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  1. Working Memory and Consciousness: the current state of play.Marjan Persuh, Eric LaRock & Jacob Berger - 2018 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12:323696.
    Working memory, an important posit in cognitive science, allows one to temporarily store and manipulate information in the service of ongoing tasks. Working memory has been traditionally classified as an explicit memory system – that is, as operating on and maintaining only consciously perceived information. Recently, however, several studies have questioned this assumption, purporting to provide evidence for unconscious working memory. In this paper, we focus on visual working memory and critically examine these studies as well as studies of unconscious (...)
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  2. ARGUING FROM CONSCIOUSNESS TO GOD's EXISTENCE VIA LOWE's DUALISM.Eric LaRock & Mostyn W. Jones - manuscript
    Arguments from consciousness to God’s existence (ACs) contend that physicalism is too problematic to explain the mind’s ultimate source. They add that theism probably better explains this source in terms of God making us in his own image (with conscious, unified, rational minds). But ACs are problematic too. First, physicalism has various competitors beside theism. Russellian monism and dual-aspect theory are examples. Second, all these theories, including theism, are seriously flawed. For example, it’s tied to traditional dualism, which has causal (...)
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  3. Are qualia computations or substances?Mostyn Jones & Eric LaRock - forthcoming - Mind and Matter:in press.
    Computationalism treats minds as computations. It hasn't explained how our quite similar sensory circuits encode our quite different qualia, nor how these circuits encode the binding of the different qualia into unifi ed perceptions. But there is growing evidence that qualia and binding come from neural electrochemical substances such as sensory detectors and the strong continuous electromagnetic field they create. Qualia may thus be neural substances, not neural computations (though computations may still help modulate qualia). This neuroelectrical view not only (...)
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  4. Consciousness and the Self without Reductionism: Touching Churchland's Nerve.Eric LaRock & Mostyn W. Jones - 2024 - In Mihretu P. Guta & Scott B. Rae (eds.), Taking Persons Seriously: Where Philosophy and Bioethics Intersect. Eugene, Oregon.: Pickwick Publications, Wipf and Stock Publishers.
    Patricia Churchland's Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain is her most recent wide-ranging argument for mind-to-brain reductionism. It's one of the leading anti-dualist works in neurophilosophy. It thus deserves careful attention by anti-reductionists. We survey the main arguments in this book for her thesis that the self is nothing but the brain. These arguments are based largely on the self's dependence upon neural activities as reflected in its various impairments, its unified experiences, and its powers of agency. We show (...)
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  5. E. J. Lowe's Metaphysics and Philosophical/Analytic Theology. Special Issue.Mihretu P. Guta & Eric LaRock - 2021 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 5 (2):1-216.
    The essays in this special issue focus on connecting the relevant aspects of Lowe’s metaphysics to issues in philosophical theology. In this regard, the essays focus on Trinity, divine causal agency, atonement, embodied existence, physicalism vs. dualism, natural science, and theological claims.
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  6. How Subjects Can Emerge from Neurons.Eric LaRock & Mostyn Jones - 2019 - Process Studies 48 (1):40-58.
    We pose a foundational problem for those who claim that subjects are ontologically irreducible, but causally reducible (weak emergence). This problem is neuroscience’s notorious binding problem, which concerns how distributed neural areas produce unified mental objects (such as perceptions) and the unified subject that experiences them. Synchrony, synapses and other mechanisms cannot explain this. We argue that this problem seriously threatens popular claims that mental causality is reducible to neural causality. Weak emergence additionally raises evolutionary worries about how we’ve survived (...)
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