40 research outputs found
The Disunity of Consciousness
It is commonplace for both philosophers and cognitive scientists to express their allegiance to the
"unity of consciousness". This is the claim that a subjectÂ’s phenomenal consciousness, at any one
moment in time, is a single thing. This view has had a major influence on computational theories
of consciousness. In particular, what we call single-track theories dominate the literature,
theories which contend that our conscious experience is the result of a single consciousness-making
process or mechanism in the brain. We argue that the orthodox view is quite wrong:
phenomenal experience is not a unity, in the sense of being a single thing at each instant. It is a
multiplicity, an aggregate of phenomenal elements, each of which is the product of a distinct
consciousness-making mechanism in the brain. Consequently, cognitive science is in need of a
multi-track theory of consciousness; a computational model that acknowledges both the
manifold nature of experience, and its distributed neural basis
Blazars in the Fermi Era: The OVRO 40-m Telescope Monitoring Program
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
provides an unprecedented opportunity to study gamma-ray blazars. To capitalize
on this opportunity, beginning in late 2007, about a year before the start of
LAT science operations, we began a large-scale, fast-cadence 15 GHz radio
monitoring program with the 40-m telescope at the Owens Valley Radio
Observatory (OVRO). This program began with the 1158 northern (declination>-20
deg) sources from the Candidate Gamma-ray Blazar Survey (CGRaBS) and now
encompasses over 1500 sources, each observed twice per week with a ~4 mJy
(minimum) and 3% (typical) uncertainty. Here, we describe this monitoring
program and our methods, and present radio light curves from the first two
years (2008 and 2009). As a first application, we combine these data with a
novel measure of light curve variability amplitude, the intrinsic modulation
index, through a likelihood analysis to examine the variability properties of
subpopulations of our sample. We demonstrate that, with high significance
(7-sigma), gamma-ray-loud blazars detected by the LAT during its first 11
months of operation vary with about a factor of two greater amplitude than do
the gamma-ray-quiet blazars in our sample. We also find a significant (3-sigma)
difference between variability amplitude in BL Lacertae objects and
flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), with the former exhibiting larger
variability amplitudes. Finally, low-redshift (z<1) FSRQs are found to vary
more strongly than high-redshift FSRQs, with 3-sigma significance. These
findings represent an important step toward understanding why some blazars emit
gamma-rays while others, with apparently similar properties, remain silent.Comment: 23 pages, 24 figures. Submitted to ApJ
The Step to Rationality: The Efficacy of Thought Experiments in Science, Ethics, and Free Will
Will Science and Consciousness Ever Meat? Complexity, Symmetry and Qualia
Within recent discussions in the Philosophy of Mind, the nature of conscious phenomenal states or qualia (also called ‘raw feels’ or the feel of ‘what it is like to be’) has been an important focus of interest. Proponents of Mind-Body Type-Identity theories have claimed that mental states can be reduced to neurophysiological states of the brain. Others have denied that such a reduction is possible; for them, there remains an explanatory gap. In this paper, functionalist, physicalist, epiphenomenalist, and biological models of the mind are discussed and compared. Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism is proposed as a unifying framework for a non-reductive theory of qualia and consciousness. Downward Causation, Emergence through Symmetry-breaking, and Dynamical Systems Theory are used to show how consciousness and qualia emerge from their neural substrate and can also be causally efficacious