The High-Level Structure of Consciousness. The study of consciousness is often regarded as the last great frontier for science. Work in this area has flowered recently, but it has focused on low-level aspects of consciousness, such as visual perception of color and shape. We aim to discover the high-level structure of consciousness, which involves attention, self-consciousness, and the unity of consciousness, among other things. The project involves international collaboration in a three-way int ....The High-Level Structure of Consciousness. The study of consciousness is often regarded as the last great frontier for science. Work in this area has flowered recently, but it has focused on low-level aspects of consciousness, such as visual perception of color and shape. We aim to discover the high-level structure of consciousness, which involves attention, self-consciousness, and the unity of consciousness, among other things. The project involves international collaboration in a three-way interaction between philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology. This work has potential social benefits, for example in understanding attention in distracted drivers, and potential medical benefits, in understanding breakdowns of the unity of consciousness in patients with mental illnessRead moreRead less
Epistemic Warrant: Transmission Failure, Basic Knowledge, and Entitlement. This Project will bring substantial intellectual, cultural, and economic benefits to the nation - not only by increasing research strength, contributing to research output and establishing an international research partnership, but also by deepening the relationship between the study of the mind and theory of knowledge as a traditional area within philosophy and thus helping to maintain the pivotal position of philosophy ....Epistemic Warrant: Transmission Failure, Basic Knowledge, and Entitlement. This Project will bring substantial intellectual, cultural, and economic benefits to the nation - not only by increasing research strength, contributing to research output and establishing an international research partnership, but also by deepening the relationship between the study of the mind and theory of knowledge as a traditional area within philosophy and thus helping to maintain the pivotal position of philosophy in our intellectual life. Students, early-career researchers and established philosophers will benefit from access to the intellectual and institutional resources of international partner universities and there will be substantial and quantifiable financial contributions by international universities and research agencies.Read moreRead less
Understanding phenomenal experience as a natural part of our world. The natural sciences?physics, chemistry and biology?provide compelling accounts of our world. They contain, however, no overt mention of mental states and in particular the mental states with a phenomenology: states like itches and colour experiences. The challenge for naturalists is locate these states within the naturalist picture. This project develops and draws on representationalist accounts of mind to explain how to locate ....Understanding phenomenal experience as a natural part of our world. The natural sciences?physics, chemistry and biology?provide compelling accounts of our world. They contain, however, no overt mention of mental states and in particular the mental states with a phenomenology: states like itches and colour experiences. The challenge for naturalists is locate these states within the naturalist picture. This project develops and draws on representationalist accounts of mind to explain how to locate mental states that have a phenomenology within the naturalist's picture. This will yield new perspectives on the mental lives of machines.Read moreRead less
Conscious Experience and the Hegemony of Representation. Many things make humans special but three stand out: the possession of a moral sense, rationality, and consciousness. This project aims to explain consciousness in a way fully comppatible with the aspirations of cognitive science to see humans as a natural part of the physical world.
Belief singular versus beliefs plural. Research on the brain and how it represents the environment has the potential to reconfigure our ordinary conceptions of belief and rationality. This project explores the impact of the changes and their implications.
The basis of conscious thought. The science and philosophy of consciousness has made much progress in recent years, and the study of conscious thought is the next frontier. The project will place Australian research on the leading edge of this area. An international network of researchers will analyse both the neurobiological basis and the subjective experience of conscious thought, yielding a unified account of conscious thinking from the first-person and third-person perspectives. The resultin ....The basis of conscious thought. The science and philosophy of consciousness has made much progress in recent years, and the study of conscious thought is the next frontier. The project will place Australian research on the leading edge of this area. An international network of researchers will analyse both the neurobiological basis and the subjective experience of conscious thought, yielding a unified account of conscious thinking from the first-person and third-person perspectives. The resulting account will illuminate the nature of human thinking and reasoning, and will be applied to the detection of consciousness in post-coma patients.Read moreRead less
The Evolution of Embodied Intelligence. The aim of the project is to write a collaborative monograph that integrates the recent development in cognitive science of alternatves to classical cognitivism with recent developments in evolutionary biology. Those developments include in particular the recognition of the importance both of non-genetic inheritence and of the role agents play in constructing their own environments. The monograph will argue that these evolutionary processes are of particul ....The Evolution of Embodied Intelligence. The aim of the project is to write a collaborative monograph that integrates the recent development in cognitive science of alternatves to classical cognitivism with recent developments in evolutionary biology. Those developments include in particular the recognition of the importance both of non-genetic inheritence and of the role agents play in constructing their own environments. The monograph will argue that these evolutionary processes are of particular importance in human evolution, and they are the key to explaining how it is that humans are simulataneously encultured beings and biological agents.Read moreRead less
Philosophical progress. Understanding the nature and possibility of progress in philosophy will shed light not only on philosophy as a funded research discipline within the university system in Australia, but also on the nature of research within the humanities and social sciences more generally.
Knowledge of consciousness. This project explores and defends a new philosophical perspective on introspective knowledge and charts its connection to larger issues of human rationality and consciousness.
The Contents of Consciousness. This project aims to develop a research centre that will be a world leader in the study of consciousness. The focus will be the question: how does human consciousness represent the world? The science of consciousness has seen explosive growth internationally in the last decade, but the relationship between consciousness and representation is not well-understood. Through local and international collaboration, researchers will develop a framework for understanding ....The Contents of Consciousness. This project aims to develop a research centre that will be a world leader in the study of consciousness. The focus will be the question: how does human consciousness represent the world? The science of consciousness has seen explosive growth internationally in the last decade, but the relationship between consciousness and representation is not well-understood. Through local and international collaboration, researchers will develop a framework for understanding the representational content of consciousness and will analyze experimental work at the leading edge of neuroscience and cognitive science. This will help us to understand the nature of consciousness itself.Read moreRead less