Category: Cognitive Science

New book in Philosophy of Psychiatry

6/5/2018

This book explores the relationship between schizophrenia and common sense. It approaches this theme from a multidisciplinary perspective. Coverage features contributions from phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, and social cognition.

The contributors address the following questions: How relevant is the loss of common sense in schizophrenia? How can the study of schizophrenia contribute to the study of common sense? How to understand and explain this loss of common sense?

They also consider: What is the relationship of practical reasoning and logical formal reasoning with schizophrenia? What is the relationship between the person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and social values?

Chapters examine such issues as rationality, emotions, self, and delusion. In addition, one looks at brain structure and neurotransmission. Others explore phenomenological and Wittgensteinian theories.

The book features papers from the Schizophrenia and Common Sense International Workshop, held at New University of Lisbon, November 2015. It offers new insights into this topic and will appeal to researchers, students, as well as interested general readers.

Available here:
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319739922

Also in Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schizophrenia-Common-Sense-Explaining-Relation-ebook/dp/B07B3S1PWJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520466290&sr=8-1&keywords=schizophrenia+and+common+sense

Pre-prints of the introduction available here.

New paper out online

9/9/2017

Already available online my paper co-authored paper with Jorge Martins, on "Mind-life continuity: qualitative study of conscious experience", published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

We focused on the mind-life continuity thesis and the autopoietic account, which requires a reciprocal influence and determination of first- and third-person accounts. In this paper, we studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of living beings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study.

We are very thankful to the special contributions of Teresa Rodrigues from IMM, Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, Portugal; Nuno Rosa, Maria Jose Correia, and Marlene Barros from the Institute of Health Sciences (ICS), Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Health (CIIS), Universidade Católica Portuguesa, (Viseu, Portugal); and Mário Simões from LIMMIT lab, Faculty of Medicine, and Mind-Brain College, from the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. The authors also wish to thank Michael Kirchhoff for his insightful comments on the paper, and the Lisbon Wide Minds Group for the fruitful discussion during the presentation of the project at Nova University of Lisbon. The authors would like also to thank the important comments of the reviewers, and the patience of the editors. Inês Hipolito would like to acknowledge that this paper was made possible by an International Postgraduate Award from the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Abstract
There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is the computational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biological organism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allow the phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioral tests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome methodological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in this paper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated with cognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of living beings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The intervention with Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based upon subjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards an integrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have the final word.

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Philosophy Research in Progress Seminar

8/15/2017

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NEUROSCIENCE AND SOCIETY Call for Abstracts

6/9/2017

Ethical, Legal & Clinical Implications of Neuroscience Research — 14-15 September 2017, Sydney, Australia

Researchers, practitioners, clinicians and other professionals from Australia and internationally are invited to submit abstracts for presentation at the 2017 Neuroscience & Society Meeting in Sydney, Australia. The meeting will feature a wide range of exciting scientific lectures and ethical, philosophical and legal discussions, with numerous networking opportunities with experts, researchers, and emerging leaders in the field of neuroethics and neurolaw. Abstracts are invited from those working in the fields of ethics, law, neuroscience, mathematics and engineering, psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, allied health care, and public policy.

Abstracts of an empirical, legal, and philosophical nature related to the field of neuroethics are welcomed. Investigators at all career stages are encouraged to submit one or more abstracts. Abstracts will be peer reviewed and acceptance will be based on content, available space, and overall program balance. A small number of selected abstracts will be invited for an oral presentation. Other selected abstracts will be invited for a poster presentation.

Presentations are welcomed on any neuroethics topic, although particular consideration will be given to those addressing the key conference themes of:

Ageing and dementia
The developing brain
Disability and mental health
Disorders of self control Moral cognition and moral technologies
Artificial intelligence and machine learning Neurolaw

Selected papers will be invited to be submitted to a special issue of the journal Neuroethics. All papers will undergo peer review — an invitation will not guarantee publication. Enquiries may be emailed to Adrian Carter or Jeanette Kennett.

More info and abstract submission here.

Anatomy of Language: can we understand language games from cortical networks?

6/8/2017

Already online my paper “Anatomy of Language”. I’m thrilled with this paper because it is the first one I write and publish in my mother thong, the Portuguese.

It is significant topic because the paper attempts to draw an evaluation upon the empirical methods and theoretical frameworks adopted in the study of metaphor. The perspective in this paper was particularly to look at the conception of metaphor in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, against the notion of language games. The major aim was to see whether this notion of metaphor as a language game remained hidden, or not, from empirical lenses of behavioural paradigms (e.g. times response), and brain pictures (imagiology).

The linguistic turn could not anticipate that the 21st century would be dominated by cognitive states of linguistic encoding penetrating propositional attitudes, - even in the case of metaphors. Wittgenstein, on his return to philosophy, did substitute the conception of language as exclusively a set of axioms, and meanings of truth conditions by the notion of language games and forms of life. I guess he would agree with our Portuguese poet, there are metaphors, which are more real than the people walking on the street (BS, Book of the Disquiet).

I am thankful to the editors of Kairos, and, of course, to the reviewers who helped me bringing my ideas into clarity.

*

Já se encontra disponível online o meu artigo “Anatomia da Linguagem”. Estou muito feliz com este artigo por ser o primeiro artigo que escrevo e publico na minha língua materna, o português.

Parece-me um tema relevante porque tenta fazer uma avaliação sobre os métodos empíricos e enquadramentos teóricos utilizados para o estudo da metáfora. A perspectiva neste artigo foi sobretudo olhar para a concepção de metáfora adoptada na neurociência e psicolinguística e compará-la coma sua concepção enquanto "jogos de linguagem". O objectivo foi perceber se a dimensão de jogo de linguagem ficava, ou não, escondida por detrás de paradigmas comportamentais (tempos resposta) e imagens cerebrais (imagiologia).

A viragem linguística não podia antecipar que o século XXI da ciência cognitiva ficaria dominado por estados cognitivos de codificação linguística a penetrar atitudes proposicionais, - até mesmo no caso da metáfora. Wittgenstein, no seu regresso a Filosofia, substituiu a concepção da linguagem como exclusivamente um conjunto de axiomas e de significados de condições de verdade pela noção de jogos de linguagem e formas de vida. Parece-me que ele concordaria com o nosso poeta, que nos diz, há metáforas mais reais do que a gente que anda na rua (BS, Livro do Desassossego).

Estou grata aos editores da Kairos e, claro, à preciosa ajuda dos revisores por me ajudarem a tornar mais claras as minhas ideias.

Sydney Philosophy of Psychology 2017, Pearl Beach

5/16/2017

Academics and post-graduate students from Macquarie University, The University of Sydney and The University of Wollongong presented their research on Sydney Philosophy of Psychology, 2017.

Can you order the following colours?

3/30/2017

I am doing exploratory research on the nature of color perception. In order to develop operational definitions, could I ask you to help me out by ordering the following colored squares? Please send a private message (below) with your response/order. I know this is not an easy task, thank you so much for helping me out here!

Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (ASCS)

3/7/2017

Friends and Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the reformation of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (ASCS). The main activity of the society has been the organisation of conferences. The society now aims to run regular conferences every second year with an eye to becoming the peak body for the interdisciplinary study of the mind in Australasia. The first major event for the reformed society will be a conference held at the brand new Port Macquarie (yes we have an airport, along with our beaches and rainforest) campus of Charles Sturt University on the 7th and 8th of December 2017. Max Coltheart (Macquarie) will keynote the event. This event will include a general meeting of the society to endorse a new constitution and elect a committee consisting of a president, general secretary, treasurer, student representative and communications officer. We will also be seeking expressions of interest from those wanting to host the next conference in 2019. Much more information about the conference will be forthcoming in the next weeks. For now, interested parties are asked to contact Glenn Carruthers (glenn.rj.carruthers@gmail.com) to be added to a mailing list where information about the society (including a draft constitution, call for nominations for committee positions and information about conferences) will be distributed. Please forward this onto any potentially interested parties.

Sincerely

Glenn Carruthers on behalf of the ASCS reformation advisory committee

Invariances and Experimental Phenomenology: an introduction

2/28/2017

The idea that the brain of the neonate begins as a “tabula rasa”, and that the complex precepts of the adult can be traced back to a history of learned associations made from the time of brith, originated in empiricism, sets the foundational ground to modern neural network or connectionist theories, whereby individual sensations are related to the activation of individual neurons, or neuron assemblies in the brain expressed by Hebbian learning.

It is, however, hard to understand why we do not see the world as na assembly of dots

Seurat's painting The Circus

but as extended areas and volumetric bodies. Wolfgang Metzger (1936), identifies this problem, and develops a careful description and unbiased analysis of the phenomenological properties of visual perception. In his view, although there seems to be some sort of influence of experience on vision, the organization of the visual field occurs essentially without our involvement. It is, in fact, not to up to us to decide what and how we see. Rather, we already find the visual world ready-made before us: stimuli organize themselves in the simplest, most symmetrical, and balanced manner. Perceptual constancies (or invariances) is what warrantees that the same object in our environment changes little in perception even when physical conditions under which the stimuli occur vary: Perceptual constancies or invariances are the focus os experimental phenomenological analysis, which has fruitfully developed the Gestalt laws (see also the post on Gestalt and Qualitative Relations).

The world we see is not the world itself. Metzger, in his Laws of Seeing (1936), justifies such claims with three major observations:

There are percepts for which there is no direct correlate in the physical stimulus. Examples are brightness enhancement and illusory contours

Certain things are not seen though they are clearly before our eyes. Examples of this are objects that by their proximity and structure become part of an edge or become embedded in larger configurations (hidden objects).

We see objects, but differently from the way they are. Some examples are made from stimulus conditions (microgenesis) as well as many geometric-optical illusions, where we misperceive shapes, sizes, and angles of stimuli. These observations are undeniable, they cannot be overridden by better knowledge of the actual stimulus, and they have reality of their own.

As Metzger remarkably explains (1936, xv),

On a more recent account of this problem, I present the methodological issue on the post Special issue Quantitative Approaches in Gestalt Perception, a review).

References
Metzger, W. (1936). Gesetze des Sehens. 2., erw. Aufl. Frankfurt a. M.: Kramer.

Metzger, W. (2006) Laws of Seeing. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press (original work, 1936).

And so I arrived in the University of Wollongong

2/20/2017

For an amazing adventure of 4 years of study. This is possible by virtue of the great generosity of the University in offering me a full scholarship to develop a project on Mind and Cognition.

Couldn't ask for more, nor be more excited!

This is Wollongong,