Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Lay Theories of Moral Progress

Abstract Many consider the world to be morally better today than it was in the past and expect moral improvement to continue. How do people explain what drives this change? In this paper, we identify two ways people might think about how moral progress occurs: that it is driven by human action (i.e., if people […]

Published on November 18, 2024

Understanding the qualitative nature of human consciousness

Understanding what conscious experiences feel like from a first-person perspective, known as the hard problem of consciousness, remains one of the most intriguing yet elusive topics in science and philosophy [1,2]. In their timely article in TiCS, Fleming and Shea propose the quality space approach as a promising path forward [3]. They suggest that the qualitative […]

Published on November 14, 2024

How does the quality space come to be?

In their recent opinion article [1], Fleming and Shea explore how different theories of consciousness fare in accounting for the structure of our phenomenology. Under the quality space hypothesis, each experience corresponds to a point in a multidimensional space instantiated over the activity of processing units (i.e., natural or artificial neurons). This way of thinking […]

Published on November 14, 2024