11 papers in the library · 4,994 citations · publishing 1994-2025
The MIT Press eBooks April 7, 1994 1,724 citations
Metacognition, or knowing about what we know, is central to consciousness and the personal self. Without self-reflective processes, behavior would be automatized and environmentally bound, lacking plans, strategies, reflections, self-control, self-monitoring, and intelligence. This collection presents twelve original contributions summarizing theoretical and empirical research on these processes.
The MIT Press eBooks November 17, 1995 Michael Tye 1,665 citations
Conscious experiences—smelling a skunk, feeling pain, or experiencing happiness—have a subjective, phenomenal character that seems difficult to explain in purely neurophysiological terms. Michael Tye proposes that all experiences and feelings represent things, and that their phenomenal aspects are to be understood in terms of what they represent. He tests his representational theory against ten critical problems of consciousness, laying out existing theories and their difficulties before developing his intentionalist approach in detail. The book includes boxed summaries and cartoons illustrating the ten problems.
The MIT Press eBooks December 14, 2012 Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin 515 citations
Basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most human doing and experiencing involves dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists acknowledge the importance of situated, embodied engagements for understanding basic minds, but hold that such minds are necessarily contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. This book promotes a radically enactive, embodied approach: some kinds of minds are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. It defends the thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrates advantages for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
The MIT Press eBooks May 19, 2017 Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin 482 citations
Cognition can be divided into two basic types: contentless, interactive forms and content-involving forms. The most elementary cognitive processes—perceiving, imagining, remembering—do not require picking up, storing, or representing information in the brain. Instead, they are fundamentally dynamic, relational, and contentless. Only some forms of cognition involve content. This duplex account of the mind offers a naturalistic explanation of basic minds without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries.
The MIT Press eBooks August 28, 2000 273 citations
The book compiles work by neuroscientists and philosophers investigating how subjective experience correlates with brain events. It highlights the core methodological challenge: conscious experience is inherently first-person and subjective. The central empirical question is whether and how physical states of the nervous system map onto conscious content. Research methods include single-cell recording in monkeys, brain imaging, and electrophysiology in humans, applied to phenomena like blindsight, implicit/explicit cognition, and binocular rivalry. The volume covers foundational and evolutionary issues, global integration, vision, the NMDA receptor complex, neuroimaging, implicit processes, intentionality, phenomenal volition, schizophrenia, social cognition, and the phenomenal self.
The MIT Press eBooks October 25, 2002 David J. Chalmers 156 citations
Neuroscience plays a major but not exclusive role in developing a theory of consciousness, with recent progress in neurobiological research, though its conceptual foundations are still being established. From a philosopher's perspective, the concept of the "neural correlate of consciousness" (NCC) refers to the neural system or systems primarily associated with conscious experience. Numerous proposals for the NCC exist, such as Crick and Koch's earlier suggestion about 40-hertz oscillations, which has since faded. The variety of current proposals is compared to the "particle zoo" in particle physics.
The MIT Press eBooks December 12, 2008 Michael Tye 139 citations
After rejecting the phenomenal-concept strategy—the idea that special concepts explain subjective experience—materialist philosophers face four major puzzles of consciousness. Michael Tye, formerly a proponent of that strategy, argues it is mistaken and presents alternative solutions. The puzzles include how Mary discovers something new when leaving a black-and-white room, what the explanatory gap consists of and how to bridge it, how to solve the hard problem of consciousness, and how philosophical zombies are possible. Tye also addresses perceptual content, conditions for consciousness of an object, change blindness, phenomenal character and awareness of it, and privileged access to one's own experiences.
The MIT Press eBooks July 14, 2020 Ido Hartogsohn 34 citations
In midcentury America, the psychedelic experience was profoundly shaped by historical, social, and cultural forces—by the user's mindset and the surrounding environment. Researchers studied psychedelics as therapeutic medicines, dangerous drugs, tools for spiritual communion, cognitive enhancers, and political catalysts, often reaching contradictory results. The book chronicles uses from CIA and military experimentation to influences on music, fashion, design, architecture, and film, introducing figures like psychologist Betty Eisner and Timothy Leary. It situates these developments within the cold war, counterculture, anti-psychiatric movement, and cybernetics, proposing that LSD functioned as a suggestible technology and that midcentury America's collective set and setting created the conditions for a distinct American trip.
The MIT Press eBooks June 29, 2023 Dyck, Erika 1975-, Elcock, Chris 4 citations
A collection of essays explores the global history of psychedelics beyond North America, covering their discovery, use, and cultural impact in the twentieth century. Topics include LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia, early LSD-25 applications in South America, and ayahuasca's intersection with modernism in China. The authors examine how colonial empires and U.S. influence shaped local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical contexts, and address underexplored themes such as gender, agriculture, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovations.
The MIT Press eBooks October 7, 2025 Graham St John 1 citation
An intellectual biography of Terence McKenna (1946–2000), the twentieth century's psychedelic Renaissance man, who developed a philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time. More than twenty years after his death, McKenna maintains an enduring presence across digital culture and social media. The biography, drawing on original documents, letters, fifty-two rare photographs and artworks, and stories from over eighty people, chronicles his life, works, and legacy without glorifying or disparaging him. It presents McKenna as a stand-up philosopher who contributed to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, and whose weird intelligence continues to haunt the present.
The MIT Press eBooks August 6, 2024 Benjamin Young 1 citation
Smell, despite being central to philosophy of mind and consciousness, has been neglected for centuries. Benjamin Young's book argues that the nature of odors and how we perceive, cognitively represent, and categorize them remains poorly understood. Drawing on over a decade of research, Young presents a methodology to address philosophical and conceptual issues raised by olfaction. He shows how the philosophy of smell advances debates in philosophy of mind, perception, and cognitive neuroscience, demonstrating that empirically informed philosophy can significantly impact interdisciplinary research on smell across philosophy, chemistry, and neuroscience.