The relational mind" approach to the inner content of consciousness is developed in terms of various control structures and processing strategies, and their possible neurobiological identifications in brain sites. This leads naturally to a division of consciousness into a passive and an active part. A global control structure for the single strand' aspect of consciousness is proposed as the thalamonucleus reticularis thalami-cortex coupled system, which is shown to support experimental data on electrical stimulation of awareness [Libet (1964)]. Local control, in terms of excitatory transfer from sites of semantic memory to working memory, is shown to explain subliminal perception timing [Marcel (1980)]. The inner content of consciousness is suggested as arising from the resulting relational features between inputs and stored semantic and episodic memories. Long Abstract A possible physical model of consciousness is presented to allow for a solution to the problem of analysing what it i...

Abstract — A developing agent must learn the structure of its world, beginning with its sensorimotor world. It learns rules to predict how its motor signals change the sensory input it receives. It learns the limits to its motion. It learns which effects of its actions are unconditional and which effects are conditional, including what they depend on. We present preliminary results evaluating an implemented computational model of this important kind of foundational developmental learning. Our model demonstrates synergy between the learning of landmarks representing important qualitative distinctions, and the learning of rules that exploit those distinctions to make reliable predictions. These qualitative distinctions make it possible to define discrete events, and then to identify predictive rules describing regularities among events and the values of context variables. The attention of the learning agent is focused by a stratified model that structures the set of variables, and the structure of the stratified model is simultaneously created by the learning process. Index Terms — developmental learning, sensorimotor learning, qualitative abstraction, predictive rules, landmark values I.

If first language is rational in the sense that acquisition produces an end-state model of language that is a proper reflection of input and that optimally prepares speakers for comprehension and production, second language is usually not. This paper considers the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition, that is the shortcomings where input fails to become intake. It describes how ‘learned attention’, a key concept in contemporary associative and connectionist theories of animal and human learning, explains these effects. The fragile features of L2 acquisition are those which, however available as a result of frequency, recency, or context, fall short of intake because of one of the factors of contingency, cue competition, salience, interference, overshadowing, blocking, or perceptual learning, which are all shaped by the L1. Each phenomenon is explained within associative learning theory and exemplified in language learning. Paradoxically, the successes of L1 acquisition and the limitations of L2 acquisition both derive from the same basic learning principles.

This report describes our attempt to conduct exact Nineteenth century sensory physiologists and psychologists were concerned with the phenomenology of attention. Investigators, including Mach, Fechner, Wndt, Titchener, Mller, James and others, were concerned with the phenomenal quality imparted to objects by experiments on the effect of attention on the phenomenology of perception

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one.

‘An interesting question for a theory of semantic information is whether there is any equivalent for the engineer’s concept of noise. For example, if a statement can have more than one interpretation and if one meaning is understood by the hearer and another is intended by the speaker, then there is a kind of semantic noise in the communication even though the physical signals might have been transmitted perfectly. ’ — George A. Miller What to do about ambiguity It’s really easy to misunderstand when there’s so much noise. Shapes are simply filled with ambiguities. They don’t have definite parts. I can divide them anyhow I like anytime I want. The shape includes two squares four triangles and indefinitely many K’s like the ones I have on my computer screen right now. There are upper case K’s lower case k’s

I am most grateful to all those who commented on ‘“The Self”’. The result was a festival of misunderstanding, but misunderstanding is one of the great engines of progress. Few of the contributors to the symposium on ‘Models of the Self ’ were interested in my project: some (like Olson and Wilkes) were already highly sceptical

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, in other words, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the brain or, in other words, material brain activity. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. It will be pointed out that they make different epistemological assumptions, refer to different neurophysiological levels of description, and adopt quantum theory in different ways. For each of the approaches discussed, these imply both problematic and promising features which will be indicated.

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “outthereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory ” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

xxi I General