This chapter contains sections titled: The Question Mind and Brain What It Does Global Availability The Grey Area What It's Like.

This article reviews recent cognitive and neurological approaches to the study of attention. It argues that such research is based on the notion that attention has a positive cognitive function selecting, like a sieve or a filter, elements from the background and foreground, to then be processed by the brain and made conscious when required. These approaches fail to explain cognitive overload and recent findings demonstrating that recognition and understanding—sensory, visual and semantic—also occur prior to attention. Merleau-Ponty and Freud offer (...) a different model: a negative distractive attention. Negative distractive attention serves as a threshold for stimuli excluded by neurological processes regulating overload and ensuring that consciousness can concentrate on the singularity of its objects. Such approach to attention explains how one can drive and talk. It is not a positive multi-tasking model but a negative distractive one. (shrink)

Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind (...) and specifically of consciousness: what can be known about it, and how it can be known. The main argument of denialism is that first-person reports about the mental realm are not always the best source of information about that realm, and are certainly not reliable. This leads the deniers to realize that the reference and meaning of mental terms as used in standard philosophical literature are vague and call for clarification, and that what many take to be empirical data in the study of the mind are actually heavily laden with theory. Denialism thus makes scientific and philosophical research clearer and more fruitful. (shrink)

In an attempt to reduce dangerous driving behavior of those students enrolled in an upper level course at Sam Houston State University, students performed a series of critical thinking assignments and completed a survey to record their behavior and habits related to driving and the project. The project included a lab experiment, lecture, class discussion, video, and a culminating paper to synthesize the scientific information with real world and classroom experiences. Inspired by the approach to critical thinking put (...) forward by Duron, Limbach, and Waugh, critical thinking for each assignment was implemented through instructions and feedback. Results showed that the critical thinking led to behavior changes in the students’ driving during the semester. It was also determined that the students chose to reduce their distracted driving behaviors based on what they learned and experienced through the project. Within this small sample, using critical thinking to apply conceptual knowledge to real world behaviors led to behavioral changes and real learning. (shrink)

In this event-related potential study a masking technique that prevents conscious perception of words and non-words through attentional distraction was used to reveal the temporal dynamics of word processing under non-conscious and conscious conditions. In the non-conscious condition, ERP responses differed between masked words and non-words from 112 to 160 ms after stimulus-onset over posterior brain areas. The early onset of the word–non-word differences was compatible with previous studies that reported non-conscious access to orthographic information within this time period. Moreover, (...) source localisations provided evidence for automatic activation of prelexical phonological information, whereas no evidence for non-conscious semantic processing was found. When subjects were informed about the masking technique, lexical differences occurred at later time intervals, suggesting conscious access to additional word related information. These results indicate that early visual word processing does not depend entirely on attentional resources, but that non-conscious processing probably is restricted to rather lower-level linguistic information. (shrink)

A primary goal of this chapter is to correct a widespread misunderstanding about how epistemic issues shape the debate between dualists and physicalists. According to a familiar picture, dualism is motivated by armchair reflection, and dualists accord special significance to our ways of conceptualizing consciousness and the physical. In contrast, physicalists favor empirical data over armchair reflection, and physicalism is a relatively straightforward extension of scientific theorizing. This familiar picture is inaccurate. Both dualist and physicalist arguments employ a combination (...) of empirical data and armchair reflection; both rely on considerations stemming from how we conceptualize certain phenomena; and both aim to establish views that are compatible with scientific results but go well beyond the deliverances of empirical science. My discussion highlights these neglected epistemic parallels between dualism and physicalism, and identifies the key epistemic questions that drive this debate. (shrink)

In this contribution to the philosophical debate over distracted driving, I defend the idea that talking on the cell phone while driving is an activity that ought neither to be regulated by public policy means nor addressed by means of automotive safety design features, such as the augmented-reality windshield. I arrive at this conclusion through taking a phenomenologically-influenced look at what an average driver pays attention to during the act of driving an automobile. More specifically, I (...) suggest that if driving while “celling” is taken to involve a single act of attention within a single experience, or taken to involve a “weak” form of multi-attention, a way opens up to see driving while “celling” as being “good” driving. (shrink)

A primary goal of this chapter is to highlight neglected epistemic parallels between dualism and physicalism. Both dualist and physicalist arguments employ a combination of empirical data and armchair reflection; both rely on considerations stemming from how we conceptualize certain phenomena; and both aim to establish views that are compatible with scientific results but go well beyond the deliverances of empirical science. -/- I begin the chapter by fleshing out the distinctive commitments of dualism, in a way that illuminates the (...) interplay of epistemic and metaphysical elements within the dualist position. Section 2 outlines two influential arguments for dualism and explains how dualists defend those arguments from key criticisms. Sections 3 and 4 examine the most powerful objections to dualism: that it is inferior to physicalism as regards the theoretical virtue of simplicity, and that it cannot explain mental causation. I show that each of these objections to dualism depends on substantial assumptions that cannot be empirically justified. The objection from mental causation additionally rests on an ambitious assumption about how we conceptualize physical phenomena. Section 5 briefly reviews how epistemic considerations inform arguments on both sides of this debate. (shrink)

By introducing 'drives' into a Sartrean framework, 'being-in-itself' is interpreted as 'Nature as such', wherein instincts dominate. Being-for-itself, on the contrary, has an ontological nature diametrically opposed to this former – indeed, in the latter realm, through a fundamental process of 'nihilation' (Sartre's 'freedom') consciousness perpetually flees itself by transcending towards the world. However, a kernel of (our) nihilated Nature is left at the heart of this process, in the form of 'original facticity' that we here name drives. Drives (...) are the original feelings and urges of a freed Nature that simply are there; they are the fundamental forces that consciousness qua freedom always has to deal with. Drives, in addition, can be nihilated in their own turn, onto a reflective, irreal plane, whereby they take the form of value . This means Sartre's notion of ontological desire is always made up of two necessary components: drives and value. (shrink)

This chapter elucidates the important Fichtean concept of drive by examining how it is put to use in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre to account for the I’s positing of an object in general, its comprehension of nature as purposive, and its consciousness of its own pure nature. In the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, the nature of drive is first clarified as the form the I necessarily takes in and for itself inasmuch as it strives. Further configurations of the determination (...) are used to explain the operation of the laws by which the I determines external objects, their changes, and the harmony or disharmony of their changes with the moral law. In the System of Ethics, the concept is further employed to provide a transcendental account of nature’s purposiveness. By the account, the I is compelled by the need to comprehend its own nature as a drive that constitutes an organized whole to posit to a drive to form parts of itself into such wholes in the rest of nature. Also, when the I refers natural objects to the original drive, it posits final purposes for the objects. In the popular lectures, the concept is employed as an anthropological and psychological concept to explain features that accrue to human beings on account of their rationality, such as their social, aesthetic, intellectual and moral nature. (shrink)

To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behavior. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be interpreted in a way that suggests consciousness is a product of the organization of energetic activity in the brain. The nature of energy itself, though, remains largely mysterious, and we do not fully understand how it contributes to brain function or consciousness. According (...) to the principle outlined here, energy, along with forces and work, can be described as actualized differences of motion and tension. By observing physical systems, we can infer there is something it is like to undergo actualized difference from the intrinsic perspective of the system. Consciousness occurs because there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo a certain organization of actualized differences in the brain. (shrink)

Now that we have looked at the characteristics of mystical experience, we are ready to discuss the assumption made in this paper that mystical experience can be translated into an understanding of “integration” or the drive for meaning which Fingarette pursues in a much more analytic fashion. Reviewing the conversion process as an “integration” process we have seen that for the sick-souled, beset with the meaninglessness or melancholy which paralyzes his will, his own awareness of wrong in his situation prevents (...) him from opening up to larger views of reality. But, as James has described, at the same time as the subject is attending so strongly to his own sense of worthlessness, “all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work toward rearrangements.” Yet the “rearrangements” can only come about by obeying the command of Chaung-Tse: “Cease striving.” The result is self-transformation in “reconciling, unifying states.” There is achieved “a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness; facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.”However, James cautions us to realize that the same incursions of the subconscious which produce such “reconciling, unifying states” can also produce pathological states, “a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down.” In such a state the “meanings” of events become dreadful and the ruling emotion is pessimism. To this possibility James applied the pragmatic test, “By their fruits...,” and concluded that the mystical experience which brings optimism to the individual is a genuine experience and one which brings truth. In our context then, we would say that real “integration” brings the subject away from the “melancholy” and meaninglessness he felt into the “genuinely insightful resolution” of which Fingarette speaks.Conversion, then, is a process in James's analysis of religious experience analogous to the process of integration and meaning-discovery while mysticism is analogous to the state in which integration or meaning-discovery is achieved. Conversion is climaxed by self-surrender; mysticism is characterized by new determination, self-transformation: two ways of describing an indivisible event. Furthermore, the four characteristics James applies to mysticism are indeed characteristic of the experience of integration.Two other points should be added here which are much in line with James's treatment of experience. In the first place, one of the basic principles of radical empiricism is that not only objects but relations between objects are the subject of experience. Such an experience of relationships, of wholeness, is exactly what characterizes integration. At the same time, the five senses are suspended, and the “insight” is experienced with such a strong immediacy that it is almost sensed. James refers to this quality of mystical states: The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, - that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.I am not saying that every integration is a mystical experience. Rather I have been saying that James's discussion of religious experiences such as healthy-minded, sick-souled, melancholy, conversion, and mysticism provide analogues for better understanding the phenomenological processes and characteristics of the drive for meaning and integration which Fingarette analyzes. In fact, the very notion of religion itself for James bears not just an analogous resemblance but perhaps an identification with integration. For in his personal letters James had defined religious experience as “Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more ‘home’ to one.” And in Varieties James defines religion as “a man's total reaction upon life....; his attitude towards what he felt to be the primal truth.”If we look upon this outlook of James toward religion as an “exaggeration” of the reality of integration, we can follow James to what he perceives as the importance of religion upon an individual's life. The man of religious feeling possesses “the excitement of a higher kind of emotion,” an “enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce.” So we are brought again to the area of creativity in which an individual has experienced the widening of the area of his immediate experience and is “re-born” in the karmic pattern, a valid pattern for both James and Fingarette. As Fingarette describes it, the “converted” individual “creates” values which the dead reality he had previously faced did not possess. The result of the achieved integration is explained by James when referring to religious experience as “an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.” This emotion “overcomes temperamental melancholy [meaninglessness] and imparts endurances to the subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.”We might sum up this discussion not by a criticism of the shortcomings of James's treatment of the religious life, such as his apparent insensitivity to the part played by institutions in the religious experience itself, but rather by underscoring the richness of the phenomenological analysis James has undertaken. James Edie acknowledges that James's studies of religious experience itself rather than of religion. ... are not only more sound phenomenologically than some of the studies which have, under the influence of Husserl, up to now explicitly invoked the phenomenological method, but they are also the first to establish any solid basis for a true phenomenology of religious experience.And John Wild has pointed out the parallel between James's concept of melancholy and Heidegger's concept of anxiety as the genesis of the process of becoming: beginning with the prospect of death and nothingness, the individual gropes toward new birth.As we have seen, then, James's analysis of the varieties of religious experience leads to a fruitful discussion of the psychological processes involved in melancholy and meaninglessness, rearrangement and integration. In all such experiences, a sense of inner unity is reached to which the following words of Fingarette would apply by analogy: The soul-racking death which leads to blissful “rebirth” is the death of the subjectively experienced, anxiety-generated “self” perception; it is the emergence into the freedom of introspective “self-forgetfulness” of the psychically unified self. (shrink)

Inattentional Blindness occurs when observers engaged in resource-consuming tasks fail to see unexpected stimuli that appear in their visual field. Eye movements were recorded in a dynamic IB task where participants tracked targets amongst distractors. During the task, an unexpected stimulus crossed the screen for several seconds. Individuals who failed to report the unexpected stimulus were deemed to be IB. Being IB was associated with making more fixations and longer gaze times on distractor stimuli, being less likely to fixate the (...) unexpected stimulus, and having lower working memory capacity than those who were not IB. Noticing the unexpected stimulus was not contingent upon fixating it, suggesting that some individuals processed the unexpected stimulus via covert attention. The findings support earlier research on working memory and IB. In addition, IBs were less efficient attentional allocators than those who were not IB, as reflected in their eye tracking of irrelevant distractors. (shrink)

The article is an approach to the possibilities of the evolution of consciousness. The research will be presented from the point of view of the Art and Mystic experiences and also compared with the biological point of view.The differences between the perception space and the representation space will be described, since it is considered that the later represents the location where the conscience processes take place. An example in the contemporary architecture on the representation space (the Jean Nouvel's Agbar (...) Tower) will be analysed. The contemporary artistic practices on living tissue manipulation will also be reviewed: artists inspired by the evolutionary laws are working nowadays with the manipulation of living tissues as artistic objects. This could be a controversial phenomenon that may drive the art-science to a materialistic position. It is for this reason that the work with consciousness could prove that the immaterial or energy is a real element that humans can manipulate as they do with living tissues. To know how to do it would be the research in art for this century and could change the direction in art-science, could change the direction of the global consciousness through a planetary culture. (shrink)

Consciousness, as a higher-order cognitive capacity allowing for the explicit representation of abstract mental states, might be the incidental byproduct of design features from other adaptive systems, such as those governing expansion of the frontal lobes in primates. Although such abilities may have occurred entirely by chance, the standardized entrenchment of this representational capacity in human cognition may have posed engineering dilemmas for natural selection in that consciousness could not be easily removed without disrupting the adaptive features of (...) other design solutions. If so, then those organisms saddled with the burden of higher-order representation by the occurrence of these chance events were suddenly assaulted with a series of social problems previously unencountered by any other species in evolutionary history. Such consciousness-based problems constituted enormous selective pressure for generating ancestrally adaptive psychological programs designed to cope with them. Each of these design solutions was, by necessity, generated and progressively pruned over an extraordinarily short span of geological time. In addition, these programs ran into conflict with more ancient primate social adaptations — such as those underlying sexual coercion and violence — that did not evolve to be sensitive to the epistemic positions of others. These mosaic processes have likely resulted in selection for innumerable algorithmic properties driving human-specific behaviors which are both proximally and ultimately caused by consciousness. Consciousness by itself should be classified as maladaptive; what is adaptive are those psychological programs in place to support its incidental and problematic arrival in the human brain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cit: ConsciousnessAlan PretiCit: Consciousness. By Bina Gupta. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 203.In his 1988 essay "Consciousness in Vedānta,"1 J. N. Mohanty pointed out that, Heidegger notwithstanding, a metaphysics of consciousness has been the destiny of Indian thought. Indeed, from the earliest Upaniṣadic speculations to the growth of the systems, the centrality of the concept of consciousness to the development (...) of Indian philosophy can hardly be denied. It is even arguable that the nature and function of consciousness was perhaps the greatest bone of contention among the darśanas, with some of the more critical disputes turning on the details of a particular theory of consciousness. The importance of the concept lies in the almost universal agreement among classical Indian philosophers that consciousness enjoys a fundamental epistemic priority regarding the guarantee of any ontological claim; any claim with respect to the existence of such and such, to the way the world is, ultimately depends on evidence that is (or was) in some way present to consciousness. Consciousness is thus the fons et origo of all knowledge; in its absence nothing can be claimed about the world.One of the most recent additions to a growing body of literature concerned with examining the concept of consciousness in Indian thought is Bina Gupta's Cit: Consciousness, the inaugural release of Oxford's Foundations of Philosophy in India series, initiated by the Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science in New Delhi. The editors intend for the series "to make available a critical reassessment of the philosophical achievement of the classical Indian tradition in such a way that it contributes to the dialogue between civilizations of the new century"—a prospect most welcome by those engaged in Indian and comparative philosophy. [End Page 619]Cit: Consciousness is a natural extension of Gupta's work in The Disinterested Witness: A Fragment of Advaita Vedānta Phenomenology (1998). While concerned there primarily with the notion of the witness consciousness (sākṣin) in the Vivarana tradition of Advaita Vedānta, in Cit Gupta seeks to provide a more general account of consciousness in Indian thought. Her stated goals are "(1) to demonstrate the profound contribution of Indian thought to the theme of consciousness, and (2) to make Indian thought accessible to my readers, irrespective of whether they belong to the Indian or Western tradition" (p. 11). Consistent with the aims of the series, Gupta's approach is conceptual, rather than historical; her focus is specifically on various theories of the nature of consciousness and on the arguments advanced on their behalf. Concerns regarding the losses incurred by abstracting the theories from their historical context are balanced by the recognition that the historical development of a particular school yields one type of understanding, its conceptual structure another (p. 12). In this connection, one may note that Gupta's emphasis on the arguments and conceptual frameworks could make for greater accessibility to those unfamiliar with the territory; certainly the prominence of philological and historical concerns found in many accounts of the development of the schools can prove distracting to the reader seeking the specific philosophical issues.Cit unfolds dialectically, beginning with an analysis of consciousness distilled from the Upaniṣads, continuing through the Nyāya-Vaiśesika and Yogācāra Buddhist views, and culminating with an examination of Advaita Vedānta, both in its classical form and in its "transformations" effected by the contemporary philosophers Sri Aurobindo, K. C. Bhattacharyya, and J. N Mohanty. The order in which the views are discussed is not arbitrary; Gupta's arrangement of the themes purposefully leads to an analysis of Advaita not only because it is, to her mind, "an amazing case of a sublime metaphysical system, subtle logical discursivity, and detailed phenomenological description" (p. x), but also in order to "show that the conceptual nature of the Advaitic theory of consciousness undergoes transformations in the hands of many contemporary thinkers, which makes the Advaitic theory of consciousness stronger and more responsive to modern philosophic challenges" (p. 13). The book, thus, in effect, seeks to vindicate an Advaitic view of consciousness. The final chapter includes a comparative assessment... (shrink)

Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon-based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well-supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational implementation generally and consciousness specifically. We argue instead that the mechanistic account of computation can explain several of the intuitions driving implementationalism and noncomputationalism in a manner which is consistent with artificial (...) consciousness. Our argument provides indirect support for computationalism about consciousness and the view that conventional artificial systems can be conscious. (shrink)

Animals search for food and shelter by locomotion through time and space. The elemental step is the action-perception cycle, which has three steps. In the first step a volley of action potentials initiated by an act of search triggers the formation of a macroscopic wave packet that constitutes the memory of the stimulus. The wave packet is filtered and sent to the entorhinal cortex, where it is combined with wave packets from all sensory systems. This triggers the second step forming (...) a unified memory that is passed through the hippocampal formation where it is assigned a place in the life-long memory of the subject. In the third step the output of the entorhinal cortex triggers the formation of a global wave packet that synchronizes the oscillatory activity of most of not all of the cerebral cortex. This shared oscillation caries a pattern of amplitude modulation, that can be observed non-invasively from the scalp EEG of human volunteers perceiving the stimulus and correlated with the stimulus. The same dendritic electric currents that drive the output of the brains of the wave packet drive the observed EEG signs. Therefore I postulate that the global wave packet, the third step in the cycle requiring only 0.2 seconds expresses the memory of the global accommodation that initiates the next action-perception cycle. Some unspecified fraction of the AM pattern is available to me the observer, and some other unspecified fraction of the total activity in the subject who is expected to respond to the stimulus. There is reason to hope that these fractions will coincide often enough to support refinements in techniques for extending these correlates of consciousness. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

The United Nations ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address a range of global issues related to the future of the planet and human well-being. Critics, however, argue that the Agenda, a complex product of multi-stakeholder governance, in its drive to accommodate many competing voices, is overloaded with weakly defined, overlapping and contradictory issues, concepts and buzzwords. These serve to gloss over actual concrete global problems and forces, concealing an underlying (...) free-trade ideology. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw attention to the nature of the documents used to communicate the Agenda. These documents comprise an edifice of self-referential texts that rely heavily on infographics, bullet points, charts and tables. Such formats appear to helpfully simplify, distil information and break things down into workable components. But, we show, through the affordances of these formats, the the vagueness of buzzwords, contradictions and lack of clear causalities can be glossed over, presenting the Agenda as a highly technical, engaging, and above all moral process. These formats are important, therefore, for the legitimization and rhetorical power of the Agenda, necessary for its take-up by governments and organizations around the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT ABSTRACT: Nietzsche, we are often told, had an account of 'self' or 'mind' or a 'philosophical psychology', in which what he calls our 'drives' play a highly significant role. This underpins not merely his understanding of mind, in particular, of consciousness and action. but also his positive ethics, be they understood as authenticity, freedom, knowledge, autonomy, self-creation, or power. But Nietzsche did not have anything like a coherent account of 'the drives' according to which the self, the relationship (...) between thought and action, or consciousness could be explained; consequently, he did not have a stable account of drives on which his positive ethics could rest. By this, I do not mean that his account is incomplete or that it is philosophically indefensible: both would leave open, misleadingly, the possibility of a rational reconstruction of Nietzsche’s views; both would already assume more unity and coherence than we find in his texts. Specifically, as I show through detailed analysis, Nietzsche provides varied and inconsistent accounts of what a 'drive' is, how much we can know about drives, and the relationship between drives and conscious deliberations about action. I conclude by questioning the hunt for a Nietzschean theory: is this the best way to be reading him? (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: In this commentary to Martin V. Butz’s target article I am especially concerned with his remarks about language (§33, §§71–79, §91) and modularity (§32, §41, §48, §81, §§94–98). In that context, I would like to bring into discussion my own work on computational models of self-monitoring (cf. Neumann 1998, 2004). In this work I explore the idea (...) of an anticipatory drive as a substantial control device for modelling high-level complex language processes such as selfmonitoring and adaptive language use. My work is grounded in computational linguistics and, as such, uses a mathematical and computational methodology. Nevertheless, it might provide some interesting aspects and perspectives for constructivism in general, and the model proposed in Butz’s article, in particular. (shrink)

Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses . Thirty participants listened to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction , or while (...) class='Hi'>distracted by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule . A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations. (shrink)

This paper argues that self-consciousness and associated psychic consciousness emerges as a consequence of a recursive selfdirecting on itself of the cognitive centre in the human brain. The neural mechanisms and circuits underlying self-consciousness appeared and developed during biological evolution as an adaptation that increased the fitness of our social ancestors, chances of their survival, and reproduction. These mechanisms/circuits strengthened the efficiency of individuals in various social relations, enabled separation of 'I' from 'he/she' or 'them' and the (...) formation of firstand higher-order theory of mind, stimulated development of complex, recursive language, facilitated forming temporary coalitions directed to achieve a particular goal, helped to establish social hierarchies, and increased coherence and cooperativity of a social group. The reciprocal reinforcement of the development of the neural network in the brain underlying self-consciousness and of the network of various social relations and aspects was a self-driving process, one of positive feedbacks abundant in anthropogenesis. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, David Chalmers introduced the meta-problem of consciousness as “the problem of explaining why we think consciousness poses a hard problem” (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). A solution to the meta-problem could shed light on the hard problem of consciousness. In particular, it would be relevant to elucidate whether people’s problem intuitions (i.e. intuitions holding that conscious experience cannot be reduced to physical processes) are driven by factors related to the nature of (...) consciousness, or rather by factors that are independent of consciousness. Whether people hold problem intuitions, and what factors drive those intuitions, are largely empirical questions. However, there is a lack of empirical research on these issues to date. The results of four studies will show that (1) problem intuitions are not widespread, and (2) when they arise, they do so because of factors that are unrelated to the nature of consciousness. This suggests that consciousness is, after all, not so problematic. (shrink)

The meta-problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 2018) is the problem of explaining the behaviours and verbal reports that we associate with the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness'. These may include reports of puzzlement, of the attractiveness of dualism, of explanatory gaps, and the like. We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem. Our solution takes as its starting point the emerging picture of the brain as a hierarchical inference engine. We show why such a device, operating under familiar (...) forms of adaptive pressure, may come to represent some of its mid-level inferences as especially certain. These mid-level states confidently re-code raw sensory stimulation in ways that (they are able to realize) fall short of fully determining how properties and states of affairs are arranged in the distal world. This drives a wedge between experience and the world. Advanced agents then represent these mid-level inferences as irreducibly special, becoming increasingly puzzled as a result. (shrink)

The catastrophe of the eye -- A new view of seeing -- Applying the new view of seeing -- The illusion of seeing everything -- Some contentious points -- Towards consciousness -- Types of consciousness -- Phenomenal consciousness, raw feel, and why they're hard -- Squeeze a sponge, drive a porsche : a sensorimotor account of feel -- Consciously experiencing a feel -- The sensorimotor approach to color -- Sensory substitution -- The localization of touch -- The (...) phenomenality plot -- Consciousness. (shrink)

We should not be creating conscious, humanoid agents but an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates.

To understand Self-Representationalism you need to understand its family. Self-Representationalism is a branch of the Meta-Representationalist family, and according to theories in this family what distinguishes conscious mental representations from unconscious mental representations is that conscious ones are themselves the target of a mental meta¬-representational state. A mental state M1 is thus phenomenally conscious in virtue of being suitably represented by some mental state M2. What distinguishes the Self-Representationalist branch of the family is the claim that M1 and M2 must (...) be the same token mental state, so a mental state is phenomenally conscious in virtue of suitably representing itself. This Self-Representationalist branch of the family divides into further branches, giving us specific implementations of the Self-Representationalist approach. But before asking whether we should adopt Self-Representationalism, and in what form, we should reflect on why Meta-Representationalism is an attractive family in the first place. After all, Self-Representationalist theories trade on their family name, claiming to deliver on the promises that drive the Meta-Representationalist approach. The two most important promises of Meta-Representationalism are: a) the promise of capturing the transitivity of consciousness and; b) the promise of rendering consciousness naturalisable. I discuss each in turn. (shrink)

This brief work valuably shows how a distinguished historian ascertains the causes of his historical facts. Koht, a Norwegian European historian, eschews any philosophy of history, claiming only that the nature of man is permanent through historical change. Drawing from his own historical research he discusses the significance of the different forces of history. These are religion, economics, class consciousness, the power of the state, war, revolt, science, and internationalism. No one force or cause is primary.—A. B. D.

A major driving force behind the attention that cognitive neuroscience has received in recent decades is the deep mystery of how consciousness is related to brain activity. Many scientists have been fascinated by the wealth of empirical data for individual neurons, neural assemblies, brain areas, and related psychological and behavioral features, and by progressively powerful computational tools to simulate corresponding cortical networks. At the same time, the interested public has been attracted by fancy illustrations of brain activity (e.g., (...) from imaging techniques) and by pretentious claims of neural solutions to basic philosophical problems (e.g., free will versus determinism) in popular magazines and newspapers. However, heaps of data, extensive simulations, pretty pictures and bold statements cannot replace the insight that is inevitable to relate the available facts to one another in an intelligible manner. I am talking about the old-fashioned stance that understanding is the ultimate goal of scientific effort. In this respect, the need for new conceptual and theoretical ideas in cognitive neuroscience begins to be recognized by prominent representatives of the field. Theory in this sense must not be confused with models fitting data, e.g. by regression algorithms, cluster analyses, etc. It is uncontroversial that experimental and numerical work is and will remain mandatory for scientific progress. But it can only unfold its full value if it is embedded within a profound theoretical framework. To formulate a serious, clear-cut and transparent formal framework for cognitive neuroscience is a challenge comparable to the early stage of physics four centuries ago. Only very few approaches worth mentioning are visible in contemporary literature. I think that Wallace’s book presents an appreciable step in the right direction. However, it is not the ultimate breakthrough yet. Much is left for future work before a full-fledged theory of consciousness will be established. In two central conceptual respects, Wallace builds on earlier work: Dretske’s (1981) usage of informational terms in consciousness research and Baars’ (1988) global neuronal workspace model.. (shrink)

We discuss the “axioms of dark ontology” proposed by the US philosopher Levi Bryant. The axioms are analyzed in a context of the historical development of diverse philosophical viewpoints united by the concept of the denial of consciousness. The “deniers” declare the direct conscious experience to be an illusion. As for the philosophical provisions that will not fit into their very limited conceptual straitjacket, they proclaim those inimical to science and therefore subject to elimination from the epistemological discourse (...) altogether. Analyzing the viewpoints of the denialist philosophers, we show their inner contradictions that primarily are related to their inability to apply their assertions about consciousness to their own methods, arguments, and conclusions. We review the historical development of the critique regarding the denialists’ views taken from sometimes very diverse philosophical corners. We show that Bryant’s assertions are not axioms in any logical sense, but rather a scientism manifesto created in response to a technocratic demand for dehumanization. We also show how Bryant’s rejection of the human-centered position of philosophy follows from deconstruction practices undertaken by the structuralists and poststructuralists. To advance his ideas, Bryant imitates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s forms of discourse. He also engages moralizing and sophistry. We show that Bryant’s failure to create a robust, coherent system demonstrates weaknesses in the poststructuralist ideas that his concepts stem from. We conclude that the process that the doctrine of the denial of consciousness becomes mainstream attests, in Heidegger’s terms, the final stage of European nihilism and the crisis of science and philosophy of knowledge. (shrink)

A renewed interest into the philosophy of Bergson in the last decades brings his central notion duration to the fore of lively discussions. This renewed interest certainly has its source in Deleuze’s Bergsonism, where he declared Bergson’s philosophy as an alternative to phenomenology that dominated the philosophical discussions throughout the 20th century. Deleuze’s attempt to put Bergson as an alternative to phenomenology was a protest against the phenomenological tradition, which denounced Bergson’s analysis of duration as it is first developed in (...) Time and Free Will as remaining within the confines of psychological realism and reducing time to a flowing, fluid thing that resides in consciousness. In an attempt to contribute to the Deleuzian interpretation that defends Bergson’s notion of duration against its phenomenological criticisms, I argue in the present study that the notion of duration as developed by Bergson in Time and Free Will can be best interpreted in terms of a Leibnizian notion of force. Following Bergson’s criticism of reduction of time to a homogeneous medium in the work of Kant, I introduce Bergson’s analysis of duration as a drive that prolongs the past of consciousness into its present. In doing this I take a detour through Heidegger’s interpretation of Leibniz’s vis activa as drive. (shrink)

Common sense suggests that visual consciousness is essential to skilled motor action, but Andy Clark—inspired by Milner and Goodale's dual visual systems theory—has appealed to a wide range of experimental dissociations to argue that such an assumption is false. Critics of Clark's argument contend that the content driving motor action is actually within subjects' experience, just not easily discovered. In this article, I argue that even if such content exists, it cannot be guiding motor action, since a review (...) of current visual neuroscience indicates that the visual brain areas producing conscious representations are distinct from those driving motor action. (shrink)

Information processing theories in psychology give rise to executive theories of consciousness. Roughly speaking, these theories maintain that consciousness is a centralized processor that we use when processing novel or complex stimuli. The computational assumptions driving the executive theories are closely tied to the computer metaphor. However, those who take the metaphor serious — as I believe psychologists who advocate the executive theories do — end up accepting too particular a notion of a computing device. In this (...) essay, I examine the arguments from theoretical computational considerations that cognitive psychologists use to support their general approach in order to show that they make unwarranted assumptions about the processing attributes of consciousness. I then go on to examine the assumptions behind executive theories which grow out of the computer metaphor of cognitive psychology and conclude that we may not be the sort of computational machine cognitive psychology assumes and that cognitive psychology''s approach in itself does not buy us anything in developing theories of consciousness. Hence, the state space in which we may locate consciousness is vast, even within an information processing framework. (shrink)

A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's worldview. The contextuality of one's conscious experience both enhances and constrains the contextuality of one's behavior. Since we cannot know first-hand the conscious experience of another, it is by way of behavioral contextuality that we make judgements about whether or not, and to what (...) extent, a system is conscious. Thus we believe that a deep understanding of contextuality is vital to the study of consciousness. Methods have been developed for handling contextuality in the microworld of quantum particles. Our goal has been to investigate the extent to which these methods can be used to analyze contextuality in conscious experience. (shrink)

Milner and Goodale have advanced a justly influential theory of the structure of the human visual system. In broad outline, Milner and Goodale hold that the ventral neural pathway is associated with recognition and experiential awareness, and with a kind of indirect control of action. And they hold that, by contrast, the dorsal neural stream is associated with the non-conscious, direct control of visually informed action. Most of the relevant empirical research has focused on the visual control of close-in, “personal (...) space,” reaching and/or grasping. While their view has not escaped controversy and debate, we think that Milner and Goodale have a compelling story to tell about the visual guidance of such close in, “personal space” action. However, the question of whether their scheme applies to behavior with visually specified targets that are outside of the space accessible by simply reaching and grasping is largely unstudied. And it should be studied, since this is the arena of much human behavior. We provide good reason to think that the Milner and Goodale scheme may well not apply to important classes of mid-range, ‘action space’ behavior. But the matter is in the end to be decided in the lab. We describe a research program to do this. (shrink)

The Belgian Act on Euthanasia came into force on 23 September 2002, making Belgium the second country—after the Netherlands—to decriminalize euthanasia under certain due-care conditions. Since then, Belgian nurses have been increasingly involved in euthanasia care. In this paper, we report a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 18 nurses from Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) who have had experience in caring for patients requesting euthanasia since May 2002 (the approval of the Act). We found that the care (...) process for patients requesting euthanasia is a complex and dynamic process, consisting of several stages, starting from the period preceding the euthanasia request and ending with the aftercare stage. When asked after the way in which they experience their involvement in the euthanasia care process, all nurses described it as a grave and difficult process, not only on an organizational and practical level, but also on an emotional level. “Intense” is the dominant feeling experienced by nurses. This is compounded by the presence of other feelings such as great concern and responsibility on the one hand, being content in truly helping the patient to die serenely, and doing everything in one’s power to contribute to this; but also feeling unreal and ambivalent on the other hand, because death is arranged. Nurses feel a discrepancy, because although it is a nice death, which happens in dignity and with respect, it is also an unnatural death. The clinical ethical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Within contemporary health care, many of the decisions affecting the health and well-being of patients are not being made by the clinicians or health professionals, but by those involved in health care management. Existing literature on organizational ethics provides insight into the various structures, processes and strategies - such as mission statement, ethics committees, ethical rounds … - that exist to create an organizational climate, which fosters ethical practices and decision-making It does not, however, show how health care managers experience (...) their job as being intrinsically ethical in itself. In the present article, we investigate the way in which ethical values are present in the lived experiences and daily practice of health care management. What does it imply to take up a managing position within a health care institution and to try to do this in an ethically inspired way? We carried out a qualitative study (Grounded Theory Approach) to explore the essence of values-based leadership in health care. We interviewed 15 people with extensive experience in health care management in the fields of elderly care, hospital care and mental health care in the various regions of Flanders, Belgium. Six predominant themes, presented as metaphors, illustrate the essence of values-based leadership in health care management. These are: (1) values-based health care management as managing a large garden, (2) as learning and using a foreign language, (3) going on a trekking with an ethical compass, (4) embodying integrity and authenticity in a credible encounter with everyone, (5) being a present and trustworthy leader during sun and storm, and (6) contributing to human flourishing by giving people wings to fly. Notwithstanding the importance of organizing a good ethics infrastructure, values-based leadership in health care entails much more than that. It is about the co-creation of an integrated and comprehensive ethical climate of which community-model thinking and authentic leadership are essential components. As a never-ending process, the six metaphors can help leaders to take substantive proactive steps to shape a fruitful ethical climate within their organization. (shrink)

The first brief description is given of a project aimed at searching for the neural correlates of consciousness through computer simulation. The underlying model is based on the known circuitry of the mammalian nervous system, the neuronal groups of which are approximated as binary composite units. The simulated nervous system includes just two senses - hearing and touch - and it drives a set of muscles that serve vocalisation, feeding and bladder control. These functions were chosen because of their (...) relevance to the earliest stages of human life, and the simulation has been given the name CyberChild. The system's pain receptors respond to a sufficiently low milk level in the stomach, if there is simultaneously a low level of blood sugar, and also to a full bladder and an unchanged diaper. It is believed that it may be possible to infer the presence of consciousness in the simulation through observations of CyberChild's behaviour, and from the monitoring of its ability to ontogenetically acquire novel reflexes. The author has suggested that this ability is the crucial evolutionary advantage of possessing consciousness. The project is still in its very early stages, and although no suggestion of consciousness has yet emerged, there appears to be no fundamental reason why consciousness could not ultimately develop and be observed. (shrink)

Sartre posed a problem for himself in his discussion of bad faith: how is it possible to deceive oneself, given the unity and translucency of consciousness? Many critics of Sartre interpret translucency as transparency; some, such as M.R. Haight, conclude that Sartre's account of consciousness makes self-deception impossible.A reply to those critics takes the form of showing that translucent consciousness has a number of dimensions: (a) non-positional versus positional aspects; (b) prereflective versus reflective levels; (c) temporally synthetic (...) flux; and (d) the first-person perspective versus the third-person perspective. These dimensions enable Sartre to succeed in describing subtle and varied patterns of self-deception, based on such strategies as obscuring, evasion, distraction, misdescription and disavowal. The translucency of consciousness is not a barrier to self-deception.However, there is another problem in Sartre's claim that all purposive activity is conscious, including our practice of self-deception. The bodily subject of consciousness performs important purposive activities beyond the range of the most obscure non-positional consciousness. This calls into question Sartre's existentialist claim that we are wholly responsible for all we do. (shrink)

The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul is a landmark attempt to make progress on the problem of animal consciousness. Ginsburg and Jablonka propose a general cognitive marker of the presence of consciousness: Unlimited Associative Learning. They use this marker to defend a generous view about the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, on which a capacity for conscious experience is common to all vertebrates, many arthropods and some cephalopod molluscs. They use this inferred distribution to defend (...) a view about the evolution of consciousness, on which it has evolved at least three times, first evolved at around the time of the Cambrian explosion, and was in fact the driving force behind that explosion. In this essay review, I reflect critically on the book’s central idea: the proposal that Unlimited Associative Learning provides a general marker of consciousness. (shrink)

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This paper addresses two ways in which scarcity in health care turns up and three ways in which this dual condition of scarcity can be approached. The first approach is the economic approach, which focuses on the causes of cost-increase in health care and on developing various mechanisms of rationing and priority-setting in health care. The second approach is the justice approach, which interprets scarcity as one of the Humean ‹Circumstances of Justice.’ Whereas these approaches interpret scarcity as a given (...) fact, the third approach casts doubt on this interpretation. Rather, it interprets scarcity as a social, anthropological, and technologically induced construction of Modernity. This paper supports the theories of Hans Achterhuis, Ivan Illich, and Nicholas Xenos but also further elaborates their views with regard to health care by offering an approach to scarcity that interprets it as an economic translation of finitude. I argue that this approach, which entails a contemporary revaluation of the ancient Socratic attitude on human life and finitude, will be better able to deal with the pressing contemporary issues of setting limits on health care because it mitigates contemporary health care’s tendency toward infinity in meeting – and creating – health care needs. (shrink)

Drawing from the gender wage gap literature, we explore four possible causes of sexual minority earnings gaps: variation in human capital and labor force participation, occupational and industrial sorting, differences in the institutional organization of the public and private sector, and different returns to marriage and parenthood. Using the 2006 Census of Canada, we find that heterosexual men earn more than gay men, followed by lesbians and heterosexual women. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that industry of employment, rather than occupation, disadvantages gay (...) men, lesbians, and heterosexual women. High levels of educational attainment lead to employment in lucrative occupations, but sexual minorities earn significantly less than heterosexual men within these occupations. Wage gaps are reduced in the public sector for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians. Finally, we find that heterosexual women experience a motherhood penalty, heterosexual men experience a fatherhood premium, and both receive a premium for marriage; however, the presence of children and marriage have no effect on the earnings of either gay men or lesbians in conjugal relationships. (shrink)

This paper explores the significative structure and normative quality of the child wish by focusing on the concepts that are used when people speak about it. Does having children belong to the category of human needs, or is it rather something that people desire? The Principle of Precedence holds that needs tend to have a substantially greater moral impact than desires. In order to do justice both to people’s profound happiness that goes with fulfilment of the child wish and to (...) the great distress that goes with involuntary childlessness it seems to be right then to argue that having children belongs to the category of human needs; and to use the term from Harry Frankfurt, to the category of constrained volitional needs. Accordingly, it might be argued that society has a rights-based duty to prevent involuntary childlessness. Contrary to this, I defend the thesis that an ethics of desire, which conceives the child wish as rooted in a symbolic desire, leads to a more adequate understanding of the child wish in all its various phenomenological aspects. (shrink)