It has been more than 20 years since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. on the admissibility of scientific expert witness testimony in legal proceedings. It is time, perhaps, to look back at the history of Daubert decisions to determine whether it and its progeny have lived up to their collective promises to keep bad science out of the courtroom, while allowing in good, especially where the mind and brain sciences are concerned.In this (...) essay, I argue that, although the decision in Daubert describes a general test for the admissibility of scientific evidence, it has not been applied consistently to data and conclusions drawn from the behavioral sciences.... (shrink)

In 2020, the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) changed its definition of pain to just an "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. " Since then, several philosophers have attempted to reaffirm the impossibility of reducing pain to neurobiology from a variety of approaches, including eliminativism, multiple realizability, and intersubjectivity. All of their arguments assume that there are no specific biomarkers for pain. I adumbrate a more ecumenical path: that while these approaches have some merit, they also misstate (...) how brains function. Once we shift our view regarding how brains operate, then pain processing is just as "mysterious" as other types of complex brain processes. (shrink)

There is an increasing suspicion that Multiple Personality Disorder is one extreme along a continuum of dissociative phenomena, ranging from children’s pretend play and dreams at one end, through borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic stress syndrome, dissociative disorders not originally specified to a severe and complete personality fragmentation at the other. In this essay, we address the questions of whether a continuum view is correct and how to characterize the differences among the various disorders through distinguishing multiplex from multiple selves. This (...) analysis has implications for how the symptoms of MPD should be characterized and treated as well as shedding some light on the relation between conscious experience and selfhood. (shrink)

Some theorists have argued that we should understand the notion of free will from a functional perspective: free will just is our ability to choose effectively and adaptively in an ever-changing environment. Although far from what many philosophers normally mean by free will, those who adopt this biological-evolutionary perspective can clearly define and defend a notion of personal responsibility. One consequenceof this point of view is that addicts become responsible for their actions, for at each choice point, there is a (...) real sense in which the addict could have elected not to use or abuse. As a result, it has been argued that addiction is not a disease, that addictive behavior is voluntary, and that sometimes it is even rational. This paper defends a different way of thinking about addiction, one that aligns it with other complex chronic illnesses. The perspective put forth here suggests that these discussions about responsibility and free will represent an over-simplified and neuropsychologically inaccurate portrait of basic human capacities for behavioral choice. (shrink)

Spelling out in detail what we do and do not know about phenomenological experience, this book denies the common view of consciousness as a central decision...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 353-355 [Access article in PDF] Emotions and Narrative Selves Valerie Gray Hardcastle In their commentaries, both Phillips (2003) and Woody (2003) agree that the affective side of personhood needs to be better addressed in narrative views of self. In their arguments, they focus mainly on how a patient or a subject is here and now. In contrast, Kennett and Matthews (2003) (...) take a longer view and argue for the importance of a diachronic unity for selfhood. This commentary seeks to integrate these views by discussing how emotions are central to building our personal sense of unified agency. 1Phillips and Woody are right: most philosophical discussions of the narrative view of self are overly cognitive and focus too much attention on our linguistic story-telling abilities and not enough on what it is like to be a person experiencing the world. This is too bad, for it is our affective reactions that drive our personal life narratives. Consider: of all the experiences in the world, we only chose a small subset to become or represent who we are. I regularly eat cold cereal for breakfast before heading off to work, but if you ask me to describe myself, I describe my work or my children, not my breakfast-eating habits. Why is this? I identify with my work, my family life, or my play, but not with my sleeping patterns, the trajectories I chose when I drive, or how I brush my teeth. How is it that I have selected the former activities to highlight in my self-stories, but not the latter?I maintain that I choose the former because I have strong affective ties to them, ties that I do not have to driving routes or personal hygiene. And these ties are what determine what gets into our narratives of self. Actually, my claim is stronger than that. I believe that our emotions not only color what we do but they also allow us to act in the first place (this discussion is greatly expanded in my forthcoming book).Humans delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought. Since Plato at least we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.But what would life really be like with an overdeveloped forebrain and without emotion? Let us consider more carefully what it is we really prize about being human. We can rationalize well, it is true, but we do so in the service of personal goals. As Aristotle reminds us, we have practical rationality; we have means-ends reasoning with a point. This is just another way of saying that it is imperative that we identify what is important to us prior to cognizing.Obviously, one might scoff, we need an end to engage in means-ends reasoning. But often, I think, what having an end entails is not well appreciated. These days it is fashionable to believe that our fundamental ends—survival and reproduction—are set by our biology and that all [End Page 353] other ends (or most other ends) derive from them in some fashion. Maybe this story is true, but it obscures how ends—whether they be hardwired in or they come later—function in the human psyche.At a bare minimum, that we have particular ends tells us that we have to tag our abstractions, interpretations, and matched patterns with valances—some things are good, some things are bad, and some are indifferent. Tagging our experiences thus is just what it means to have emotions; we are reacting affectively to our world around us. And it is these reactions that determine which inputs we respond to and which we ignore. We literally cannot move about in our world without emotion. I think, perhaps, that this fact is what Phillips and Woody are... (shrink)

This book is perhaps the first to open a dialogue between the two disciplines.

On the one hand, consciousness seems to be utterly the wrong sort of phenomenon to capture in a scientific theory. On the other hand, theorizing about consciousness does not seem to be beyond the pale of science. This dissertation tries to resolve this dilemma of consciousness for the cognitive sciences by answering the three following questions: What are the appropriate properties of the mind and the brain to study in order to develop a theory of consciousness? What informational role does (...) consciousness play in our psychological life? How does the underlying neurophysiological structure of consciousness relate to higher-level information processing descriptions of consciousness? In discussing these issues, I defend the viability of the project against popular philosophical objections and then develop my own framework for approaching the scientific study of consciousness based on work in neurophysiology, developmental psychology, neurology, cognitive neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology. In particular, this dissertation argues that consciousness is actually a structural property of the brain relative to higher level information processing. ;I argue that qualitative states are aligned with a single and distinct memory system. Understanding how that system works, and how it differs from other systems, should allow us to "decompose" consciousness in a naturalistic framework. Though the operations of our different memory systems are not completely understood, it is clear that our "semantic" memory system can be identified with conscious experience. The study of semantic memory across the various investigative domains within the cognitive sciences bounds the phenomena of consciousness such as to make it amenable to scientific scrutiny. This then gives us a solid interdisciplinary framework in which to begin a thorough study of qualitative experience. (shrink)

The data discussed strongly suggest that neural imaging does not unduly sway judges and jurors; in fact, it is often counterproductive. The percentage of appellate cases in which the decision was favorable to defendants with brain scan data mirrored those of decisions without such proffered evidence. Moreover, fully two-thirds of the scans admitted were either inconclusive or showed normal brain structures. In decisions referencing brain scans, judges mentioned defendant behavior significantly more often than they referred to the defendant’s brain. Finally, (...) in the actual decisions themselves, judges often ignored relevant imaging data in favor of case precedent or misinterpreted the data so that they would fit with the judges’ initial reactions and opinions. (shrink)

On the one hand, we think that our conscious perceptions are tied to some stage of whatever processing stream we have. On the other hand, we think that our conscious experiences have to resemble the computational states that instantiate them. However, nothing in our alleged stream resembles our experienced perceptions. Hence, a conflict. The question is: How can we go from what we know about neurons, their connections, and firing patterns, to explaining what conscious perceptual experiences are like? No intuitive (...) answer seems plausible. Our perceptual experiences are complex and unified; however, brains divide their processing tasks into small chunks and segregate those smaller pieces across the gray matter. In this essay, I conjecture that what corresponds to our visual perceptions are higher order patterns of bifurcation in an attractor phase space. If I am correct, then the problem of the explanatory gap in philosophy, the binding problem in psychology, and the problem of perception in neuroscience disappear. If the traditional computational perspective is wrong, and sensory processing is not piece-meal, step-wise, and segregated, then there is no need for something in the head to tie things together. (shrink)

There is a bias in neuroscience toward localizing and modularizing brain functions. Single cell recording, imaging studies, and the study of neurological deficits all feed into the Gallian view that different brain areas do different things and the things being done are confined to particular processing streams. At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that brains probably don’t work like that after all; it is better to conceive of them as fundamentally distributed units, multi‐tasking at every level. This (...) sentiment, however, is much less congenial to the tried‐and‐true experimental protocols available today and to theorizing about the brain in general. This essay examines the tension between current experimental methods and large-scale views of the brain. We argue that this disconnection between experiment and what really are guiding theoretical metaphors seriously impedes progress in neuroscience. (shrink)

There are three basic skeptical arguments against developing a scientific theory of consciousness: theory cannot capture a first person perspective; consciousness is causally inert with respect to explaining cognition; and the notion "consciousness" is too vague to be a natural kind term. Although I am sympathetic to naturalists' counter-arguments, I also believe that most of the accounts given so far of how explaining consciousness would fit into science are incorrect. In this essay, I indicate errors my colleagues on both sides (...) of the fence make in thinking about this issue, as well as outline data relevant to distinguishing conscious states from unconscious ones empirically. (shrink)

While schizophrenia may be genetically determined up to a point, neither it nor its nearest relatives offer any sort of reproductive advantage to its sufferers. Instead, from an evolutionary point of view, schizophrenia is benign – it neither promotes nor inhibits survival to reproduction. Because it is benign, its rate of occurrence should remain fairly constant over time.

[opening paragraph]: Nicholas Humphrey is interested in illustrating how it is that the mind is the brain. We can think of him as taking up David Chalmers’ and Joe Levine's challenge to solve the so-called hard problem, to bridge the so-called explanatory gap. For after being convinced, as we surely are, that minds are housed in brains via the activity of neurons, we still need to explain why that should be the case. Why is it that our lumpy grey matter (...) should contain consciousness? Even if we agree that it does, we still need to arrange the facts so that having minded brains is a patently obvious truth. (shrink)

In their recent bookUnfit for the Future, Persson and Savulescu make a heartfelt plea for the increasing necessity of “moral enhancement”, interventions that improve human capacities for moral behaviour.3They argue that, with all the technological advances of the 20thand 21stcenturies, the sheer scope of horror that humans can now potentially wreak on their neighbours or the world is staggering. Hence, we are morally obliged to use interventions at our disposal to prevent such atrocities. However, as we learn more about human (...) behaviour and decision-making, the argument that we are morally obligated to morally enhance our friends, neighbours, or countrymen starts to fall apart. For us to be more moral requires more than sharpening our reasoning capacities so that we can more effectively recognise what is better or increasing personal motivation so that we are more likely to do what is good. It requires that we all agree on what the good is and how to achieve it, and that there are no social, cultural, physical, or psychological impediments that prevent us from recognising the good or acting on it. To illustrate my position, I use the phenomenon of self-radicalised terrorists as a case study. In particular, I focus on how historians, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and political scientists understand the process of self-radicalisation, who self-radicalises, and why, and what all this tells us about it should be “treated”. Part of my purpose in working my way through this case study is to demonstrate that many philosophers misunderstand or over-simplify the science behind so-called immoral actions; consequently, their discussions of whether to enhance someone's morality miss their mark. (shrink)

In this essay, I hope to make clearer what the points of division between the materialists and the sceptics are. I argue that the rifts are quite deep and turn on basic differences in understanding the scientific enterprise. In section I, I outline the disagreements between David Chalmers and me, arguing that consciousness is not a brute fact about the world. In section II, I point out the fundamental difference between the materialists and the sceptics, suggesting that this difference is (...) not something that further discussion or argumentation can overcome. In the final section, I outline one view of scientific explanation and conclude that the source of conflict really turns on a difference in the rules each side has adopted in playing the game. (shrink)

Many philosophers of psychology fail to appreciate the constructivist process of science as well as its pragmatic aspects. A well-developed philosophy of science helps to clear many conceptual confusions. However, ridding ourselves of popular complaints only opens more sophisticated worries regarding how we generalize specific events and how we use those generalizations to build physical systems and abstract models. These questions can still be answered though by realizing that science is largely a social enterprise, and how and what we explain (...) depends a great deal upon who is asking the question of whom and when. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that as we learn more about how we might intervene in the brain in ways that impact human behavior, the scope of what counts as “moral behavior” becomes smaller and smaller because things we successfully manipulate using evidence-based science are often things that fall outside the sphere of morality. Consequently, the argument that we are morally obligated to morally enhance our neighbors starts to fall apart, not because humans should be free to make terrible choices, (...) but because morality is not something subject to such manipulation. To illustrate my argument, I shall use the rise of veteran diversion courts in the United States as a putative instance of an intervention designed to change human behavior for the better. Part of my purpose in working my way through this case study is to demonstrate that many philosophers have the psychology of immoral action wrong. (shrink)

Levine claims that Locating Consciousness does not seriously address the problem of the explanatory gap; instead it merely provides lots of data. Here I argue that, contrary to the intuitions of some philosophers, the best remedy for our gaps in explanation and understanding is in fact through empirical investigation.

Evolutionary psychologists claim that the mind contains “hundreds or thousands” of “genetically specified” modules, which are evolutionary adaptations for their cognitive functions. We argue that, while the adult human mind/brain typically contains a degree of modularization, its “modules” are neither genetically specified nor evolutionary adaptations. Rather, they result from the brain’s developmental plasticity, which allows environmental task demands a large role in shaping the brain’s information-processing structures. The brain’s developmental plasticity is our fundamental psychological adaptation, and the “modules” that result (...) from it are adaptive responses to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments. If different individuals share common environ- ments, however, they may develop similar “modules,” and this process can mimic the development of genetically specified modules in the evolutionary psychologist’s sense. (shrink)

Since at least the time of Darwin, we have recognized that our human emotional life is very similar to the emotional life of other creatures. We all react in characteristic ways to emotionally valenced stimuli. Though other animals may not blush or cry, we all have prototypical ways of expressing anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and curiosity. In assuming that the neural circuits underlying these reactions are homologous or at least analogous across species, neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists have been able to (...) construct impressive and substantial research programmes studying the neural correlates for emotion. They are to be applauded, for we now know quite a lot about where and how basic emotions are processed in the brain. At the same time, there is a dangerous trend developing in the study of emotion in neurophysiology and neuropsychology, a trend toward oversimplifying and reducing emotional responses to the point of distortion. We all know that scientists must abstract away from much of what is going on in order to produce quantitative and unambiguous data. We also know that scientists operate using several basic methodological, technological, and theoretical assumptions. The question I wish to address here is whether, in the case of emotions, scientists haven't gone too far in their tendency to modularize brain processes and to reduce reactions down to their simplest components. (shrink)

Robert Wilson (1994) maintains that many interesting and fundamental aspects of psychology are non-individualistic because large chunks of psychology depend upon organisms being deeply embedded in some environment. I disagree and present one version of narrow content that allows enough reference to the environment to meet any wide challenge. I argue that most psychologists are already this sort of narrow content theorist and that these narrow content explanations of psychological phenomena meet Wilson's criteria for being a good explanation better than (...) any wide explanation of the same event. (shrink)

I examine what happens in the brain when patients experience chronic pain and when subjects are addicted to alcohol. We can find important parallels between these two cases, and these parallels can perhaps point us toward new ways of treating (or at least understanding) both issues. Interestingly, we can understand both cases as our pleasure system gone awry. In brief, I argue that chronic pain and alcohol addiction both stem from a dysregulation in our brain’s reward structure. This dysregulation in (...) what should be our pleasure circuitry pushes individuals to behave in ways counterproductive to their needs and to feel unpleasant things. In other words, there is likely both something quite right and perhaps quite wrong about how some philosophers are thinking about pain as an evaluative state. I shall be arguing that pain is both hedonic and evaluative, though perhaps not in the ways they are imagining. (shrink)

It seems that we could be physically the same as we are now, only we would lack conscious awareness. If so, then nothing about our physical world is necessary for qualitative experience. However, a proper analysis of psychological functionalism eliminates this problem concerning the possibility of zombies. ‘Friends of absent qualia’ rely on an overly simple view of what counts as a functional analysis and of the function/structure distinction. The level of thought is not the only level at which one (...) might perform a functional analysis; all that is required for some description of a state to be functional is that it be defined in terms of its causal relations. Insofar as functionalism is not restricted to a higher level of analysis , then successful theories of consciousness should include whatever it is that makes those states have a qualitative character. (shrink)

I have two goals in this paper. First, I want to show by example that inferences about theoretical entities are relatively contingent affairs. Previously accepted conceptual metaphors in science set both the general form of new theories and our acceptance of the theories as plausible. In addition, they determine how we define the relevant parameters in investigating phenomena in the first place. These items then determine how we conceptualize things in the world. Second, and maybe more importantly, I want to (...) solve a puzzle that falls out of our current explication of attention, namely why we have it. Given the now widely accepted view that our brains are massively parallel, it is difficult to see why we should have evolved attentional mechanisms at all. Why gate when we can already process what we transduce in parallel? Here I answer that puzzle and suggest a perspective on attention that makes it a bit easier to understand, although this perspective also entails that we have to revise how we individuate experimental protocols and relevant data. (shrink)

Newly developed Bayesian perspectives on schizophrenia hold out the promise that a common underlying mechanism can account for many, if not all, of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. If this is the case, then understanding how schizophrenic minds go awry could shine light on how healthy minds maintain a sense of self. This article investigates this Bayesian promise by examining whether the approach can indeed account for the difficulties with self-awareness experienced in schizophrenia. While I conclude that it cannot, I (...) nonetheless maintain that understanding how the self breaks down in schizophrenia tells us much about how and why the self functions in normal human circumstances. I proceed first by recounting in some detail a Bayesian interpretation of perception, schizophrenia, and self-awareness, as well as some of the empirical data supporting this interpretation, then by exploring aspects of schizophrenia that this approach leaves out. I conclude by discussing what the “left out” aspects tell us about self-awareness, thereby convincing the reader that studying patients with schizophrenia is indeed a useful avenue for understanding awareness of self. (shrink)