13 found
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  1. Conscious vision guides motor action—rarely.Benjamin Kozuch - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (3):443-476.
    According to Milner and Goodale’s dual visual systems (DVS) theory, a division obtains between visual consciousness and motor action, in that the visual system producing conscious vision (the ventral stream) is distinct from the one guiding action (the dorsal stream). That there would be this division is often taken (by Andy Clark and others) to undermine the folk view on how consciousness and action relate. However, even if this division obtains, this leaves open the possibility that con- scious ventral information (...)
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  2. Dislocation, Not Dissociation: The Neuroanatomical Argument Against Visual Experience Driving Motor Action.Benjamin Kozuch - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (5):572-602.
    Common sense suggests that visual consciousness is essential to skilled motor action, but Andy Clark—inspired by Milner and Goodale's dual visual systems theory—has appealed to a wide range of experimental dissociations to argue that such an assumption is false. Critics of Clark's argument contend that the content driving motor action is actually within subjects' experience, just not easily discovered. In this article, I argue that even if such content exists, it cannot be guiding motor action, since a review of current (...)
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  3. Prefrontal lesion evidence against higher-order theories of consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):721-746.
    According to higher-order theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious only when represented by another mental state. Higher-order theories must predict there to be some brain areas (or networks of areas) such that, because they produce (the right kind of) higher-order states, the disabling of them brings about deficits in consciousness. It is commonly thought that the prefrontal cortex produces these kinds of higher-order states. In this paper, I first argue that this is likely correct, meaning that, if some (...)
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  4. Underwhelming force: Evaluating the neuropsychological evidence for higher‐order theories of consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - 2021 - Mind and Language 37 (5):790-813.
    Proponents of the higher‐order (HO) theory of consciousness (e.g., Lau and Rosenthal) have recently appealed to brain lesion evidence to support their thesis that mental states are conscious when and only when represented by other mental states. This article argues that this evidence fails to support HO theory, doing this by first determining what kinds of conscious deficit should result when HO state‐producing areas are damaged, then arguing that these kinds of deficit do not occur in the studies to which (...)
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  5. No Pain, No Gain (in Darwinian Fitness): A Representational Account of Affective Experience.Benjamin Kozuch - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):693-714.
    Reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are yet to produce a satisfying account of pain’s affective component, the part that makes it painful. The paramount problem here is that that there seems to be no suitable candidate for what affective experience represents. This article suggests that affective experience represents the Darwinian fitness effects of events. I argue that, because of affective experience’s close association with motivation, natural selection will work to bring affect into covariance with the average fitness effects of types (...)
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  6. A new low: Reassessing (and revising) the local recurrency theory of consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Local Recurrency Theory (LR) holds that recurrent loops of neural activity localized to the visual cortex are necessary and sufficient for visual consciousness (if certain background conditions obtain). LR’s popularity has recently waned in favor of theories holding that higher-level types of processing are necessary for consciousness (for example, the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Higher-order Theory). This has been in part because of empirical evidence thought to disconfirm LR. However, these competing theories now face challenges of their own, often (...)
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  7. Gorillas in the missed (but not the unseen): Reevaluating the evidence for attention being necessary for consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (3):299-316.
    The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological observations supplemented with empirical data to argue that some subjects failing to notice the target stimulus nonetheless experience its color. Since subjects not noticing the (...)
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  8. Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective Transparency.Benjamin Kozuch & Shaun Nichols - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12):11-12.
    A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of access, i.e. what (...)
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  9. Correlation, Causation, Constitution: On the Interplay between the Science and Philosophy of Consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch & Uriah Kriegel - 2015 - In S. M. Miller (ed.), The Constitution of Consciousness. John Benjamins. pp. 400-417.
    Consciousness is a natural phenomenon, the object of a flourishing area of research in the natural sciences – research whose primary goal is to identify the neural correlates of consciousness. This raises the question: why is there need for a philosophy of consciousness? As we see things, the need for a philosophy of consciousness arises for two reasons. First, as a young and energetic science operating as yet under no guiding paradigm, the science of consciousness has been subject to considerable (...)
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  10. A Legion of Lesions: The Neuroscientific Rout of Higher-Order Thought Theory.Benjamin Kozuch - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (8):3109-3135.
    Higher-order thought (HOT) theory says that a mental state is conscious when and only when represented by a conceptual, belief-like mental state. Plausibly, HOT theory predicts the impairment of HOT-producing brain areas to cause significant deficits in consciousness. This means that HOT theory can be refuted by identifying those brain areas that are candidates for producing HOTs, then showing that damage to these areas never produces the expected deficits of consciousness. Building this refutation is a work-in-progress, with several key components (...)
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  11. The Received Method for Ruling Out Brain Areas from Being NCC Undermines Itself.Benjamin Kozuch - 2015 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (9-10):145-69.
    Research into the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) aims to identify not just those brain areas that are NCC, but also those that are not. In the received method for ruling out a brain area from being an NCC, this is accomplished by showing a brain area’s content to be consistently absent from subjects’ reports about what they are experiencing. This paper points out how this same absence can be used to infer that the brain area’s content is cognitively inaccessible, (...)
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  12. Consciousness and mental causation: Contemporary empirical cases for epiphenomenalism, in Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch (ed.) - 2021 - Oxford University Press.
    In its classical form, epiphenomenalism is the view that conscious mental events have no physical effects: while physical events cause mental events, the opposite is never true. Unlike classical epiphenomenalism, contemporary forms do not hold that conscious men­ tal states always lack causal efficacy, only that they are epiphenomenal relative to certain kinds of action, ones we pre-theoretically would have thought consciousness to causally contribute to. Two of these contemporary, empirically based challenges to the efficacy of the mental are the (...)
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  13. Elizabeth Irvine, Consciousness as a scientific concept: A philosophy of science perspective. [REVIEW]Benjamin Kozuch - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (3):651-655.
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