Eric LaRock, Ph.D.
Department
of Philosophy
Email: larock.consciousness@gmail.com
Research Areas:
•
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy
of Neuroscience (especially consciousness)
•
Ancient Greek
Philosophy
•
Metaphysics
Articles Published
or In Press (all refereed):
•
Is Consciousness Really a Brain Process? Forthcoming in International
Philosophical Quarterly.
•
Intrinsic Perspectives,
Object Feature Binding, and Visual Consciousness. Forthcoming in Theory and Psychology (Sage
Publications,
•
Disambiguation,
Binding, and the Unity of Visual Consciousness. Forthcoming in Theory and Psychology
(Sage Publications,
•
Why Neural Synchrony
Fails to Explain the Unity of Visual Consciousness. Behavior and Philosophy, 2006,
vol. 34: 39-58. (
•
Cognition and Emotion:
Aristotelian Affinities with Contemporary Emotion Research. (with K. Kafetsios,
•
Against the
Functionalist Reading of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Perception and
Emotion. International Philosophical Quarterly, 2002, vol. 42: pp. 231-258.
•
Dualistic Interaction,
Neural Dependence, and Aquinas’s Composite View. Philosophia Christi,
2001, vol. 3: pp. 459-472.
•
Augustine on Time,
Mind, and Personal Identity. Augustinus, 2001, vol. 46, pp. 251-271.
Books in Progress:
•
The Unity of Visual
Consciousness: A Kantian Approach
•
Consciousness,
Causation, and Agency: The Rise of Aristotle in Neuroscience
Dissertation Area:
Consciousness & Neuroscience
Title: The Unities of Visual Awareness (
Advisor: Dr. George Terzis
Reader: Dr. Michael Barber
External Reader: Dr. Jesse Prinz (UNC
Papers Presented
(all refereed):
•
“A Kantian
Solution to the Problem of Diachronic Object Unity,” 9th International
Conference on Persons, held at the
•
“Why Moral Agency
is Irreducible to Neural Activity,” 14th International
Conference on Bioethics, Bioethics Nexus:
The Future of Healthcare, Science, and Humanity, July 2007.
•
“Aristotle and
the Strong Emergence of Consciousness”, De Anima and Its Interpreters,
•
“Disambiguation,
Binding, and the Unity of Visual Consciousness,” Southern Society for
Philosophy and Psychology (April 2006)
•
“Neural Synchrony,
Attention, and Unified Visual Consciousness,” Toward a Science of
Consciousness, Sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies,
University of
•
“Neural Synchrony
and Subjectivity in Perceptual Consciousness,” Selves, Souls, and Survival,
•
“Why Neural
Synchrony Fails to Explain the Unity of Visual Consciousness,”
•
“The Unity of
Visual Consciousness,” Neurophilosophy: The State of the Art,
California Institute of Technology (June 2005)
•
“Why Neural
Mechanisms Fail to Explain the Unity of Visual Consciousness,” Toward
a Science of Consciousness, Sponsored by the Center for Consciousness
Studies, University of
•
“Feature
Ambiguity, Binding, and the Self’s Unified Experience,” Toward a
Science of Consciousness, Sponsored by the Center for Consciousness
Studies, University of
•
“Against the
Functionalist Reading of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Emotion,” Mephistos
Philosophy of Science Conference, University of Notre Dame (April 2001)
•
“Augustine on
Time, Mind, and Personal Identity,”
Abstracts of
Recent Research Articles:
Is Consciousness Really a Brain Process?
U. T.
Place articulates an affirmative response to the title of his article,
“Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” Place’s central thesis is
that “we can identify consciousness with a given pattern of brain
activity, if we can explain the subject’s introspective observations by
reference to the brain processes with which they are correlated.”
Presumably consciousness is identical to a brain process because conscious
events can in some sense be directly correlated with neural events. What is meant by the direct neural
correlates of consciousness is that all conscious events are caused by and
wholly explainable in terms of neural events. This stronger construal of the neural
correlates of consciousness will suffice to establish type-type identity and
abate problems that confront looser kinds of correlation. Place’s thesis is representative
of a theory of mind known as type-type identity theory: types of conscious
events are reducible to (and therefore identical with) types of physiochemical
events of the brain. After reviewing some philosophical reactions to
Place’s reductionist view of consciousness, I argue on the basis of
recent findings in neuroscience that consciousness is not a brain process, and then explore some alternative, non-reductive
options concerning the metaphysical relationship between consciousness and the
brain, such as weak and strong accounts of the emergence of consciousness and
the constitution view of consciousness. I propose an Aristotelian account of
the strong emergence of consciousness.
This account says that an adequate explanation of consciousness cannot
be achieved in terms of neural reduction and/or efficient causation alone, as
the identity theorists assume, but will likely involve adopting a wider
ontology and reference to other notions of causation, such as formal causation
(see Aristotle, Physics, II, 3; see
also LaRock, 2002, 2005). What is
meant by formal causation, in this
context, is that consciousness has the causal power to organize or control
neuronal activity. This notion of causation is elaborated and defended in light
of recent empirical findings in the neurosciences. An advantage of this
empirically informed approach is that proponents of the irreducibility of
consciousness no longer need to rely upon philosophical arguments alone, but
can build a case against reductionism that has a significant empirical
foundation. (Forthcoming in International
Philosophical Quarterly)
Key Words: Aristotle,
Causation, Consciousness, Correlation, Emergentism, Neural Reduction, Type-Type
Identity Theory
Disambiguation, Binding, and
the Unity of Visual Consciousness
Recent
findings in neuroscience strongly suggest that an object’s features (e.g.,
its color, texture, shape, etc.) are represented in separate areas of the
visual cortex. Although represented in separate neuronal areas, somehow the
feature representations are brought together as a single, unified object of
visual consciousness. This raises a
question of binding: how do neural activities in separate areas of the visual
cortex function to produce feature-unified objects of visual consciousness?
Several prominent neuroscientists have adopted neural synchrony and
attention-based approaches to explain object feature binding. I argue that although neural synchrony
and/or attentional mechanisms might function to disambiguate an object’s
features, it is difficult to see how either of these mechanisms could fully explain the unity of an object’s
features at the level of visual consciousness. After presenting a detailed critique of
neural synchrony and attention-based approaches to object feature binding, I
propose Interactive Hierarchical
Structuralism (IHS). This view suggests that a unified
percept (i.e., a feature-unified object of visual consciousness) is not reducible to the activity of any
cognitive capacity or to any localized neural area, but emerges out of the interaction of visual information organized by
spatial structuring capacities correlated with lower, higher, and intermediate
levels of the visual hierarchy.
After clarifying different notions of emergence and elaborating evidence
for IHS, I discuss how IHS can be tested through transcranial magnetic
stimulation and backward masking.
In the final section I present some further implications/advantages of
IHS. (Forthcoming in Theory and
Psychology)
Key Words:
Ambiguity, Attention, Binding, Consciousness, Disambiguation, Emergentism,
Spatial Structure, Unified Experience, Object Perception.