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The Thankful

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Every once in a while I get an idea for a short story. Usually they pop in and out rather quickly and I just let them go but I recently decided to jot them down when they come. I don’t think I’m a great writer, and definitely not a great story teller, but it is fun to write badly in another genre. My first two attempts are below.

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Doug leaned his head around the doorframe calling out, “it’s time! George! Let’s go! I am starving over here!’

George called back, “I’m almost ready, just give me a minute!”

Doug began pacing back and forth, waiting for George to be ready. Typical George! He’s always lagging, Doug thought to himself as he paced back and forth.

“What time is dinner?” George came out, adjusting the belt on his pants. “I can wait to eat as much as I can! This belt may have to be loosened out by the end of the night”

George was patting his stomach with a big grin on his face. “You and me both!” Doug laughed back. They clapped each other on the back and headed out into the snowy night. Yes, it was the night of the big Annual Feast. This year there was a bountiful harvest and there would be a lot of food to eat. The entire community was gathering to celebrate and there was a lot to celebrate, even if times had been hard in other ways.

It had now been several generation since the wars of the 2030s. The Earth had become a massive battleground and all of the natural animal life on the planet had been largely decimated. The established world-wide food chain had been severely disrupted, with all of the factory farms being collateral damage in the Wars. People had survived on insects and what plants continued to grow until they had come to the Pact, which was now the organizing force of their society. The Pact had allowed Human Beings to survive the wars and now they were thriving. Why, tonight alone there would be a gathering of 10,000 hungry Humans coming to partake in The Feasting. It made George feel proud to be a part of this tradition.

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“I’ve got to log-off! The dinner ceremonies will be starting soon!’ Timothy was also buzzing because of the Feasting celebrations about to occur, but he was also nervous. He had just turned 19 and so he was one of the Guests of Honor at the Feast. There were hundreds of guests of honor at tonight’s feast, everyone who had just turned 19 would join him in being celebrated.

“I know you do son, and I just want you to know how proud I am of you” Andy, Timothy’s dad, was standing in front of his home in the virtual world.

“I know you are dad,” Timothey’s avatar looked sheepish and blushed. This was because Timothy, in the non-virtual environment was blushing and the VR suit he was in did a good job communicating those things to the Avatars in the virtual environment. It made being in the simulated world feel very real. It’ll be even real-er in an hour or two, Timothy thought to himself.

Timothy looked up at his dad and said “I can’t wait to see you, so we can all be together again!”

“Me too, son” Andy smiled and took his son’s virtual had. “The uploading isn’t as scary as you think it is and it happens really fast and then you’ll be here with me.”

“Dad!” Timothy rolled his eyes as he spoke. “I know, I know! We’ve been learning about this since 3rd grade! I just wish it were done already!”

“What’s the first thing you want to do?” His dad asked, trying to change the subject.

“I think I want to try a beer! Or maybe fried food!”

“yes!” Timothy’s dad replied, “I’ll make sure we have some on hand for you!”

Timothy smiled and the logged out of the virtual environment and back into the non-simulated world. “Wow, a beer and maybe some French Fries or Onion Rings?” Can you imagine? Since the Wars humans had one big Feast and then the leftovers until the next Feast. They had to grow the vegetables from scratch and prepare the meat. It was very important that they had enough to make it until the next Feasting Day. Timothy had been so busy with preparing for his big day that he had completely forgot to check on when the next Feating Day after today would be. The next group turning 19 would to be that far off.

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Timothy came out and ran into Fred who was also on the way to the dinner. “Hey there Timothy! Are you ready for this?”

“yeah, I ca’t wait” said Timothy “I just got done talking with my dad,” he went on excitedly, “and he says I can have a beer and some fried food when I get there!”

“Wow, that sounds great!” Fred said “I’ve been reading a lot about soda and I asked for Root Beer so we can have a beer together when we get there.” Fred was smiling, and Timothy thought he actually winked at him as he said ‘root beer’. That thought disappeared as they walked into the dinning hall and saw all of the tables and chairs arranged around the large Dias in the center with the seats for the Guests of Honor. He had been coming to the event his entire life, but today it was his turn to be the Guest of Honor! Fred had already made his way up to the seats for the guests of Honor and Timothy joined him there, feeling really nervous now. He had made sure to go to the bathroom earlier and had not eaten beforehand as instructed, but he hoped he did not have any embarrassing accidents on stage. He would never live that down!

A hush had fallen over the room and the Ceremony began. “Ladies and Gentleman, I give you tonight’s Guests of Honor!” boomed a voice over the loudspeaker. The entire room burst into applause. Everyone in the room, most of them under 19 years of age, was smiling and clapping. Then the lights dimmed and people took their seats. Leader Martha came out. Leader Martha was one of the Elders, one of the council of learned people who ran the society. Leader Martha was in her mid-forties.

“Who is ready to be Thankful?” she asked. Everyone raised their hand. “Very good. Yes, very good indeed” she cooed. “As is our custom there will be plenty of activities while we prepare dinner, so please stand and salute our Guests of Honor. Dinner will be served in 8 hours time”

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The crowed burst not applause and the Guests of Honor stood at attention as the Dias they were on was lowered below to the Kill Room. As the Guests were lowered the crowed started happily chatting and talking amongst themselves. “Nervous?” asked Timothy?

“Not really,” replied Fred, “I hear it is really quick”

The Dias for the Guests of Honor had reached the bottom floor and they were lead to their final room. They marched in single file and then things happened very quickly. There was first a blinding light which disoriented them, followed quickly by an electrical zap which rendered them unconscious. As this was happening a mechanical arm swept up the Guests of Honor and slit their throat as they were hung upside down to bleed out. Once this was done a conveyor line took the bodies to the next room where the head was severed from the body and sent for brain scanning. The rest of the body was sent for processing and would be the main course at tonight’s Feast, with bits and pieces reserved for other uses. The chef’s were waiting for the machine to process the meat into useable sections and then they would begin cooking.

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George and Doug came racing back into the dinning hall. “I want leg meat!” shouted Doug.

“And I want a rib!” shouted George.

“Kids, there is enough for everyone so just be patient,” replied Leader Martha as she sliced a hunk of Fred’s body. They had stuffed him with a delicious spiced stuffing and Leader Martha was really looking forward to digging in. This was the way things had been done for Martha’s whole life, and her ancestors before. In the Wars the animals had been destroyed and this was the only way that they could still have meat. Some select few were not eaten but the rest were butchered at 19 and then uploaded to the digital world where they could live out their lives for as long as they wanted. Martha planned to upload once she died of natural causes but for now she also wanted some ribs!

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Timothy opend his eyes and looked around. There was his dad and his older brother smiling at him. “You made it!” shouted Brandon, Timothy’s older brother. “It’s about time! We were waiting all day long!”

‘What happened? All I remember is this bright light and now I am here”

“Me too” said someone to his left. Timothy looked over to see his friend Amanda and a little further down Fred and the rest of the Guests of Honor.

“Wow, so we really made it?” asked Timothy incredulously.

“You sure did!”

Timothy hugged his dad and was surprised to find himself crying.

“I’m so proud of you! Now c’mon, there’ someone I want you to meet!” Andy had put his arm around his oldest son and was smiling from ear-to-ear.

“What do you mean, someone to meet?” asked Timothy as he was drying his eyes, “I already know everyone here from Meatspace.”

“Well, not everyone,” started Brandon, “you see, I have a son and many people here do as well”

Timothy was looking right at Brandon but wasn’t sure he had heard him right.

“A son? How is that possible?”

Andy was smiling again and looking at Brandon “tell him, he can know now”

“What they don’t exactly tell you is that you are allowed to raise two infants in Meatspace but after that they upload them and process the bodies for specialties.”

“What?!? So, I have a nephew? Where is he? I can’t wait to meet him!!”

“Great! Let’s go, we’re late for dinner! They are simulating the exact meal of the Feast, with a couple special additions,” Andy added looking at Timothy before continuing, “and I don’t want to miss out on that stuffing!”

“Me either!” yelled Fred sprinting off towards the house in the distance.

Brown on Non-Human Animals and their Treatment

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am coming up on the 20th anniversary of starting this blog. I started blogging over at Brain in 2007 and then started this blog shortly afterwards, so in has been about 19 years of blogging at this point. Over that time I have written very little about my views on animals and in particular my vegetarianism/veganism. This has always been hard for me to argue about with a calm and cool head. You think I get agitated talking abut Kripke’s skeptical argument against meaning? Wait until you see someone say that they can’t stop eating meat because it “tastes too good” or that they “feel bad” for me because I have never tasted a steak. There is just something too gross about trying to justify the way we treat animals all so that we can enjoy a certain taste or experience.

I had also over the years lost many friends over this and had even gotten into a drunken argument over vegetarianism with some graduate students that led me to transfer schools (I’ll spare the details). Then at the new school I transferred to I soon got into another drunken argument about this where I brazenly declared that eating meat was at least as bad as some forms of sexual assault, which caused quite some stir (I stand by this statement to this day). I went home that night and tried to write a short paper justifying my claim. That paper, “The Case against Carnivores” is, as far as I know, lost to time. I remember writing it in a fit of rage and if I had had a blog back then it most certainly would have been an epic blog post. As it is I think I put it on my early website and found out someone was using it in a class they were teaching. Anyway that would have probably been 2005 or so. It would be very interesting to see that paper but sadly we may never know what the case against carnivores was!

Then when I started writing this blog I wrote a couple of early blogposts on this (the first two below) but then had a really negative interaction with a commenter. That is when I realized that I needed to chill on this particular issue until I could learn to engage in a reasonable way. I don’t think I am all the way there yet, to be honest, but over the years I have tried to become a less annoying vegan who lives by way of setting an example through action rather than debate. As veganism started to become somewhat mainstream things seemed to be getting better but I still see the same tendencies that have always haunted this debate. I am trying to reach the point where I can at least engage in some arguments in this space without loosing my mind but it continues to be a work in progress.

Below are the eight posts I have written that are relevant to this issue, and I am working on one about animals in research.

Animal Consciousness and the Unknown Power of the Unconscious Mind

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Things are about to get really (I mean really) busy for me and so I probably won’t be doing much besides running around frantically until August 2026 (seriously even by my standards it’s going to be a rough ride for a while). Of course I will post the Consciousness Live! discussions once they start (Sept 18) and I am looking forward to Block’s presentation at the NYU Philosophy of Mind discussion group so may try to get to something here and there. At any rate we have been having some very interesting discussions in the philosophy of animal consciousness and society class. We have been discussing the markers and ‘tests’ approach and we read Bayne et al Tests for Consciousness in Humans and Beyond and Hakwan Lau’s The End of Consciousness (there was another paper but I’ll leave it aside for now). There were a lot of good points that came up in the class but I want to focus on the issue that is important to me, which is the methodological/evidential one I discussed in the previous post on this class.

Andrews seems to be trying to frame things by making a distinction between two positions you might have towards animals. The first is that we assume that animals, or a particular organism, is not conscious at all and then we look for markers that would raise our credence that the animal was conscious. So, we look at fish and see if they behave a certain way with respect to tissue damage, etc. If the fish is damaged and seeks a pain reliever then probably that indicates it is conscious and if it doesn’t then not. The second issue assumes that animals are conscious but that we need to establish that they have this or that specific conscious experience. As I am understanding this at this point she sees that marker approach as belonging to the first camp and the tests approach belonging to the second, though I might have misunderstood that point.

I can see why, if you are arguing with a certain type of philosopher/scientist, this may be how you are thinking of tings but I do not think it helps with the methodological challenge to studying animal consciousness. This can bee seen by the response to the argument that I gave in the previous post. That argument relied on the empirical claim that anything that you associated with consciousness could likely be done without consciousness. So when I point out that blindsight seems to suggest that you can have sophisticated behavior without consciousness one response was to say, ‘yeah but that doesn’t show that the blindsight patient has no conscious experience’. Another was ‘yeah but the blindsight subject is a conscious subject’. These are subtly different.

The first is taking the blindsight argument to be suggesting the conclusion that animals are not conscious. The second is suggesting the conclusion that being conscious played an important role in the process that led to the now unconscious behavior. So, the blindsight subject was normally sighted for a period of their life and they had normal visual perception and consciousness. Perhaps that played an important role in their learning how to do what they did and now, even though the process is automatic and can be done unconsciously, that doesn’t mean it could always be done unconsciously. These are good and interesting points but they do not defuse the methodological tension that I am pressing.

As I have said before, I don’t take the issue to be whether animals are conscious or not since I take that to be intuitively obvious; and you may take it to be intuitively obvious that they are not conscious. That is irrelevant since I do not base my beliefs in animal consciousness on science. If you were to ask me if science does support my belief about animals I would say that we at this point do not have scientific evidence that animals are, or are not, conscious because of this methodological issue.

Suppose there is a behavior, neural process, or function, which you take to be associated with consciousness (as either a test, marker, or whatever). Suppose that you think this is a marker or a test, or whatever. I will take as my example a certain pattern of neural activation in the fusiform face area. Suppose that we found that pattern when people looked at faces but not when they looked at houses. Does that indicate that finding that pattern is good evidence that they consciously saw the face? No. The reason is that we have found that same pattern of activation in cases that we have good reason to think are unconscious. (side note: that could be disputed and it is interesting to think about those arguments but lets save that for later). So, this pattern shows up when the subject consciously sees the face and also when the subject does not consciously see the face (but the face is present). Now suppose that someone finds this kind of pattern in a non-human animal. Is that evidence that the animal consciously sees a face? Or is it evidence that this process occurs unconsciously as it did in some human cases? Unless we had some way of telling the two kinds of neural activations apart we should conclude neither that the animal consciously nor that it unconsciously saw the face.

More to the point it would be irresponsible to loudly proclaim that this is evidence that the animal did consciously see the face until the issue above was resolved. None of this suggests that the animal is unconscious. It only suggests that the proposed marker/test is insufficient to establish that until we know the extent of the unconscious mind.

From there one might want to mount the more general argument that anything could be done unconsciously. That is an empirical question that the field should take seriously. Most reasonable people I know of are not saying we should think animals are unconscious, or that science suggests that only mammals/birds are conscious. We are saying that we don’t really know how powerful the unconscious mind is, this hasn’t fully investigated empirically. We have some reason to think it is quite powerful indeed, and some reason to think maybe not. Until we resolve this issue we should be cautious about grand declarations about what science has shown about animals and seriously address these methodological issues.

Philosophy of Animal Consciousness

Richard Brown 2 Comments

The fall 2025 semester is off and running. I have a lot going on this semester, with Consciousness Live! kicking off in September, and teaching my usual 5 classes at LaGuardia. Since the Graduate Center Philosophy Program recently hired Kristen Andrews I have been sitting in on her philosophy of animal consciousness and society class she is offering. We are very early in the the semester but the class is very interesting and I think that Andrews will have a positive impact on the culture at the Grad Center, which is very nice!

It also allows me to address some issues that have long bothered me. As those who know me are aware, I was raised vegetarian and am now vegan. I strongly believe in animal rights and yet also reluctantly accept the role that animals play in scientific research (at least for now). I have always considered it beyond obvious that animals are conscious and that vegetarianism/vegainsim is required on moral grounds because of the suffering of animals (but also I would say there are other reasons to not eat meat).

At the same time I have long argued that we have a conundrum on our hands when it comes to animals. All we have are third-person methods to address their psychological states and they cannot verbally report. In addition we know that many things that seemingly involve consciousness can be done unconsciously. More specifically we can see in the human case that there seem to be instances where people can do things without being able to report on them (like blindsight). Given this the question opens up as to whether any particular piece of evidence one offers in support of the claim that animals are conscious truly supports that claim (given that it might be done unconsciously).

These two claims are not in tension since the first is a moral claim and the second is an epistemic/evidential/methodological claim.

To be honest I have largely avoided talking about animals and consciousness since to me it is hot-button topic that has caused many fights and loss of friends over the years. When one grow up the way I did one sees a great moral tragedy taking place right out in the open as though it is perfectly normal. It is mind-numbingly hard to “meet people where they are” on this issue (for me; to be clear I view this as a shortcoming on my part). Trying to convince people that animals are conscious or trying to convince them that since they are they should be treated in a certain way, and to met with the lowest level of response over and over takes a very special personality type to endure (and I lack it).

Then I met and started working with Joe LeDoux, who has very different views about animals. When I first met Joe he seemed to think that animals did not have experience at all. He also seemed to think that people like Peter Carruthers and Daniel Dennett shared his view, and so that it was somewhat mainstream in philosophy. I remember once he said “there is no evidence that any rat has ever felt fear,” and I was like, but you study fear in rats, so…uh, ????

Over the course of much discussion (and only slightly less whiskey) we gradually clarified that his view was that mammals are most likely conscious but we cannot say what their consciousness is like since they done’t have language. In particular they don’t have the concept ‘fear’ and so can’t be aware of themselves as being afraid. So, whatever their experience is like in a threatening condition it is probably wrong to say that it is fear, since that does seem to involve an awareness of oneself as being in danger. Joe thinks rats can’t have this kind of mental state but I am not so sure. This is an interesting question and I’ll return to it below.

Joe and I largely agreed on the methodological issue, even if we disagreed on which animals might be conscious. The way this has shown up in my own thinking is that I have tried to use this methodological argument to suggest that we won’t learn much about human consciousness from animal models. This suggests we should stop using them in this kind of research until we have a theory of phenomenal consciousness in the human case. Then we can see how far it extends.

This now brings me to Andrews. She has been arguing that we need to change the default assumption in science from one that holds we need to demonstrate that animals are conscious to just accepting this as the background default view: All animals are conscious. Her argument for this is, in part, that we don’t have any good way to determine if animals are conscious (i.e. the marker approach fails). She also argues that we need what she calls a “secure” theory of consciousness which could answer these questions. Since we don’t have that we should just assume that animals are consciousness. This, she continues, would allow us to make progress on other issues in the science of consciousness.

So it seems we agree on quite a bit. We both think that only a well-established “secure” theory of consciousness would allow us to definitively answer the question about animals. We both agree that the marker approach isn’t successful (though for slightly different reasons). We also both agree that the “demarcation” problem of trying to figure out which animals are conscious or where to draw the line between animals that are and are not conscious should be put aside for now.

But I don’t agree that we should change the default assumption. This is because I don’t think the default assumption is that animals are not conscious. The default assumption is this: any behavior that can be associated with consciousness can be produced without consciousness. That should not be changed without good empirical reason because we have good empirical reasons to accept it. However, even if we did change that default assumption we would still face the methodological challenge above with respect to the particular qualities, or what it is like for the animal. So, for now at least, I still think the science of consciousness is best done in humans.

Academic Year 2024-2025 -That’s a Wrap!

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am just about to submit my grades for my summer session and so another academic year is wrapping up. I haven’t done one of these year-end round up posts in a while so I figured I’d give it a go. In the course of writing this up I realized that I started Graduate School in Spring 2000 and taught my first class (Critical Thinking) in Fall of 2000. 25 years in the game!

This year has been incredibly busy (and depressing but that is another story). I taught 14 classes at LaGuardia (still three off from my record of 17) and no classes at the Graduate Center. I was hoping to co-teach a joint philosophy/cog neuro class on Ned Block’s Border between Seeing and Thinking book in the Spring 2025 semester, but it did not work out (long story). That makes three failed attempts to offer a course at the Graduate Center besides the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course (I offered to co-teach a class with Joe LeDoux on Emotions and Consciousness (and Joe had agreed to do it), I wanted to offer a solo class on Reality+ by Dave Chalmers, and now this class on Ned’s book…not sure when I am supposed to get the message and give up). I am hoping that Tony and I can offer the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course in the next academic year but nothing definite is in place. We have been doing it every other year, and we last offered it in Spring of 2024 which would put us on track to offer it in Spring 2026, but Tony is possibly going on sabbatical so we will see. I like teaching at the Graduate Center, and love working with the graduate students so we’ll see how things go.

Besides all of the teaching the other big news was that my book was published in April (a year and a half after I finished it!). I didn’t have a book launch or anything but I did have a nice glass of LaGavulin to celebrate. At this point I am just waiting to see if anyone reads it and if so what they might think of it. My own feeling is that, to paraphrase A.J. Ayer, the book is in every sense a young man’s book, except in the sense that it is very much written by an old man 😉 I also gave a few talks. One was at a Festschrift for Joe LeDoux in December 2024. There was video being recorded but I don’t know what ever happened to it. Another was at the CUNY Comparative and Cognitive Psychology colloquium (video rehearsal of the talk here: early 2025), and then a talk responding to Block’s recent argument against higher-order theories from his book and based on infant color perception. That one I gave at the NYU Infant consciousness conference in February, which was a lot of fun to attend. There is video of that talk and I hear they are working on putting it online now. The Festschrift paper came out in Cerebral Cortex and the Infant Consciousness one could possibly come out in a special issue devoted to Infant Consciousness organized by the Infant Consciousness Conference.

In addition, exciting things are happening behind the scenes in the two Templeton funded higher-order projects that I am a part of. All together there are 5 different experiments aimed at looking at some aspect of the HOROR theory. We will hopefully see some publications from these projects in the not too distant future. On of them is in the pipeline already and it is a very exciting investigation of inattentional inflation. This experiment has two stages. The first aims to investigate whether inattentional inflation is a genuine phenomenon and if so what are its contours. The second phase will look to see whether activity in the sensory or frontal areas better correlates with the results of the first phase. So far the first phase is nearing completion and it is looking like inattentional inflation is a robust and wide-spread phenomenon. It will be very exciting to see the next phase of this project. The other experiments are equally cool but they are not done yet. I am planning on developing a talk where I go over all of the experimental designs and how they relate to the higher-order theory. I want to have this done by November for a talk that I was invited to give, but we’ll have to see how the fall semester goes. It is always interesting to read these kinds of things later and see how well I lived up to my expectations 😉

I also had a great time with Consciousness Live! I started the 7th season in December 2024 and I really forced myself to limit them to one per month. My general rule of thumb is that if there is more than a month between Consciousness Live! episodes, then that means the previous season has ended, which means Season 7 ended in June. Looking back on it, I felt like the pacing was a lot more manageable. I often read a book and several articles multiple times for each interview/discussion so it is a fair amount of work. I could do more of these but it would have to be under different circumstances (less teaching or less preparations for each discussion). I have a list of people I was about to email to work off of for season 8. Plus I had a couple of guests scheduled for this season reschedule so I will try to start with them for the next season. I am currently under some deadlines and will probably take a bit of time off but I expect to be back at it come Fall/Winter so stay tuned for some Consciousness Live! Season 8 announcements. I am pretty sure I will hit the 100th discussion landmark next season! I am also behind on audio podcasting the latest discussions so see my YouTube channel for the latest discussions. I am having the same problem in that I am out of storage space at my WordPress site and not sure where to host the audio files. I know there are some free options out there but haven’t had time to look into them. Hopefully I will get on that at some point! I even did my very first in-person episode as part of LaGuardia’s undergraduate philosophy conference, which was very cool! I am definitely wanting to do that again!

Besides Consciousness Live! I also did several ‘philosophical reaction’ videos and some “office hours” livestreams on my YouTube channel as well. It is a lot of work ‘making content’!

I am looking forward to next academic year. In addition to my usual teaching I will be teaching two undergraduates classes at NYU in the Spring 2026 semester as an adjunct lecturer. I will be posting some stuff about what I plan to teach at some point. At LaGuardia I will also be teaching Ethics and Moral Issues in the Fall of 2025 for the first time in a long time and I am excited to update the class with some ethics of AI. In the meantime I am going to be learning feeble grind to fakie on the 4 ft mini ramp and reading Asunder by Kerstin Hall.

Consciousness Live! Season 7

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am excited to announce the new season of Consciousness Live! I have decided to try a somewhat different approach this time and am trying to limit these to 1 or so a month. Knowing me, things will get out of hand at some point, but that is what I am aiming for. I have also been behind in the audio podcasting of these but I am starting to catch up now. Since I am trying to limit the number of the discussions I am going to be scheduling them on a continual basis rather than all at once, but as of now here is what I have for Season 7.

More to come. Stay tuned!

What is the Role of the PFC in Consciousness?

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I just read this very interesting paper out in Cortex taking a novel approach to assessing the role of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness. The interesting idea in the Rowe, Garrido, and Tsuchiaya paper linked to here is the idea of looking at whether there is even enough information being sent to the PFC to account for the contents of consciousness. What they seem to have found was that there is, and it is there whether or not the subjects have to report or are likely aware of the stimulus. They say,

Most strikingly, during Phase 1 (that is, no-report and half of participants unaware of the face stimuli), when prefrontal theories would predict that classification accuracy should fall to chance for the IB participants, we found above-chance classification of face stimuli using the pattern of connectivity between sensory and prefrontal locations regardless of awareness. Further, this classification accuracy remained largely the same, regardless of the presence or absence of reports and awareness (Figure 4). This aspect of the finding is hard to reconcile with any existing theories of consciousness and call for a revised account whereby PFC involvement may be ubiquitous regardless of awareness.

Potentially, a phenomenon that is close to our finding may be “unconscious working memory” (see Soto et al., 2011 and review by Gambarota et al., 2022), which also implies non-conscious prefrontal activity (Soto & Silvanto, 2014) and challenges HOT and GNWT. 

They go on to say why they think this challenges GNWT but do not elaborate on their proposed challenge to higher-order theories. There may or may not be a challenge to a certain implementation of higher-order theories, but there is no challenge to a model like Joe LeDoux’s which sees the lower-order states of which we become aware to be themselves in the prefrontal cortex.

Either way, I think this highlights the importance of talking more about how it is that these psychological level constructs (higher-order representations, etc), get mapped onto the brain.

I Did It!

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I made it through an entire semester with no teaching responsibilities at CUNY! For the first time in 20 years! Oh, and I wrote a book!

I started as a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as an adjunct instructor of philosophy at Brooklyn College, in the Fall of 2003. I came to the Grad Center with an M.A. in philosophy (from the University of Connecticut, where I thought I was going to get my PhD but didn’t), and some teaching experience from SF State (where I was supposed to complete my M.A. but didn’t, it’s a long story!). Brooklyn College was the first time I had been hired to teach philosophy at a college I did not attend (even though it was part of the university I attended). The rest is, as they say, history.

I started thinking I maybe should write a book back in the summer of 2021, when I was preparing for this talk. It seemed like it would be a lot of work, and it was easy to forget about it once the fall of 2021 hit. I was once again plagued by thoughts of writing a book in the summer of 2022, and by that time there seemed like there may even be some interest in such a project. I wrote up a book proposal and started seriously working on a draft in July of 2022.

I worked on it in every spare second I had from August 2022 until early January 2023. This mostly consisted of dashing out thoughts before rushing off to class, or running out in the middle of dinner to implement a change that occurred to me. During that time I felt like I was barely keeping the ship afloat. It was at that point that I knew that I needed to devote more time to writing the book, or wait until I wasn’t teaching to work on it. I put the project on hold in January 2023, when the Spring semester started, and applied for research leave for the fall of 2023. I figured that if I got it, I would devote my full effort to the book. If I didn’t, I was going to put the draft on my website and leave it at that. I did get the research leave and I have been spending 9-10 hours every day since September 2023 to get to where it is now. All in all it has really only been 9 months of writing time (spread over a year and a half), but it feels like an eternity!

It is now in a state that I would consider ‘good enough for government work’ and since I am a government employee, that is good enough for me. I haven’t put anything up here because there is still a small chance that this may be published. However, if anyone wants to see the current draft email me and I’ll send it.

I am still on research leave until March 1st at LaGuardia and I will also be co-teaching the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course with Tony Ro at the Graduate Center starting at the end of January. In the meantime, I will be taking a break for some family time until early January. When I get back I am still hoping to get into Consciousness Live! and my YouTube channel more generally. Stay tuned!

Terminal Burnout Unlocked

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Things have just been off the charts hectic around here, and I’m not just talking about Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom! I have always taught a lot but since 2015 it has become overwhelming. I did a little number crunching on the train and found that before 2015 I was teaching about 10 classes per year but since 2015 it has gone up to 13.43 classes per year (and that’s with two semesters of parental leave without teaching which throws of the average). This year I got to 15 classes but my record is 17 from back in 2020. And that’s with different preps across several disciplines to boot! These are the classes I taught this academic year (plus summer).

  • Logic & Philosophy -3 sections
  • Introduction to Neuroscience (Lecture & Lab) -3 sections
  • Science, Humanism, and Technology (liberal arts capstone course)-3
  • Critical Thinking -2
  • Introduction to Philosophy -2
  • General Psychology -2

I felt like I was keeping up with things during the pandemic but It has become increasingly difficult to do anything else besides teaching and has left me feeling like I am doing a poor job at everything. For example I gave up on my Consciousness Live! Podcast because preparing for those discussions took away from time grading and prepping lectures. I also had to miss a bunch of the recent Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting, which I had a small part in helping to organize, because it conflicted with my teaching schedule (which changed at the last minute because of class cancelations). I could go on and on.

I hate to complain because I know things are tough all around and things could always be worse. Plus I know in the grand scheme of things I am incredibly lucky to be able to support my family with the work that I do. Even so it has made me a bit grumpy. There is some good news though in that I was awarded research leave for the Fall 2023 semester, which for Laguardia goes from early September until March (don’t ask). An entire six months with no teaching; it sounds like a mythical creature from some fantasy.

Haha…as you can see I enjoy being dramatic. Still, I have been teaching since graduate school and haven’t had an entire semester off like this since my first year as a graduate student. I did take parental leave but that is only a few weeks and then I had to come back and while I wasn’t teaching I still had to come into my office and ‘teach’ logic (that is when I recorded my online lectures for my logic course). Not to mention the stress of a newborn! This will a bit different in that both of my children will be in school, my wife will be at work, and I may once again have time for “reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking…”.

My hope is to use that time to think about my alleged “book” and possibly some other fun things as well. By the by, I did actually produce a very rough first-ish draft of something which someday could possibly resemble something some people might think of as a book. I haven’t been able to work on it since January of this year because of my teaching schedule but I am hoping to get back to it at the end of August. I decided not to post the material for various reasons but anyone who its interested in seeing the supposed draft can email me and I’ll send a copy. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, especially if it came in sometime before October/November of 2023.

2021 in Review

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Like most people (I assume) I can’t believe that 2021 is almost over. This year has really flown by and I am feeling very burnt out. I feel like I am getting less and less done and yet at the same time being more and more overwhelmed by what I do manage to get done.

Because of class cancelations (don’t get me started on how CUNY has handled the pandemic!) I was only able to teach 10 classes this year and I have to admit that it was nice not teaching as much as I usually do (I average around 13-14 a year and last year I did 17!!!). I am looking forward to 2022 and being able to teach the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness course with Tony Ro at the Graduate Center (in Spring in person!) and possibly even a class on David Chalmers’ book Reality+ (in Fall), though I am not sure if that will go through or not (I hope it does!)…but I have to get through my three classes in the short 6 week winter session first (starting in January)!

I also had a lot of fun with Consciousness Live! in season 4, doing 18 conversations! This was less than I planned and less than I did in 2020. Even so I did start to find it a bit overwhelming towards the end and I felt like I was underprepared for some of these conversations. I didn’t even get to schedule all of the people that agreed to come on and talk to me! If there is a season 5 I think I need to do fewer and prepare more. Aiming for one a week is just too much with my teaching load. We’ll see what I can do once I come back in January and start missing talking to cool people about consciousness 🙂

I wrote only one blog posts and tried another short story but my mostly I have been using Philosophy Sucks! (the name of my blog) for Consciousness Live! podcasting.

Part of the reason for the lite blogging is that I tried putting more time into my YouTube channel posting some videos of my recent attempts to re-learn how to skateboard, some ‘philosophical reactions‘ and other cringey things…it turns out this is a lot of work! I was experimenting with one or two of these kinds of videos per week in November and I think that if I do more of this kind of content in 2022 that I need to limit it and do fewer. I don’t think there is any way I could keep that up when my teaching schedule returns to ‘normal’.

I had two co-authored publications come out

I have another co-authored piece in the pipeline and I am hoping that makes it out someday. It’s funny because all of my recent publications have been co-authored and I actually heard through the grapevine that maybe I should publish more single authored stuff (philosophy is weird about giving credit in co-authoring situations) and I do have some recent talks that I gave which could be written up and some other projects as well but lately I have been finding it really hard to produce anything that I think is any good. Part of the reason for that is that I teach a lot, and had my first child in 2015 (the year of my last single authored piece and the year I got tenure coincidently). But the other part of the reason is a bit more complicated.

I used to jump at every publication opportunity I got because I needed to get tenure and then when I sort of thought I had done enough to get tenure I thought maybe someday I could get a job where I could teach less and have more time for all of these other projects I am constantly starting and getting overwhelmed by (like the New York Consciousness Collective and the Qualia Fest, the Online Consciousness Conference, and all of the other stuff I do as the Director of CONSC -the Center for the ONline Study of Consciousness 😉 but if I had my way I probably would have chosen not to publish them or to wait longer. Writing philosophy and enduring the publication process takes a level of self-confidence that is hard to sustain…but I did recently pull of my first feeble and smith grinds on a (small) quarter pipe and that helps a bit 🙂

See you in 2022!