evidence which is supposed to challenge the existence of free will • Become versed in various philosophical responses to the challenges to free will posed by neuroscience • Develop a grasp of the implicit bias literature and related considerations concerning our responsibility over our unconscious attitudes, judgments and biases November 11, 2013 Week 6. Philosophical Theories of Freedom: Incompatibilism • Nagel, “Free Will” from What Does it All Mean? • Van Inwagen “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism” Further Reading: Holbach, The Illusion of Free Will Bishop, Determinism and Indeterminism” Kane, “Responsibility, Luck, and Chance” Pereboom, “Why we have no free will and can live without it” November 18, 2013 Week 7. Philosophical Theories of Freedom: Compatibilism • Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility: A Theory of Moral Responsibility” Further Reading: Hume, “Of Liberty and Necessity” Ayer “Freedom and Necessity” Austen, “Ifs and Cans” Dennett, Selections from Elbow Room Harris, Selections from “The Illusion of Will” November 25, 2013 Week 8. Neuroscience and Free Will •
Libet et al.,“Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (readiness-­‐potential). The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act” Further Reading: Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain” Fried, Mukamel, Kreiman, Internally generated preactivation of single neurons inhuman medial frontal cortex predicts volition. Haggard and Libet, “Conscious Intention and Brain Activity” Greene and Cohen, “For the Law, Neuroscience changes nothing and everything” December 2, 2013 Week 9. Philosophical Responses • Dennett, “Free Will, Responsibility, and the Brain” (video) http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/video-­‐dan-­‐dennett-­‐“free-­‐will-­‐
responsibility-­‐and-­‐the-­‐brain”-­‐the-­‐project-­‐on-­‐law-­‐and-­‐mind-­‐sciences/ • Levy, “Libet’s Impossible Demand” Further Reading: Dennett, Selections from Consciousness Explained, Elbow Room & Freedom Evolves Dennett, various reviews: Wegner, Raine, Waller Rosenthal, “The Timing of Conscious States” Roskies, “Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility” Mele, “Free Will: Action theory meets Neuroscience” Nehmais, “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” Smith, “Taking Aim at Free Will” December 9, 2013 Week 10. Implicit Bias and Responsibility • https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/ • Kelly, D. & Roedder, E.,“Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias” Further Reading: Amodio, “The social neuroscience of intergroup relations.” Holroyd, “Responsibility for Bias” Saul, “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat and Women in Philosophy” Gendler, “On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Racism” Gendler, “Alief and Belief” Schwitzgebel, “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs or The Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief” ** First Summative Essay Due: December 20, 2013 III. The Mind-­‐Body Problem Primary Objectives: • Come to understand the primary challenges posed by the mind-­‐body problem • Acquire an appreciation of the arguments for and against some of the most influential accounts of the relationship between the mind and the body: dualism, identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism • Develop the capacity to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of these various approaches to the mind January 13, 2014 Week 11. Dualism • Descartes, Meditations 1&2 • Descartes, Selections from the Principles of Philosophy Further Reading: Strawson, “Self, Mind and Body” Ryle, Selections from Concept of Mind January 20, 2014 Week 12. Identity Theory • Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes” Further Reading: Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” Kripke: Selection from Naming and Necessity Papineau, “Kripke's Proof That We Are All Intuitive Dualists.” January 27, 2014 Week 13. Functionalism • Putnam, “The Nature of Mental States” Further Reading: Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Lewis, "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications," selection
Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” Dennett, “Broad Functionalism and Minimalism” Block, “Troubles with Functionalism” Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” Churchland & Churchland, “Could a Machine Think?” February 3, 2013 Week 14. Eliminative Materialism • Rey, “A Question About Consciousness.” Further Reading: Churchland & Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes” Feyerabend, “Mental Events and the Brain” Rorty “Mind-­‐Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories”
Lycan and Pappas, “What Is Eliminative Materialism?” Dennett, “Quining Qualia” IV. Consciousness Primary Objectives: •
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Gain an understanding of the philosophical problems raised by phenomenal consciousness and the search for its neural correlates Appreciate the force of various responses to the hard problem of consciousness Become familiar with various theories of consciousness: higher-­‐order theories, global workspace, and information integration Come to appreciate the arguments for and challenges to higher-­‐order theories of consciousness (both higher-­‐order thought and higher-­‐order perception) Become versed in the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness Come to appreciate the role that consciousness plays in the assignment of moral value and ethical consideration February 10, 2014 Week 15. The Hard Problem • Chalmers, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” Further Reading: Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know” Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap” **Second Formative Essay Due: February 21, 2014 February 24, 2014 Week 16. Responses to the Hard Problem • Papineau, “Confusions about Consciousness” Further Reading: Papineau, “Mind the Gap” Dennett, “What RoboMary knows.” Dennett, “Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness” Churchland, P.S., “The Hornswoggle problem” Pauen, “Feeling Causes” March 3, 2014 Week 17. Theories of Consciousness: Higher Order Representation (HOR/HOT/HOP) • Rosenthal, “Two Concepts of Consciousness” Further Reading: Armstrong, “What is Consciousness?” Lycan, “A simple Argument for a higher-­‐order representation theory of consciousness” Lycan, “The Superiority of HOP to HOT” Rosenthal & Lau, “Empirical Support for Higher Order Theories of Consciousness” March 10, 2014 Week 18. Theories of Consciousness: Access Consciousness and Phenomenal Consciousness • Block, “Some concepts of consciousness” Further Reading: Block, “Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness” Chalmers, “Availability: the cognitive basis of experience” Dehaene & Changeux, “Neural mechanisms for access to consciousness.” Dehaene & Naccache, “Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework.” Dennett, “The path not taken” Tong, “Binocular Rivalry and the Visual Awareness in Human Extrastriate Cortex” Sperling, “The information available in brief visual presentations” March 17, 2014 Week 19. Theories of Consciousness: Information Integration • Tononi and Koch, “The neural correlates of consciousness, an update” Further Reading: Tononi, “An information integration theory of consciousness” Crick and Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness” Crick and Koch, “A framework for consciousness” Block, “How Not to Find the Neural Correlates of Consciousness” Searle: “Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?” March 23, 2014 Week 20. Is Consciousness Special? • Levy and Savulescu, “Moral significance of phenomenal consciousness” Further Reading: Shea & Bayne, “The Vegetative State and the Science of Consciousness” Singer, “All animals are equal” Dennett, “The Zombie Hunch” Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood” Gallagher, “Moral Agency, Self-­‐Consciousness, and Practical Wisdom” **Second Summative Essay Due: April 4, 2014