In recent work, Sarah Robins, Gerardo Viera and Steven James have provided some insightful objections to the ideas offered in my book, Memory: A Self-Referential Account. this paper, I put forward responses those objections. Robins challenges idea that being a memory could be matter of having particular functional role within subject’s cognitive economy. content explain its phenomenological pro...

If a sensory brain state plays an unusual functional role, does the phenomenology go with the role or the brain state? If the phenomenology goes with the functional role, that supports functionalism, which is the view that phenomenology just is the role. If it goes with the brain state, that supports physicalism, which is the view that phenomenology is what realizes or implements the role. I ag...

I argue that Stich’s Syntactic Theory of Mind (STM) and a naturalistic narrow content functionalism run on a Language of Though story have the same exact structure. I elaborate on the argument that narrow content functionalism is either irremediably holistic in a rather destructive sense, or else doesn’t have the resources for individuating contents interpersonally. So I show that, contrary to ...

Emergence—macro-level effects from micro-level causes—is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level functionalities (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced to the fundamental forces of physics (the reductionist position)? We cut through this debate by applying a computer science lens to the way we view nature. We ...

Artificial Intelligence was developed in 1956 and came into existence as a paradigm of cognition. It derived a powerful and lusty philosophical patrimony of functionalism and affirmatism. The history has shown a turn away from the functionalism of standard AI toward an alternative position that re-asserts the priority of development, interaction, and, more recently, emotion in cognitive systems...