Rodney M.J. Cotterill, Evolution, Cognition and Consciousness  abstract
Michael V. Antony, Is ‘Consciousness’ Ambiguous?   abstract
Kathleen Taylor, Applying Continuous Modelling to Consciousness  abstract
Barbara Montero, Post-Physicalism   abstract
Marc Bekoff, Social Play Behaviour: Cooperation, Fairness, Trust and the Evolution of Morality   abstract    full text

REVIEW ARTICLE

Benny Shanon, The Divine Within: Review of Huston Smith’s Cleansing the Doors of Perception  full text

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ABSTRACTS

Michael V. Antony

Is ‘Consciousness’ Ambiguous?

It is widely assumed that ‘consciousness’ (and its cognates) is multiply ambiguous within the consciousness literature. Some alleged senses of the term are access consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, state consciousness, creature consciousness, introspective consciousness, self consciousness, to name a few. In the paper I argue for two points. First, there are few if any good reasons for thinking that such alleged senses are genuine: ‘consciousness’ is best viewed as univocal within the literature. The second point is that researchers would do best to avoid the semantics of ‘consciousness’, since resorting to ‘semantic ascent’ typically serves no clear purpose in the case of consciousness, and confuses matters more than anything else.

Correspondence: Michael V. Antony, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
E-mail: antony@research.haifa.ac.il

Marc Bekoff

Social Play Behaviour. Cooperation, Fairness, Trust and the Evolution of Morality

People often wonder if some nonhuman animal beings (hereafter animals) have codes of social conduct that regulate their behaviour in terms of what is permissible and what is not permissible during social encounters. In a recent issue of this journal (Volume 7, No. 1–2, 2000), researchers from many disciplines debated the evolutionary origins of morality. Essentially, they were interested in discussing animal roots on which human morality might be built, even if it is not identical to animal morality. Charles Darwin’s (1859; 1872/1998) ideas about evolutionary continuity, namely that behavioural, cognitive, and emotional variations among different species are differences in degree rather than difference in kind, are often invoked in such exercises.

Here I briefly discuss some comparative data on social play behaviour in hope of broadening the array of species in which researchers attempt to study animal morality. I am specifically concerned with the notion of ‘behaving fairly’. In the term ‘behaving fairly’ I use as a working guide the notion that animals often have social expectations when they engage in various sorts of social encounters the violation of which constitutes being treated unfairly because of a lapse in social etiquette. I will cash this out below in my discussion of social play behaviour.

Correspondence: Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, Department of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0334, USA .
Email: marc.bekoff@colorado.edu

Rodney M.J. Cotterill

Evolution, Cognition and Consciousness

It is suggested that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness lies in its mediating the acquisition of novel context-specific reflexes, particularly when the context has temporally varying components. Such acquisition is conjectured to require evaluation of feedback stimuli evoked by the animal’s self-paced probing of its environment, or by memories of the outcome of previous such probings, and the evaluation is postulated to be predicated on attention. It is argued that such an approach automatically incorporates sensation into the phenomenon, sensation arising from an interplay between the nervous system and the skeletal musculature, and not from the nervous system alone. This theory avoids the increasingly untenable view that consciousness is part of the normal chain of events linking unprovoked stimuli in the outside world with immediate voluntary reactions to them. The theory should prove attractive to those who might otherwise feel compelled by neurophysiology to embrace epiphenomenalism. It also provides a means of bridging the explanatory gap, and of resolving the celebrated hard problem of consciousness.

Correspondence: Rodney Cotterill, Biophysics, Building 307, Danish Technical University, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark.
Email: rodney.cotterill@fysik.dtu.dk

Barbara Montero

Post-Physicalism

What is the problem, inherited from Descartes, that we now call ‘the mind–body problem’? In his most recent book, Jaegwon Kim provides an answer with which many would agree. ‘Through the 70s and 80s and down to this day,’ Kim tells us, ‘the mind–body problem — our mind–body problem — has been that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical’ (Kim, 1998, p. 2). This problem, which at one time was at home mainly in departments of philosophy, is now studied by a broad range of disciplines. One finds, for example, neuroscientists arguing that certain discoveries about the brain show that consciousness is physical; researchers in artificial intelligence claiming that because human thought can simulated by complex computers, thought requires nothing beyond the physical; and evolutionary biologists declaring that insights into the evolution of the mind indicate that it must be fundamentally physical. But what does it mean to be physical? While the basic results of the research being done may be clear enough, how are we to interpret the further claim ‘and this shows that the mind is physical’? The answer is that we have no idea.
 I am going to argue that it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind–body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level entirely nonmental. The mind–body problem, I want to argue, is the problem of determining whether mentality can be accounted for in terms of nonmental phenomena. In other words, it is the question, ‘is mentality a fundamental feature of the world?’

Correspondence: Barbara Montero, Dept. Of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, 1001 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Email: bmontero@pitt.edu

Kathleen Taylor

Applying Continuous Modelling to Consciousness

Abstract: Much of neuroscience is currently dominated by an information processing metaphor which is largely conceptualized in discrete terms. An alternative metaphor conceptualizes information flow as continuous. A qualitative set of hypotheses based on this metaphor, the energy model, is described here. This model considers information transfer in terms of the flow of an abstract variable, energy, between points in a field comprising the extent of the nervous system. Although extremely simple, it generates some intriguing consequences. In particular, it provides a useful way in which to look at consciousness. Traditional problems of consciousness, such as qualia and the unity of consciousness, are briefly addressed, and outlines are sketched of the answers given by the energy model.

Correspondence: Kathleen Taylor, University Laboratory of Physiology, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PT, UK.
Email: kathleen.taylor@physiol.ox.ac.uk


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