Online research in philosophy

Defining consciousness along the lines of Nagel, an organism has consciousness iff there is something it is like to be that organism, I relate three types of consciousness (phenomenal, access and reflexive) to the three types of short-term memory (sensory memories, short-term working memory and the central executive). The suggestion is that these short-term memory stores may be a key feature of consciousness.

Perception enables us to think demonstrative thoughts about the world around us, but what must perception be like in order to play this role? Does perception enable demonstrative thought only if it is conscious? This paper examines three accounts of the role of consciousness in demonstrative thought, which agree that consciousness is essential for demonstrative thought, but disagree about why it is. First, I consider and reject the accounts proposed by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference and by John Campbell in Reference and Consciousness before offering an alternative proposal of my own. My proposal is that consciousness plays an essential epistemic role in explaining the capacity for demonstrative thought about an object by enabling the subject to form immediately justified beliefs about the object.

The present commentary agrees with many of the points made by Ruchkin et al., but brings up several important differences in assumptions. These assumptions have to do with the nature of the capacity limit in working memory and the possible bases of working-memory activation.

Ruchkin et al.'s view of working memory as activated long-term memory is more compatible with language processing than models such as Baddeley's, but it raises questions about individual differences in working memory and the validity of domain-general capacity estimates. Does it make sense to refer to someone as having low working memory capacity if capacity depends on particular knowledge structures tapped by the task?

The authors' results support a functionalist conception of working memory: a manifold repertoire of schemes/schemas (long-term memory) and a small set of general-purpose “hidden operators.” Using some of these operators I define mental (i.e., endogenous) attention. Then, analyzing two of the authors' unexplained important findings, I illustrate the mental-attention model's explanatory power. Multivariate methodology that varies developmental, task differences, and individual differences is recommended.

Single-unit data from the cortex of monkeys performing working-memory tasks support the main point of the target article. Those data, however, also indicate that the activation of long-term memory is essential to the processing of all cognitive functions. The activation of cortical long-term memory networks is a key neural mechanism in attention (working memory is a form thereof), perception, memory acquisition and retrieval, intelligence, and language.