Benjamin D. Young

University of Nevada, Reno | UNR · Department of Philosophy

Humans are gifted at detecting and discriminating odors, yet we have difficulty identifying odors by name. This paper offers a new explanation for the puzzling discrepancy between our olfactory capacities for discrimination and identification by weaving together recent neuroscientific findings regarding the cortical connectivity of the olfactory sy...

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also aris...

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor...

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array. However, Odor Theories' have been recently criticized for their conception of the spatiotemporal nature of olfactory perception and the individuation of distal odors. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theo...

Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. While amodal completion is rife and plays an essential role in all sense modalities, philosophical discussions of this phenomenon have almost entirely been limited to vision. The aim of this paper is to examine in what sense we ca...

It is arguably the case that olfactory system contains two senses that share the same type of stimuli, sensory transduction mechanism, and processing centers. Yet, orthonasal and retronasal olfaction differ in their types of perceptible objects as individuated by their sensory qualities. What will be explored in this paper is how the account of ort...

This carefully designed, multi-authored textbook covers a broad range of theoretical issues in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. With accessible language, a uniform structure, and many pedagogical features, Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introdution is the best high-level overview of this area for an interdiscipli...

Unconscious processes are mental states that occur in the absence of subjective awareness. We offer a focused historical survey of the robust debate about the nature of unconscious mental processing, from ancient and medieval theories that allow for bodily functions without subjective awareness to the 20th century acceptance of autonomous unconscio...

A short blog post that provides a general overview of what we know about our imagined experiences of smells and how this suggests further directions of research exploring the boundaries of mental imagery.

Humans are gifted at detecting and discriminating odors, yet we have difficulty identifying even the most prevalent everyday odors by name. This paper offers a new explanation for the puzzling discrepancy between our olfactory capacities for discrimination and identification by weaving together recent neuroscientific findings regarding the cortical...

Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enact...

While the objects of olfaction are intuitively individuated by reference to the ordinary objects from which they arise, this intuition does not accurately capture the complex nature of smells. Smells are neither ordinary three-dimensional objects, nor Platonic vapors, nor Odors. Rather, smells are the molecular structures of chemical compounds with...

The olfactory system processes smells in a structural manner that is unlike the composition of thoughts or language, suggesting that some of the content of our olfactory experiences are represented in a format that does not involve concepts. Consequently, formative non-conceptual content is offered as an alternative theory of non-conceptual content...

Although vision is the de facto model system of consciousness research, studying olfactory consciousness has its own advantages , as this collection of articles emphatically demonstrates. One advantage of olfaction is its computational and phenomenologi-cal simplicity, which facilitates the identification of basic principles. Other researchers stud...

Qualitative-consciousness arises at the sensory level of olfactory processing and pervades our experience of smells to the extent that qualitative character is maintained whenever we are aware of undergoing an olfactory experience. Building upon the distinction between Access and Phenomenal Consciousness the paper offers a nuanced distinction betwe...

Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a...

The olfactory systemʼs anatomical structure, functional organization, and sensory states raise problems for the prevailing neuroscientific theories of consciousness, while providing a novel perspective for theorizing about consciousness. The anatomical structure of the olfactory system, which does not require a thalamic relay for olfactory consciou...

The thesis of this paper is that self-identity partially constitutes personal-identity. While there are a multitude of theories of personality identity, none offers a coherent and sufficient theory of personal identity, because of their focus upon criteria of diachronic personal identity without first identifying conditions for synchronic personhoo...