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From his homepage:

Born in the American Midwest (Kansas City), I grew up in Amsterdam/Holland, Bonn/Germany, Ottawa/Canada, and Rabat/Marocco where I graduated from the Lycée Descartes with a French Baccalaurèat (Section C) in 1974.

I studied Physics and Philosophy in Tübingen, Germany. I was awarded a Master of Physics in 1980 (writing my Master Thesis under Prof. Mario Del Cin) and my PhD from the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen in 1982. The eye-catching thesis title was Nonlinear information processing in dendritic trees of arbitrary geometry. I had two Doctor-Fathers (thesis advisors), Prof. Valentin Braitenberg and Prof. Tomaso (Tommy) Poggio.

Subsequently, I followed Tommy to Boston, where I spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT.

In the fall of 1986, I joined the California Institute of Technology's newly started Computation and Neural Systems PhD program as an Assistant Professor. Caltech, in beautiful Southern California, is an oasis, an ivory-tower dedicated to educating the best and brightest in the way of science and the pursuit of the truth.

Posted by saeid at 08:12 PM | Permalink

From his homepage:

My laboratory is interested in the cell biology of learning and memory in simple organisms. In our research we use two animals, the marine snail Aplysia californica, and the zebrafish (Danio rerio). Work on Aplysia: This invertebrate has a comparatively simple nervous system (~ 20,000 neurons) that provides a valuable experimental model for understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie simple forms of learning, such as habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning. Another experimental advantage of Aplysia is that sensory and motor neurons that mediate specific reflexes of the animal can be placed into dissociated cell culture where they will reform their synaptic connections. These in vitro sensorimotor synapses are extremely useful for cellular and molecular studies of short- and long-term learning-related synaptic plasticity. Currently, my laboratory is investigating the modulation of AMPA-type glutamate receptors during learning in Aplysia. We have found that serotonin, an endogenous monoamine that plays a central role in learning, modulates the efficacy of AMPA receptors in the motor neurons. Our current evidence indicates that serotonin modulates the trafficking of AMPA receptors in the motor neurons, causing additional receptors to be delivered to postsynaptic sites via exocytosis. We also wish to know whether long-term learning in Aplysia involves changes in the expression of glutamate receptors. We have cloned and sequenced ten AMPA-type and one NMDA-type glutamate receptor from the CNS of Aplysia. Currently, we are using the techniques of in situ hybridization and quantitative RT-PCR to examine whether long-term sensitization and long-term habituation are accompanied by changes in glutamate receptor expression. Work on the zebrafish: The zebrafish has been used extensively in studies of development. It has not been commonly used in behavioral studies, however. This is unfortunate, because the zebrafish has significant advantages for genetic and molecular studies of behavior, including studies of learning and memory. The zebrafish is amenable to both forwards and reverse genetics. Furthermore, although it is a vertebrate with a complex vertebrate nervous system, it possesses reflexive behaviors that are mediated by relatively simple neural circuits in the spinal cord and brainstem. One such reflex, the startle reflex, is under the control of a pair of large command neurons in the brainstem, the Mauthner cells. Finally, zebrafish larvae are transparent, which facilitates the use of imaging techniques to study learning-related neural activity within the intact animal. We are interested in the neural basis of nonassociative and associative behavioral modification of the startle reflex. In particular, we wish to know what changes occur in the Mauthner cell circuit during learning. In our current experiments we are using electrophysiological, genetic, and imaging techniques to analyze the mechanisms of habituation and sensitization of the startle reflex. In future experiments we hope to investigate the neural basis of classical conditioning of the reflex.

Posted by saeid at 08:08 PM | Permalink

 Source: Wikipedia.org

Chalmers was born and grew up in Australia. Before he moved to the Australian National University in 2004, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Prior to his stay at Arizona, he taught at UC Santa Cruz. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide, obtaining his Bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program, directed by Andy Clark, at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993-1995.

He is the author of the book The Conscious Mind (1996), which discusses consciousness and its relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind. In the book, Chalmers forcefully and cogently argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive) that have dominated philosophy and the sciences in modern times fail to account for the most essential aspects of consciousness. He proposes an alternative dualistic view that has come to be called property dualism. The book was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".

Saeid's notes from Chalmers' works:

Chalmers has not yet fallen in either of these traps--not quite. He understands that he must show how his strategic proposal differs from these, which he recognizes as doomed. He attempts this by claiming that consciousness is strikingly unlike life, and unlike the features of perception misconstrued by Crock: when it comes to consciousness, the hard problem is "almost unique" in that it "goes beyond problems about the performance of functions." Almost unique? He gives us no other phenomena with this special feature, but in any case, what he says in support of this claim simply repeats the claim in different words: "To see this, note that when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience . . . there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open." Our vitalist can surely say ask the same dreary question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by life? Chalmers says that this would be a conceptual mistake on the part of the vitalist, and I agree, but he needs to defend his claim that his counterpart is not a conceptual mistake as well.

Dennett

What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything. Dennett

A Catalog of conscious experiences

1. Visual experiences
2. auditory experiences
3. tactile experiences
4. olfactory experiences
5. taste exp.
6. experienes of cold and hot
7. pain
8. other bodily sensation
9. mental imagery
10. conscious thought
11. emotions
12. the sense of self

at the root of all this lie two quite distinct concepts of mind. (conceptual distinction)

1. phenomenal concept of mind = conscious experience (mind is characterized by the way it feels) (consciousness)
2. psychological concept of mind = causal or explanatory basis for behavior (mind is characterized by what it does) (awareness)

varieties of psychological consciousness

1. awakeness
2. introspection
3. reportability
4. self-consciousness
5. attention
6. voluntary control
7. knowledge

consciousness involves reportive activity

awareness is not necessary the same

awareness as I have described it need not be accompanied by consciousness

once empirical investigation shows how the relevant causal role is played, the phenomenon is explained

1. technical complication:
2. ambiguity of casual concepts
3. many casual concepts are partly characterized in terms of their effect on experience

problem with reductive explanation

1. does not usually go all the way to the microphysical level
2. conceivably maybe phenomenon does not have reductive explanation
3. local logical supervenience
4. learning vs. heat (learning is explication)(heat is explanation)

I will argue that conscious experience does not supervene logically on the physical, and therefore cannot be reductively explained

To make the case against reductive explanation, we need to show that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical.

Posted by saeid at 08:06 PM | Permalink

1928–, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia. Chomsky, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, developed a theory of transformational (sometimes called generative or transformational-generative) grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language. He first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.

According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to “deep structures,” a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., “John saw Mary”) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was seen by John”). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a “Minimalist Program” in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.

Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982) [this is actually a book on linguistics, not politics --www.chomsky.info], Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”

See biography by R. F. Barsky (1997); interviews with D. Barsamian (1992, 1994, 1996, and 2001); studies by F. D’Agostino (1985), C. P. Otero (1988 and 1998), R. Salkie (1990), M. Achbar, ed. (1994), M. Rai (1995), V. J. Cook (1996), P. Wilkin (1997), J. McGilvray (1999), N. V. Smith (1999), A. Edgley (2000), and H. Lasnik (2000); Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (film by P. Wintonick and M. Achbar, 1992) and Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (documentary film dir. by J. Junkerman, 2002).

Saeid's questions for Dr. Chomsky:

Saeid's notes from Chomsky's works:

Chomsky has until recently seemed rather indifferent as to how his universal grammar might be represented in the brain.  Steven Rose

‘I would like to discuss an approach to the mind that considers language and similar phenomena to be elements of the natural world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical inquiry’ (p. 106).

The initial state of the language faculty, fixed by genetic endowment, can be thought of as a ‘language acquisition device’

Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland

Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943 in Oliver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian-American philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since 1984. She is currently a professor at the UCSD Philosophy Department, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and an associate of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (Sejnowski Lab) at the Salk Institute. She won a MacArthur prize in 1991. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford (B.Phil.). She taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is the wife of philosopher Paul Churchland.

Churchland has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. She is associated with a school of thought called eliminativism or eliminative materialism, which argues that folk psychology concepts such as belief, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised as science understands more about the nature of brain function.

She was interviewed along with her husband Paul Churchland for the book Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore, 2006.

She attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006 and November 2007.

Patricia and her husband are noted for their attempts to apply their philosophical positions in their daily life. Emotions and feelings, for instance, are eschewed in favour of more precise formulations, such as the following which describes the state of Patricia after a hectic meeting:

"Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting."^[1]

Saeid's notes and questions (unedited):

Let begin with the term “Neurophilosophy” that you’ve coined, what do you mean by that?

It is hard to imagine how long would take philosophers to come to a unified conclusion about what consciousness really is. Most of theories of consciousness suggested by philosophers have not produced a significant fruit by which scientists could rely on, for scientific approach is, in the first stage, to deal with the simplest features of a phenomenon in the hope to gather concert data on which they may draw a universal conclusion, and those findings may shed light on the problem from which scientist may understand other complex features of that phenomenon.  These days, it seems that there is a huge gulf between what scientists try to achieve and what philosophers try to theorize.

Consciousness is not like ghost or wraith, which is the product of imagination. Rather, it is a very salient phenomenon in us; it is real.  It seems that philosophical approach to the problem of consciousness is to tackle the macro phenomena, despite the fact that scientific approach to the problem of consciousness is to deal with the micro phenomenon. It is true that both approaches are two sides of the same coin, but ultimately it is imperative to see the problem of consciousness to be resolved by solid scientific data. If, in fact, consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and in principle, it must be answered scientifically, then what would philosophy bring on the table?

“It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them?” This is the question that Crick asked in his book, Consciousness and Neuroscience. Crick’s framework for studying consciousness was to tackle simpler features of human consciousness that are similar to animals’, such as visual consciousness. He highlighted the studies on a patient by Milner, Perrett and their colleagues (1991). The Patient’s brain has diffuse damage produced by carbon-monoxide poisoning. She is able to see color and texture very well but is very deficient in seeing orientation and form. In spite of this, she is very good at catching a ball. She can "post" her hand or a card into a slot without difficulty, though she could not report the slot's orientation. He postulated the idea that this might imply that all activity in the dorsal stream is unconscious. The ventral stream, on the other hand, they consider to be largely conscious. “An alternative suggestion, due to Steven Wise (personal communication and Boussaoud et al., 1996), is that direct projections from parietal cortex into premotor areas are unconscious, whereas projections to them via prefrontal cortex are related to consciousness. Crick came to a conclusion that “many actions in response to sensory inputs are rapid, transient, stereotyped and unconscious. They could be thought of as cortical reflexes. Consciousness deals more slowly with broader, less stereotyped aspects of the sensory inputs (or a reflection of these in imagery) and takes time to decide on appropriate thoughts and responses. It is needed because otherwise, a vast number of different zombie modes would be required.” I give you (Paul) this information because by that conclusion, Crick indirectly suggested that all activities in the brain do not necessarily involve in consciousness. More important of all is that this is the brain that generates consciousness not something metaphysical.

The goal of this question is to know whether neurophilosophy can define consciousness.

Neuroscience is going to figure out how the brain works at the level of synapses, neurons, and the system of pathways. But it is true that neuroscience is in its infancy. Some philosophers argue that neuroscience is incapable to address some complex aspects of consciousness that have to do with subjective account of human experiences. They argue that there is an explanatory gap, and that can not be filled by merely mechanical processes. What is your answer?

Here are features that William James attributed to consciousness:

Here are some features of consciousness from materialitists’ point of view, which may Dr. Churchland may point out

1-      ontological objectivity

2-      quantitative measurability

3-      no intrinsic intentionality

4-      has spatial

5-      location(s) dimension

6-      force, mass, gravitational attraction and electrical charge

As you know, William James attributed some features to consciousness, such as being a form of awareness, being a process rather than a thing, being private, being continuous but changing, and of course having intentionality. Also, John Searle attributes four features to consciousness, including qualitative feeling, subjective account, a unified field, and intentionality. What are the features of consciousness from neuroscientists’ point of view?

 William James wrote, “How what used to be the soul has gradually been refined down to the “transcendental ego, …[which] attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known.” That attenuation has been continuing as to now reductionists consider this phenomenon to be a series of neural and biochemical activities in the brain. However, some, such John Searle, believe that consciousness is ontologically irreducible, but it can be causally reducible to the neural activities.

John Searle believes that consciousness can be causally reducible to neural activities, but it can not be reducible to anything that has a third-person ontology.  Do you disagree? Why?

From idealists’ point of view, mind is reality and body is an evil dream; on the other hand, from materialist point of view, body is the reality and mind is a mere property of protoplasm. Of course, Churchland is a card-carrying materialist. Reductionist refers to those who think that there is no such thing as the Subject, those very complex aspects of consciousness, such as subjectivity and intentionality, can be reduced to neural and biochemical activities.

One of the entailments of reductionist proposition about mind is that when consciousness is reduced to neural and biochemical activities, then, the Subject inevitably has to be left out of the equation. Some philosophers believe that the randomness of human behavior cannot be explained in this view. They think that a human being in this formulation is bland, robotic, and, to some extent, scary—for example, like the Virginian man with pedophilia tendency.  How do you respond to that?