{"id":3078,"date":"2018-02-23T13:38:33","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T18:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/jmb\/?page_id=3078"},"modified":"2018-09-12T13:16:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T17:16:16","slug":"volume-38-number-2-spring-2017","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/jmb\/back-issues\/2017-2\/volume-38-number-2-spring-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Strawson\u2019s Case for Mental Passivity<\/strong><br \/>\nGeorge Seli, St. John\u2019s University<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Galen Strawson (2003) argues that relatively few of our mental events are actions, what I refer to as the non-agentive thought thesis (NATT). NATT restricts the actional kinds of mental event to volition and catalysis, the latter being the mental preparation to receive thoughts. Strawson supports NATT on both metaphysical and phenomenological grounds. Metaphysically, his primary argument is that the results of thinking\u202f\u2014\u202fwhether decisions, judgments, creative ideas, etc. \u2014 are not \u201cintentionally controlled,\u201d which disqualifies them as actions. Phenomenologically, Strawson claims that, at least for him, the sense of mental agency is limited to volition and catalysis, and he takes this passivist phenomenology to further support NATT. I raise problems for both arguments. On the metaphysical side, I argue that Strawson\u2019s understanding of intentional control as direct control yields an unreasonable constraint on actional mental events. The phenomenological argument is undercut by the empirical possibility that Strawson\u2019s passivist phenomenology is cognitively penetrated by his own anti-agency\u00a0beliefs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Correspondence should be addressed to George Seli, Philosophy Department, St. John\u2019s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, New York 11439. Email: <a href=\"mailto:selig@stjohns.edu\">selig@stjohns.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>The Twin Vantage Point Paradox: A Thought Experiment<br \/>\n<\/strong>Baland Jalal, University of Cambridge and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, University of California at San Diego<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">As noted by Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger, in the world of physics the subjective vantage point does not exist. Indeed, physics requires that the conscious \u201cself\u201d who experiences the world be banished from reality. This article highlights this schism running right through the heart of reality using a thought experiment. The reader imagines himself as a twin being asked by a \u201csuper-scientist\u201d: \u201cIf I travel back in time and swap you at birth with your twin (now an adult who lives in an adjacent city), and then return to the present, who would you prefer that I torture here and now\u202f\u2014\u202fthe person standing in front of me\u202f\u2014\u202for the person in the other city?\u201d To this question (ethical considerations aside), you might answer, \u201ctorture the twin in front of you\u201d\u202f\u2014\u202fthat is, you would assume given the swap that you would be existentially continuous with the twin now living in the adjacent city and vice versa. This culminates in a paradox: while for you, such a swap matters crucially, according to science, the final state of the universe is the same regardless of the swap. This paradox does not exist from a scientific objective view of reality\u202f\u2014\u202fonly from a subjective existential point of view. To our knowledge, this issue of continuity of form and function, and the fact that the physical universe is the same irrespective of the swap, is not part of many published thought experiments exploring personal\u00a0identity.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Correspondence should be addressed to Baland Jalal, Department of Psychiatry, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, United Kingdom. Email: <a href=\"mailto:bj272@cam.ac.uk\">bj272@cam.ac.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>General Intelligence: Adaptation to Evolutionarily Familiar Abstract Relational Invariants, Not to Environmental or Evolutionary Novelty<\/strong><br \/>\nKenneth A. Koenigshofer, University of Maryland University College<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Current formulations of the evolution of general (improvisational) intelligence leave unresolved a theoretical paradox first identified by Cosmides and Tooby (2002): given that natural selection requires recurrent, across-generation selection criteria, how can psychological mechanisms evolve that \u201cexploit the novel features of unique situations\u201d? Kanazawa (2004, 2010) and Chiappe and MacDonald (2005) sidestep this issue and consequently misconstrue general intelligence as an adaptation to novelty. Several new evolutionary principles resolve this problem, removing a significant roadblock for evolutionary theories of intelligence. Natural selection fashions mechanisms that accommodate fitness-related environmental regularities whenever they attain sufficient across-generation stability, even if attained only at abstract levels of recurrence. Variance in surface details of novel, nonrecurrent adaptive problems masks evolutionarily recurrent relational regularities forming a common problem structure captured by natural selection. Such \u201cdistilled\u201d invariants, including similarity, covariation, and causality, provide across-generation selection criteria for evolution of seemingly domain-general processes, including categorization, generalization, inference, conditioning, causal\u2013logical and analogical reasoning, as adaptive specializations. Innate, implicit knowledge of abstract, relational invariants constrains adaptively specialized learning, driving innovative solutions to otherwise unsolvable novel problems. Accordingly, general intelligence is not an adaptation to novelty, but emerges from adaptive specializations that genetically internalize abstract, relational regularities of the\u00a0world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kenneth Koenigshofer, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Maryland University College, 3501 University Boulevard East, Adelphi, Maryland 20783. Email: <a href=\"mailto:Kenneth.Koenigshofer@faculty.umuc.edu\">Kenneth.Koenigshofer@faculty.umuc.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Critical Notice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Wrestling with the Absurd: Enaction Meets Non-Sense<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Book Title: <em>Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making<\/em><br \/>\nBook Author: Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese (Editors). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 317 + xxii pages, $100.00 hardback, $95.00 paper.<br \/>\nReviewed by Sebastjan V\u00f6r\u00f6s, University of Ljubljana<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><em>Excerpt:<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">The volume edited by Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese, <em>Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making<\/em>, is a <em>challenging<\/em> read. It is challenging in that it invites us to discursively engage with, and make sense of, a topic that seems to evade, if not actively defy, discursivity and reason. The book is also challenging in that it forces the reader to grapple with its thick texture and constructs a coherent narrative from a variegated, at times even incongruous, collection of essays. Thus, from the very outset, its content and form seem to be attuned to the same key, namely that of <em>wrestling with the absurd<\/em>, of hermeneutically engaging with the<em> dissonance of non-sense<\/em> so as to tease out the <em>consonance of sense<\/em>. The volume, in short, enacts what it speaks of.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Correspondence should be addressed to Sebastjan V\u00f6r\u00f6s, A\u0161ker\u010deva 2, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Email: <a href=\"mailto:sebastjan.voros@ff.uni-lj.si\">sebastjan.voros@ff.uni-lj.si<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Strawson\u2019s Case for Mental Passivity George Seli, St. John\u2019s University Galen Strawson (2003) argues that relatively few of our mental events are actions, what I refer to as the non-agentive thought thesis (NATT). NATT restricts the actional kinds of mental event to volition and catalysis, the latter being the mental preparation to receive thoughts. Strawson [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"parent":3068,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3078","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2017 - The Journal of Mind and Behavior - University of Maine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/jmb\/back-issues\/2017-2\/volume-38-number-2-spring-2017\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2017 - The Journal of Mind and Behavior - University of Maine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Strawson\u2019s Case for Mental Passivity George Seli, St. John\u2019s University Galen Strawson (2003) argues that relatively few of our mental events are actions, what I refer to as the non-agentive thought thesis (NATT). NATT restricts the actional kinds of mental event to volition and catalysis, the latter being the mental preparation to receive thoughts. 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NATT restricts the actional kinds of mental event to volition and catalysis, the latter being the mental preparation to receive thoughts. 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