Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Kelly Saunders. Kelly did an undergrad degree three decades ago. She completed a Bachelor of General Studies at Simon Fraser University in greater Vancouver. Philosophy was by far her favourite. After her degree she worked at a few jobs, including as a mental health worker, before ultimately deciding to open a small business.  During all the years of running her business, she never quite lost the feeling of wishing she had pursued philosophy to a greater extent. When she came to a "fork in the road" a year ago, she discovered the M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at Birmingham. Her hope is to use her M.A. to work as a philosophical counsellor. When it comes to the issue of responsibility and psychopathology, Hanna Pickard's contributions are immensely valuable for the subject of addiction. She helpfully differentiates between responsibility and blameworthiness in addiction. That is, she maintains that while it may be unhelpful, and morally q...

This post is by Laura Roklicer. Laura is an MA student in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham, alongside which she is attending the Expansions of Quantum Theory Towards Consciousness course organized by ECR-Institute (Berlin) and hosted by the Dev Sanskriti University (Haridvar). She holds a First-Class Honours bachelor’s degree in Psychology and in Media Production, and she is looking to pursue a PhD next year through which she hopes to continue exploring the mind. Laura Roklicer How the world actually is beyond our apparent understanding matters greatly in defining our views on many important topics. If consciousness were seen as a mere illusion, a great trick played by an unintentional Nature, then we would all be deluded in thinking that we’re thinking. Similarly, if the whole of existence were a single, unified mind, we would again be deluded in thinking we exist apart from each other, in our own private heads on our own two shoulders, and wit...

Today's post is by Dan Stein (University of Cape Town) who writes about his new book, Problems of Living (Elsevier, 2021). It seems to me hard to practice psychiatry without asking some key “big questions”, both about the nature of the mind (and mental illness) in particular, and about the nature of life (and mental suffering) in general. More than a decade ago I published a volume, Philosophy of Psychopharmacology , in which I addressed some of the “hard problems” faced by mental health clinicians, with a particular focus on philosophical issues raised or addressed by advances in psychiatric medication.  This year I’ve published my second volume at the intersection of psychiatry and philosophy,  Problems of Living , in which I look at a range of “hard problems” raised by life as a whole, with a particular focus on philosophical issues raised or addressed by advances in the cognitive-affective sciences including psychology and neuroscience. I view my approach in both o...

Today's post is by Kourken Michaelian (Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes). Kourken Michaelian With her 2016 article on misremembering, Sarah Robins drew the attention of philosophers of memory to the need to provide an account not only of successful remembering but also of unsuccessful remembering—an account of memory errors such as confabulation, to which William Hirstein had previously devoted a book but which had been neglected in subsequent discussions in the field. The debate triggered by Robins’ article continues to unfold, with Robins herself defending an approach to memory errors inspired by the causal theory of memory in articles in 2019 and 2020 , Sven Bernecker defending a similar causalist approach in an article in 2017 , and myself defending an approach based on the simulation theory of memory in articles in 2016 and 2020 . There are other approaches that merit discussion; André Sant’Anna, for example, argues in a forthcoming article that...

In this post Mark Miller (Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, Hokkaido University) reports on a workshop Emotion and Prediction , which was held online on March 31- April 1, 2021.     Emotion permeates all mental life - it reflects our adaptivity, it imbues our activities and our environments with meaning and purpose, and it motivates and modulates our behaviours. We are emotional creatures through and through. While there has been a tremendous amount of work done on this topic, to date an integrative account capable of unifying the various theoretical perspectives and experimental results is still lacking. A recent workshop Emotion and Prediction brought together philosophers, cognitive scientists and machine learning researchers to explore the implications of a leading new framework emerging within computational neuroscience for the study of feelings, emotions and moods. The Predictive Processing (or Active Inference) framework starts from th...