Philosophy of Mind Commons^™

Thinking About Thinking Chickens, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

This response focuses on three major conceptual threads that run through the peer commentary on my target article: (1) how the use of chickens influences our views of them, (2) whether education is effective, and (3) what components of chicken psychology are most relevant to understanding who chickens are.

Re-Reading Anscombe On 'I', Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

According to a certain ‘Straight Reading’ of Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘The First Person’, she holds a Radically Non-Referring view of ‘I’. Specifically, ‘I’ is analogized to the expletive ‘it’ in ‘It’s raining’. I argue that this is not her position. Her substantive view on ‘I’, rather, is that if what you mean by ‘referring term’ is a certain rich and recherché Frege-inspired notion, then ‘I’ is not one. Her methodological point is that one shouldn’t be bewitched by language into thinking that ‘I’, because of its syntax and logical role, must exhibit ‘reference’ in this sense. Anscombe uses this insight to …

An Anscombean Reference For I?, Andrew Botterell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

If Nonhuman Animals Can Suicide, Why Don’T They?, C. A. Soper, Todd K. Shackelford

Animal Sentience

An evolutionary analysis suggests that selection is unlikely to have tolerated the capacity for intentional self-killing in nonhuman animals. The potential to escape pain by suicide would have presented a recurrent and severe adaptive problem for an animal with a reproductive future to protect. If the potential for suicide arose in the evolutionary past, anti-suicide mechanisms may have co-evolved, as we believe they have in adult humans. Peña-Guzmán’s (2017) argument that some nonhuman animals can suicide is incomplete without an account of the defences that result in the vast majority opting not to.

Chicken Minds And Moral Standing, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

Some of the cognitive traits that Marino reviews are not in themselves relevant to ethics, either for chickens or human infants, but affective traits are, among them desires.

Nietzsche On Loneliness, Self-Transformation, And The Eternal Recurrence, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche's presentation of the eternal recurrence in Gay Science 341 is often viewed as a practical thought experiment meant to radically transform us. But exactly why and how we are supposed to be transformed is not clear. I contend that addressing these issues requires taking a close look at the psychological setting of the passage. The eternal recurrence is presented in our “loneliest loneliness.” I argue that facing the eternal recurrence from a state of profound loneliness both motivates self-transformation and contributes toward helping us succeed at that project.

In The Mind Of The Machine, Marcia Yang

CMC Senior Theses

As technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly important to understand how we should ethically use technology. One question within this area of study is whether we should treat certain types of technology, like artificial intelligence, with more respect. If we do owe these machines some sort of moral status, another question is what level of moral status they have. In order to answer these questions, I argue that machines can be considered as minds under the view of machine functionalism. A significant problem for machine functionalism is whether it can account for emotions within the system it suggests. First, …

Owning Our Implicit Attitudes: Responsibility, Resentment, And The Whole Self, Wesley Whitaker

CMC Senior Theses

Are implicit biases something we can rightly be held responsible for, and if so, how? A variety of social and cognitive psychological studies have documented the existence of wide-ranging implicit biases for over 30 years. These implicit biases can best be described as negative mental attitudes that operate immediately and unconsciously in response to specific stimuli. The first chapter of this thesis surveys the psychological literature, as well as presents findings of real-world experiments into racial biases. I then present the dominant model of implicit attitudes as mere associations, followed by evidence that at least some implicit attitudes take on …

Digitization Of The World: A Phenomenology Of Digitization, Thomas C. Adolphs

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The dissertation analyzes digitization through a phenomenological lens, understanding the digitization as an “outgrowth” of a potential that was always already latent within our being as the human-being. The analysis primarily utilizes the philosophic work of the 20^th century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Through their philosophies, I seek to synthesize Heidegger’s concept of de-severance with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of embodiment and the world as possessing depth. In doing so, I bring these theoretical concepts together to build a phenomenological “picture” of how it is that the digitization of the world came into being. All the while, my ultimate …

Wilderness Solitude In The 21st Century, Thomas C. Lang

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Recent advances in mobile communication technology have led to a decrease in opportunities for individuals to experience alone-time within daily life. As a result, the solitude offered by wilderness landscapes has become all the more valuable. Past research on wilderness solitude has been divided into two distinct frameworks: the Social-Spatial Perspective and the Humanistic Perspective. This distinction has severely limited the development of a comprehensive research model that incorporates all the possible conditions relating to wilderness solitude. This study synthesized past research and theory to create a quantitative model of wilderness solitude which includes elements from both research perspectives, while …

Can A Dog Be Jealous?, Yaoguang Jiang, Annamarie W. Huttunen, Michael L. Platt

Animal Sentience

Whether humans alone experience complex emotions like jealousy or envy remains hotly debated, partly because of the difficulty of measuring them without a verbal report. Cook, Berns and colleagues use functional brain imaging to identify in dogs neural responses very similar to those evoked by jealousy in humans. When dogs see their caregiver reward a facsimile dog, their amygdala is activated and the strength of this response predicts aggressive behavior — just as jealousy leads to aggression in humans. The authors conclude that dogs feel something very similar to human jealousy. This novel and creative study tackles one of the …

The Many Faces Of Fear And Vigilance, Guy Beauchamp

Animal Sentience

In the target article, I examined the relationship between vigilance and fear in prey animals. The joint occurrence of vigilance and other physiological responses to fear, such as increased heart rate and stress hormone release, would bolster the idea that vigilance can be a useful marker of fear. Nevertheless, a common theme in much of the empirical research is an uncoupling of vigilance and physiological correlates of fear. The commentators suggest several ways to refine the concepts of vigilance, fear, and risk. I discuss these refinements, which in the end will prove useful to assess further the relationship between vigilance …

On Crabs And Statistics, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I respond to commentaries by Elwood and Seth & Dienes and to a recent critique by Diggles, discussing the link between avoidance learning and sentience, the relevance of the clash between frequentist and Bayesian statistics, the risks to decapod welfare in aquaculture, and the broader concerns one may have about a “precautionary” approach to protecting invertebrates.

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Researchers, Not Dogs, Lack Control In An Experiment On Jealousy, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Cook and colleagues (2018) have developed a clever method to measure fMRI in awake dogs in response to a number of interesting stimuli. As a result, they are able to determine neural correlates of observable behavior. They report that dogs may experience something akin to jealousy because they show greater amygdala activation in response to food being given to a fake dog versus food being placed in a bucket. However, several critical controls are missing which prevent the authors from being able to speak of jealousy.

Finding The Green-Eyed Monster In The Brain Of A Dog, Peter Singer

Animal Sentience

That dogs show behavior suggestive of jealousy has long been known and has been demonstrated under controlled conditions. Cook et al. have now shown arousal in the amygdala when dogs see a caregiver feeding another dog. This finding has ethical significance in two respects. First, the consideration shown by the investigators for the welfare of their experimental subjects sets an example for other researchers using animals. Second, the greater understanding of the emotional lives of animals should lead to more concern for their needs.

Jealousy, Competition, Or A Contextual Cue For Reward?, Thomas R. Zentall

Animal Sentience

Emotions are difficult to assess, even in humans. The attribution of jealousy in an animal like a dog is especially difficult because performance of a particular behavior in the context of another animal receiving a reward may not be easily distinguishable from intra-species competition or simply a response to a contextual cue for the availability of reward. The authors provide distinguishing evidence in the form of fMRI data to show that in the presence of a “fake” dog being fed, there is bilateral activation in the amygdala, an area associated with anxiety, anger, fear, and even jealousy in humans.

What Can The Social Emotions Of Dogs Teach Us About Human Emotions?, Dean Mobbs

Animal Sentience

It has long been believed that social emotions such as guilt and jealousy are only expressed in humans. In the case of jealousy, its adaptive value has been linked to the prevention of sexual infidelity or fairness. So why would dogs feel jealousy? I suggest that understanding how social emotions have been bred into dogs can help us understand our own emotions, including their functionality — and potentially their mechanisms.

Can Neuroimaging In Dogs Have Practical Implications?, Tiffani J. Howell

Animal Sentience

Jealousy, or at least aggression, can be observed in dogs using neuroimaging techniques, but this response attenuates quickly following repeated exposure to the aggression-inducing stimulus. This may have a practical application. Early socialisation as a puppy, and habituation as an adult dog, could help prevent undesirable behaviours such as predatory behaviour. It is unclear whether these processes are the same, and affected only by the dog’s age. Neuroimaging could help us understand whether the same neurological processes underlie socialisation and habituation, and whether self-rewarding behaviours such as predatory behaviour could be stopped using socialisation/habituation techniques.

Lessons From Behaviour For Brain Imaging, Carolyn J. Walsh

Animal Sentience

Integrating physiological and behavioural arousal with social context is fundamental to understanding affect in dogs. Cook et al. (2018) have made a worthy start towards illuminating the neural basis of dog affect underlying resource loss. However, their study depends on retrospective behaviour reports versus direct testing, and an interpretation of differential neural activation that is based on too few dogs. Research groups conducting canine brain-imaging work might: (1) consider collaborative approaches to augment sample sizes and replicability, and (2) take a recent lesson from dog behavioural research regarding a more cautious approach to applying functional labels to physiological and/or behavioural …