Place, U. T. (1996o). On the anti-depressant effect of suppressing REM sleep [Conference presentation, presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology at Barcelona on the 18th of July 1996]. European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
[Abstract]In a paper presented to the 1995 Euro-SPP Meeting in Oxford Kathleen Taylor and I proposed the identification of conscious experience with the activity of what we call the "central input focuser (CIF)" which restructures the figure-ground relations within what Broadbent (1971) has called the "evidence" on which the categorization of problematic inputs is based. We further suggested that rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep is a condition in which the CIF is allowed to "freewheel" while decoupled from sensory input. As a result the vivid dream imagery which is characteristic of and peculiar to this phase of sleep recapitulates those associations formed during the preceding period of waking which have acquired motivational significance and hence an emotional charge by virtue of their resemblance to or associative links with emotionally charged events in the dreamer's past life. The effect of this is to ensure that the dreamer's attention is caught by inputs which have these emotionally charged associations during subsequent periods of waking consciousness. In this paper an explanation, based on this hypothesis, is offered of the well-known fact that anti-depressant drugs have the effect of suppressing REM sleep; though what the hypothesis in fact explains is why a drug that suppresses REM sleep should have an anti-depressant effect.
[References]  [Talks]  [1 referring publications by Place]  
Download: 1996o On the Anti-Depressant Effect of Suppressing REM Sleep.pdf

Place, U. T. (1998h). The neuroanatomy of consciousness and the zombie-within. [Paper presented at the Second Annual Conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, Bremen, Germany, 20th June 1998].
[Abstract]In Chapter 3 of their book, Milner & Goodale (1995) concede that, since the ventral and dorsal streams as defined by Ungerleider & Mishkin (1982) bifurcate "downstream" of the striate cortex (V1), neither stream can account for the visual functions which survive lesions of V1 ("blindsight"). However, on their Figure 3.1 (p. 68) they show another pathway which I call the 'Sub-Cortical (S-C) to dorsal pathway' (SUPERIOR COLLICULUS, PULVINAR, POSTERIOR PARIETAL CORTEX) which bifurcates from the ventral pathway (LATERAL GENICULATE NUCLEUS, V1-V5, INFERO-TEMPORAL CORTEX) at the retina. Not only does the S-C to dorsal pathway explain blindsight. It also coincides exactly with Michael Posner's (Posner & Petersen 1990; Posner and Dehaene 1994) "posterior attention system". This allows us to identify the superior colliculus and pulvinar with that part of the "zombie-within" (Place 1997) which involuntarily attracts the focus of conscious attention to any input which it identifies as problematic and the posterior parietal cortex as the structure which, in addition to its role in the feedback control of voluntary movement, maintains voluntary control over the focus of conscious attention (in the ventral stream in the case of vision) until a satisfactory categorization of the input is achieved. This, when combined with the known functions of the ventral pathway, allows us, in the case of vision, to identify actual anatomically defined structures corresponding to most of the functionally defined modules envisaged in 'Consciousness and the zombie-within' (Place 1997) up to the point where conscious experience gives way to categorization.
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Download: 1998h The Neuroanatomy of Consciousness and the Zombie-within.pdf

Place, U. T. (1999d). Connectionism and the problem of consciousness. Acta Analytica, 14(22), 197-226.
[Abstract]This paper falls into three parts. In Part 1 I give my reasons for rejecting two aspects of Horgan and Tienson's position as laid out in their book, the language of thought and belief-desire explanations of behaviour, while endorsing the connection they see between linguistic syntax and the syntax of a motor skill. In Part 2 I outline the theory that the brain consists of two input-output transformation systems consciousness whose function is (a) to categorise problematic inputs, (b) to select a response appropriate to such inputs once they have been categorised and (c) to initiate and monitor the execution of such response once selected, and the "zombie-within" whose function is (a) to identify and alert consciousness to any inputs that are problematic either because they are unexpected or because they are significant relative to the agent's current or perennial motivational concerns. In Part 3 I consider how far the properties of the two systems outlined in Part 2 can be understood in terms of the known properties of connectionist networks.
Keywords: connectionism, consciousness, problematic input, zombie-within
Note:
The download file contains some text added by the author after publication. Footnote 2 is added.
[References]  [Related]  [Talks]  [3 citing publications]  [1 referring publications by Place]  
Download: 1999d Connectionism and the Problem of Consciousness.pdf

Place, U. T. (2000a). Consciousness and the zombie-within: a functional analysis of the blindsight evidence. In Y. Rossetti, & A. Revonsuo (Eds.), Beyond dissociations: Interaction between dissociated implicit and explicit processing (pp. 295-329). John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/aicr.22.15pla
[Abstract]Cowey & Stoerig's (1995) demonstration that the phenomenon of blindsight applies to monkeys with striate cortical lesions in the same way as it does to humans with similar lesions makes it plausible to argue that the behaviour of mammals and probably that of other vertebrates is controlled by two distinct but closely interdependent and interacting systems in the brain which I shall refer to respectively as 'consciousness' and the 'sub-conscious automatic pilot or "zombie" within'. On this hypothesis, consciousness has three functions, (a) that of categorizing any input that is problematic in that it is either unexpected or significant relative to the individual's current or perennial motivational concerns, (b) that of selecting a response appropriate both to the presence of a thing of that kind and to the individual's motivational concerns with respect to it, and (c) that of monitoring the execution of that response. Conscious/phenomenal experience, on this view, is the first stage in the process whereby problematic inputs are processed by consciousness. Its function is to modify the figure-ground relations within the central representation of a problematic input until an adequate categorization is selected. The sub-conscious automatic pilot or “zombie-within” has two functions (a) that of continuously scanning the total current input and alerting consciousness to any input it identifies as problematic, (b) that of protecting consciousness from overload either by ignoring those non-problematic inputs which require no response or by responding appropriately but automatically to those for which there already exists a well practised skill or other “instinctive” response pattern.
Keywords: consciousness
[References]  [Talks]  [5 citing publications]  [5 referring publications by Place]  [1 reprinting collections]  
Download: 2000a Consciousness and the Zombie-within a Functional Analysis of the Blindsight Evidence.pdf