5 papers in the library · 4 citations · publishing 1993-2025
Adaptive Behavior May 6, 2025 Don Ross
Veit (2023) provides a framework for modelling and empirically investigating varieties of consciousness as a Darwinian phenomenon, based on abduction from life histories of animals. The alleged ‘hard problem’ is exposed as an artefact of ignoring mechanisms by which increasingly complex varieties of consciousness evolved under selection pressure over evolutionary time. I illustrate Veit’s...
The Mind as a Scientific Object January 13, 2005 Don Ross
Abstract If the scientific study of consciousness was once neglected-as almost every book published on the subject begins by reminding us-the opposite has been the case during the past decade. Shelves groan with recent books, articles, and new journals as cognitive scientists crowd into the space left vacant since the project of “scientific phenomenology,” as Edmund Husserl imagined it, was...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences October 1, 2004 Don Ross, David Spurrett
A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and...
Dialogue 1993 Don Ross 4 citations
Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often...
Dialogue 1993 Don Ross, John Thorp
Though the days of consciousness-raising are mostly passed, the days of consciousness seem to be upon us, or, at least, to be upon philosophers. Dennett's recentConsciousness Explainedis the flagship for a flotilla of new major works on the subject, by Flanagan (1992), Jackendoff (1988), Searle (1992), Seager (1992) and others. It seems to be something of a convention in such work that one...