SyNoPsis: Response to the Commentators

Reply to the commentators

To begin with, I would like to thank the commentators for taking their time commenting on my target paper. I find it fascinating how diverging reflections it has inspired, and how often commentators express theoretical viewpoints that are compatible or that differ, regardless of the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds. I thank Andreas Roepstorff for welcoming the article, and I do feel welcome wr...

Paternalism, reasonableness, and neutrality: a response to commentators.

Emotion and decision-making explained: response to commentators.

One of the themes of Emotion and Decision-Making Explained (Rolls, 2014c) is that there are multiple routes to emotionrelated responses, with some illustrated in Fig. 1. Brain systems involved in decoding stimuli in terms of whether they are instrumental reinforcers so that goal directed actions may be performed to obtain or avoid the stimuli are emphasized as being important for emotional stat...

Sensing, Objects, and Awareness: Reply to Commentators

I am very grateful to my commentators for their interest and their careful attention to A Theory of Sentience. It is particularly gratifying to find other philosophers attracted to the murky domain of preattentive sensory processing, an obscure place where exciting stuff happens. I can by no means answer all of their objections or counterarguments, and some of the problems noted derive from fai...

Microglial response to brain injury: a brief synopsis.

In addition to astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, microglia represent the third major population of glial cells within the central nervous system (CNS). Microglia are distributed ubiquitously throughout the brain and spinal cord, and one of their main functions is to monitor and sustain neuronal health. Microglial cells are quite sensitive to even minor disturbances in CNS homeostasis, and they b...