Papers

ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen considerable attention to the evolution of episodic memory, with contributions from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and biology.  However, these debates have been hampered by a thorny cluster of issues related to episodic memory’s individuation. I review proposals concerning episodic memory’s evolutionary function and articulate underlying sources of disagreement, before suggesting a way forward: we can temporarily sidestep many of these disagreements, and be sensitive to oft-neglected possibilities, by framing the issue not as finding the function of episodic memory, but rather as discovering the wider evolutionary history of episodic memory, its precursors, and capacities which interact with it. I illustrate the advantages of such an approach by reviewing work on cognitive maps, and articulating promising theoretical and empirical questions for future research about the possible relationships between cognitive maps and episodic memory, both in the present and in evolution. 

ABSTRACT: Do animals have episodic memory — the kind of memory which gives us rich details about particular past events — or is this uniquely human?  This might look like an empirical question, but is attracting increasing philosophical attention. We review relevant behavioural evidence, as well as drawing attention to neuroscientific and computational evidence which has been less discussed in philosophy.  Next, we distinguish and evaluate reasons for scepticism about episodic memory in animals. In the process, we articulate three pressing philosophical issues underlying these sceptical arguments, which should be the focus of future work. The Problem of Interspecific Variation asks which differences between humans and animal memory mean that an animal has a variant of episodic memory, and which mean that it has a different kind of memory altogether.  The Problem of Functional Variation asks how we should conceptualise the functions of episodic memory and other capacities across species and across evolutionary time.  Finally, the Problem of Alternatives asks what, besides episodic memory, might explain the evidence — and how we should evaluate competing explanations.

ABSTRACT: One of Clayton’s major contributions to our understanding of animal minds has been her work on episodic-like memory. A central reason for the success of this work was its focus on ecological validity: rather than looking for episodic memory for arbitrary stimuli in artificial contexts, focussing on contexts in which episodic memory would serve a biological function such as food caching. This review aims to deepen this insight by surveying the numerous functions that have been proposed for episodic memory, articulating a philosophically grounded framework for understanding what exactly functions are, and drawing on these to make suggestions for future directions in the comparative cognitive psychology of episodic memory. Our review suggests four key insights. First, episodic memory may have more than one function and may have different functions in different species. Second, cross-disciplinary work is key to developing a functional account of episodic memory. Third, there is scope for further theoretical elaboration of proposals relating episodic memory to food caching and, in particular, future-oriented cognition. Finally, learning-related functions suggested by AI (artificial intelligence)-based models are a fruitful avenue for future behavioural research.

Accepted, forthcoming in special issue

ABSTRACT: Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism  has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2024.2417984

Reply to Bayne et al. (2024) 'Tests for Consciousness in Humans and Beyond'

ABSTRACT: We seem to have rich experience across our visual field.  Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention.  Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as “subjective inflation” allows us to reconcile these phenomena.  I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly.  What’s more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others.  I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world.  The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but unstable.  However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.

ABSTRACT:  We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency.  It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder.  Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.

Review of Lau (2022) In Consciousness We Trust 

Preprint available at https://philarchive.org/rec/BROWAW-10 

ABSTRACT: Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations, durations, and specific times—have sharply distinguished representation from mere sensitivity.  A common, important picture of intertemporal rationality is that it consists in appropriately trading off immediate and future rewards, to maximize total expected discounted utility across time.  By carefully analysing simple reinforcement learning algorithms, this paper shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and intertemporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve intertemporal rationality without temporal representation.  Therefore, either: the austere account of temporal representation is too demanding; the utility-maximizing account of intertemporal rationality is not demanding enough; or the relationship between intertemporal rationality and temporal representation is very different to what many have assumed.  

ABSTRACT: Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations, durations, and specific times—have sharply distinguished representation from mere sensitivity.  A common, important picture of intertemporal rationality is that it consists in appropriately trading off immediate and future rewards, to maximize total expected discounted utility across time.  By carefully analysing simple reinforcement learning algorithms, this paper shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and intertemporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve intertemporal rationality without temporal representation.  Therefore, either: the austere account of temporal representation is too demanding; the utility-maximizing account of intertemporal rationality is not demanding enough; or the relationship between intertemporal rationality and temporal representation is very different to what many have assumed.  

ABSTRACT: Clarke & Beck assume that ANS representations should be assigned referents from our scientific ontology.  However, many representations, both in perception and cognition, do not straightforwardly refer to such entities.  If we reject Clarke and Beck’s assumption, many possible contents for ANS representations besides number are compatible with the evidence Clarke & Beck cite.