Through the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, my paper explores a different theory of time. I reconstitute Deleuze’s paradoxes of the past in Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism to reveal a theory of time in which the relation between past and present is one of coexistence rather than succession. The theory of memory implied here is a non-representational one. To elaborate this theory, I ask: what is the role of the “virtual image” in Bergson’s Matter and Memory? Far from representing (...) the simple afterimage of a present perception, the “virtual image” carries multiple senses. Contracting the immediate past for the present, or expanding virtually to hold the whole of memory (and even the whole of the universe), the virtual image can form a bridge between the present and the non-representational past. This non-representational account of memory sheds light not only on the structure of time for Bergson, but also on his concepts of pure memory and virtuality. The rereading of memory also opens the way for Bergsonian intuition to play an intersubjective role; intuition becomes a means for navigating the resonances and dissonances that can be felt between different rhythms of becoming or planes of memory, which constitute different subjects. (shrink)

We present a framework for verifying systems composed of heterogeneous reasoning agents, in which each agent may have differing knowledge and inferential capabilities, and where the resources each agent is prepared to commit to a goal (time, memory and communication bandwidth) are bounded. The framework allows us to investigate, for example, whether a goal can be achieved if a particular agent, perhaps possessing key information or inferential capabilities, is unable (or unwilling) to contribute more than a given portion of its (...) available computational resources or bandwidth to the problem. We present a novel temporal epistemic logic, BMCL-CTL , which allows us to describe a set of reasoning agents with bounds on time, memory and the number of messages they can exchange. The bounds on memory and communication are expressed as axioms in the logic. As an example, we show how to axiomatise a system of agents which reason using resolution and prove that the resulting logic is sound and complete. We then show how to encode a simple system of reasoning agents specified in BMCL-CTL in the description language of the Mocha model checker (Alur et al., Proceedings of the tenth international conference on computer-aided verification (CAV) , 1998), and verify that the agents can achieve a goal only if they are prepared to commit certain time, memory and communication resources. (shrink)

Daniel Wegner argues that our feelings of conscious will are illusory: these feelings are not causally involved in the production of action, which is rather governed by unconscious neural processes. I argue that Wegner's interpretation of neuroscientific results rests on two fallacious causal assumptions, neither of which are supported by the evidence. Each assumption involves a Cartesian disembodiment of conscious will, and it is this disembodiment that results in the appearance of causal inefficacy, rather than any interesting features of conscious (...) will. Wegner's fallacies illustrate two take-away points to heed if making claims about the causal structure of agency. (shrink)

A functional theory of memory has already been developed as part of a general functional theory of cognition. The traditional conception of memory as “reproductive” touches on only a minor function. The primary function of memory is in constructing values for goal-directedness of everyday thought and action. This functional approach to memory rests on a solid empirical foundation.

are sharp rather than vague, that they can have no borderline cases. On the other hand, many who take conscious states to be identical to, or realized by, complex physical states are committed to the vagueness of those concepts. In the paper I argue that conscious state and conscious creature are sharp by presenting four necessary conditions for conceiving borderline cases in general, and showing that some of those conditions cannot be met with conscious state. I conclude that conscious state (...) is sharp, and the conclusion is then extended to conscious creature. The paper ends with a brief discussion of some implications. (shrink)

The limited capacity of immediate memory “rides” on the even more limited capacity of consciousness, which reflects the dynamic activity of the thalamocortical core of the brain. Recent views of the conscious narrow-capacity component of the brain are explored with reference to global workspace theory (Baars 1988; 1993; 1998). The radical limits of immediate memory must be explained in terms of biocognitive brain architecture.

?In everday language, the word ?attention? implies control of access to consciousness, and we adopt this usage here. Attention itself can be either voluntary or automatic. This can be readily modeled in the theory. Further, a contrastive analysis of spontaneously self?attributed vs. self?alien experiences suggests that ?self? can be interpreted as the more enduring, higher levels of the dominant context hierarchy, which create continuity over the changing flow of events. Since context is by definition unconscious in GW theory, self in (...) this sense is thought to be inherently unconscious as well. This proposal is consistent with a great deal of objective evidence. However, aspects of self may become known through ?conscious self-monitoring,? a process that ??is useful for self-evaluation and self?control. The results of conscious self-monitoring are combined with self?evaluation criteria, presumably of social origin, to produce a stable ?self?concept?, which functions as a supervisory system within the larger self organization. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a profound (...) influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

This book presents an overview of these studies and attempts to clarify apparently disparate results by placing them in a coherent theoretical framework.

As opposed to the dismissive attitude toward reductionism that is popular in current philosophy of mind, a “ruthless reductionism” is alive and thriving in “molecular and cellular cognition”—a field of research within cellular and molecular neuroscience, the current mainstream of the discipline. Basic experimental practices and emerging results from this field imply that two common assertions by philosophers and cognitive scientists are false: (1) that we do not know much about how the brain works, and (2) that lower-level neuroscience cannot (...) explain cognition and complex behavior directly. These experimental practices involve intervening directly with molecular components of sub-cellular and gene expression pathways in neurons and then measuring specific behaviors. These behaviors are tracked using tests that are widely accepted by experimental psychologists to study the psychological phenomenon at issue (e.g., memory, attention, and perception). Here I illustrate these practices and their importance for explanation and reduction in current mainstream neuroscience by describing recent work on social recognition memory in mammals. (shrink)

I’m now looking at a soccer ball and a Nintendo Game Cube, and thus am having a perceptual experience of a sphere and a cube. My friend, blind from birth, (who’s helping me with the cleaning) is touching these items, and is thus having a perceptual experience of the same things. Not only are we perceiving the same items, but in doing so we apply the terms ‘sphere’ and ‘cube’, respectively, to them. Are we, in doing so, applying the same, (...) or different, perceptual concepts? (shrink)

There is considerable contemporary interest in memory, both within the academy and in the public sphere. Little has been written by moral philosophers on the subject, however. In this timely book, Jeffrey Blustein explores the moral aspects and implications of memory, both personal and collective. He provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of memory, focusing on the value of memory, its relationship to identity, and the responsibilities associated with memory.

Two notions of memory are studied both syntactically and semantically: memory of past beliefs and memory of past actions. The analysis is carried out in a basic temporal logic framework enriched with beliefs and actions.

The author reflects upon the notions of personal memory, collective memory, myth, and evolved memory within her lived experience of Risdon Vale. These interrelated forms of memory influence understanding of place and sense of place. Personal memories corroborate and collaborate with intersubjective memories to inform collective memory. Both personal and collective memories are held within a fusion of cultural myths. Evolved memory binds us deeply within the history of the earth and the evolution of life. Risdon Vale provides fertile ground (...) for considerations of place and memory. This former public housing suburb is adjacent to Risdon Cove, the site of first occupation by the British in 1803 and the site of the first massacre of Aboriginal Tasmanians in 1804. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner's target article contains numerous but unsystematic references to the implicit or explicit knowledge of the temporal context of a known state of affairs such as may constitute the content of a propositional attitude. In this commentary, the forms of cognition that, according to D&P, require only implicit knowledge of time are contrasted with those for which explicit temporal knowledge is needed. It is suggested that the explicit representation of time may have been important in human evolution and (...) that certain developmental disorders including autism may be (partly) caused by defective ability to represent time. (shrink)

Ever since Plato proposed that memories are analogous to im- pressions in wax, many have suggested that memories are formed through the creation of traces, representations of the things remem- bered. That is still the received view among most cognitive scientists, who believe the remaining challenge is simply to determine the pre- cise physical nature of memory traces. However, there are compelling reasons for thinking that this standard view of memory is profoundly wrongheaded — in fact, disguised nonsense. This paper (...) considers, firstly, what those reasons are in detail. Secondly and more briefly, it considers how trace-like constructs have undermined various areas of parapsychological theorizing, especially in connection with the evi- dence for postmortem survival-for example, speculations about cellu- lar memory in transplant cases and genetic memory in reincarnation cases. Similar problems also emerge in areas often related to para- psychology — for example, Sheldrake’s (1981) account of morphic resonance. (shrink)

The notion of nonconceptual content in Dienes & Perner's theory is examined. A subject may be in a state with nonconceptual content without having the concepts that would be used to describe the state. Nonconceptual content does not seem to be a clear-cut case of either implicit or explicit knowledge. It underlies a kind of practical knowledge, which is not reducible to procedural knowledge, but is accessible to the subject and under voluntary control.

Much of ordinary memory is autobiographical; memory of what one saw and did, where and when. It may derive from your own past experiences, or from what other people told you about your past life. It may be phenomenologically rich, redolent of that autumn afternoon so long ago, or a few austere reports of what happened. But all autobiographical memory is first-person memory, stateable using ‘I’. It is a memory you would express by saying, ‘I remember I . . .’.

This article reports three experiments that investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and syllogistic and five-term series spatial inference. A series of complex and simple verbal and spatial working memory measures were employed. Correlational analyses showed that verbal and spatial working memory span tasks consistently predicted syllogistic and spatial reasoning performance. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that three factors best accounted for the data--a verbal, a spatial, and a general factor. Syllogistic reasoning performance loaded all three factors, whilst spatial (...) reasoning loaded only the general factor. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of reasoning theories and contemporary accounts of the structure of working memory. (shrink)

An issue much discussed by Indian philosophers and Western philosophers alike is one that concerns the need to assume a continuing self (or subject of experience) in giving an account of the world and our experience of it. This paper concentrates on two arguments put forward by the eighth-century AD Indian philosopher Sankara, in a short passage of his commentary on Badarayana's Brahmasutra. The innovative peculiarity of these arguments is that they rest on an appeal to the content of memory (...) judgements. Sankara takes the line that an analysis of the content of memory judgements shows that a Buddhist attempt to reconstrue memory as mere similarity between successive experiences is fundamentally flawed. Our concern, therefore, is whether Sankara's account of the content of memory judgements is correct, and whether it establishes the required continuity. (shrink)

Wegner (Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press) argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one—an argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation—is more promising. Yet is suffers from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and decision making (Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Psychology Press; Stanovich, K. (1999). Who is (...) rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum; Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge University Press). I shall argue that this lacuna can be filled by a plausible a priori claim about the causal role of anything deserving to be called ‘a will.’ The result is that there is no such thing as conscious willing: conscious will is, indeed, an illusion. (shrink)

Are there different constraints on theories of conscious experience as against theories of conscious propositional thought? Is what is problematic or puzzling about each of these phenomena of the same, or of different, types? And to what extent is it plausible to think that either or both conscious experience and conscious thought involve some sort of selfreference? In pursuing these questions I shall also explore the prospects for a defensible form of eliminativism concerning conscious thinking, one that would leave the (...) reality of conscious experience untouched. In the end, I shall argue that while there might be no such thing as conscious judging or conscious wanting, there is (or may well be) such a thing as conscious generic thinking. (shrink)

Do we conduct our conscious propositional thinking in natural language? Or is such language only peripherally related to human conscious thought-processes? In this paper I shall present a partial defence of the former view, by arguing that the only real alternative is eliminativism about conscious propositional thinking. Following some introductory remarks, I shall state the argument for this conclusion, and show how that conclusion can be true. Thereafter I shall defend each of the three main premises in turn.

Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science.

A tacit and highly idealized model of the agent's memory is presupposed in philosophy. The main features of a more psychologically realistic duplex (orn-plex) model are sketched here. It is argued that an adequate understanding of the rationality of an agent's actions is not possible without a satisfactory theory of the agent's memory and of the trade-offs involved in management of the memory, particularly involving compartmentalization of the belief set. The discussion identifies some basic constraints on the organization of knowledge (...) representations in general. (shrink)

Dienes and Perner’s theory is not a satisfactory theory of implicit knowledge because by endorsing the representational theory of knowledge, the authors also inadvertently accept that only explicit knowledge can be causally efficacious, and hence that implicit knowledge is an inert category. This conflation between causal efficacy, knowledge, and explicitness is made clear through the authors' strategy, which consists of attributing any observable effect to the existence of representations that are as minimally explicit as needed to account for behavior. In (...) contrast, we believe that causally efficacious and fully implicit knowledge exists, and is best embodied in frameworks that depart radically from classical assumptions. (shrink)

A significant part of everyday learning occurs incidentally — a process typically described as implicit learning. A central issue in this domain and others, such as language acquisition, is the extent to which performance depends on the acquisition and deployment of abstract rules. Shanks and colleagues [22], [11] have suggested (1) that discrimination between grammatical and ungrammatical instances of a biconditional grammar requires the acquisition and use of abstract rules, and (2) that training conditions — in particular whether instructions orient (...) participants to identify the relevant rules or not — strongly influence the extent to which such rules will be learned. In this paper, we show (1) that a Simple Recurrent Network can in fact, under some conditions, learn a biconditional grammar, (2) that training conditions indeed influence learning in simple auto-associators networks and (3) that such networks can likewise learn about biconditional grammars, albeit to a lesser extent than human participants. These findings suggest that mastering biconditional grammars does not require the acquisition of abstract rules to the extent implied by Shanks and colleagues, and that performance on such material may in fact be based, at least in part, on simple associative learning mechanisms. (shrink)

In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.

Time plays a central role in consciousness, at different levels and in different aspects of information processing. Subliminal perception experiments demonstrate that stimuli presented too briefly to enter conscious awareness are nevertheless processed to some extent. Implicit learning, implicit memory, and conditioning studies suggest that the extent to which memory traces are available for verbal report and for cognitive control is likewise dependent on the time available for processing during acquisition. Differences in the time available for processing also determine not (...) only the extent to which one becomes conscious of action, but also provides the basis for making attributions of authorship to experienced acts. In this paper, we offer a brief overview of these different findings and suggest that they can all be understood based on the fact that consciousness takes time. From this perspective, the availability of representations to conscious awareness depends on the quality of these representations — the extent to which they are strong, stable in time, and distinctive. High-quality representations occur when processes of global competition have had sufficient time to operate so as to make the system settle into the best possible interpretation of the input. Such processes implement global constraint satisfaction and critically depend on reentrant processing, through which representations can be further enriched by high-level constraints. We discuss these ideas in light of current theories of consciousness, emphasizing the fact that consciousness should be viewed as a process rather than as a static property associated with some states and not with others. (shrink)

Implicit learning is the process through which we become sensitive to certain regularities in the environment (1) in the absence of intention to learn about those regularities (2) in the absence of awareness that one is learning, and (3) in such a way that the resulting knowledge is difficult to express.

Complete URL to this document: http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/93-Principles.html.

referred to as implicit learning (Reber, 1989). Implicit learning contrasts with explicit learning (exhibited for.

What do people learn when they do not know that they are learning? Until recently, all of the work in the area of implicit learning focused on empirical questions and methods. In this book, Axel Cleeremans explores unintentional learning from an information-processing perspective. He introduces a theoretical framework that unifies existing data and models on implicit learning, along with a detailed computational model of human performance in sequence-learning situations.

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

Over the past decade, sequence learning has gradually become a central paradigm through which to study implicit learning. In this chapter, we start by briefly summarizing the results obtained with different variants of the sequence learning paradigm. We distinguish three subparadigms in terms of whether the stimulus material is generated either by following a fixed and repeating sequence (e.g., Nissen & Bullemer, 1987), by relying on a complex set of rules from which one can produce several alternative deterministic sequences (e.g., (...) Lewicki, Hill & Bizot, 1988; Stadler, 1989), or by following the output of a probabilistic set of rules such as instantiated by noisy finite-state grammars (Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991; Jiménez, Mendéz & Cleeremans, 1996). Next, we focus on the processes involved in sequence representation and acquisition. We suggest that the sensitivity to the sequential structure observed in the probabilistic subparadigm can only be a result of the acquisition of a representation of the statistical constraints of the material, and that this sensitivity emerges through the operation of mechanisms that are well instantiated by connectionist models such as the Simple Recurrent Network (Elman, 1990; Cleeremans, 1993b). We present new simulation work meant to explore to what extent the model can also account for specific data obtained in a paradigmatic instance of deterministic, rule-based sequence learning task: Lewicki et al. (1988)'s situation. Finally, we report on the results of an experiment that compares learning on otherwise similar deterministic and probabilistic structures, and we show that learning of both types of structures is equivalent only under conditions that maximally hinder explicit acquisition. Taken together, these simulation and experimental data lend support to the claim that implicit learning in all three sequence learning subparadigms can amount to a form of statistical sequence learning. They also suggest that distinguishing among several theories of sequence representation and acquisition may require us to analize the data in great detail. Hopefully, however, some truth can be found in such details.. (shrink)