Milner and Goodale's influential account of the primate cortical visual streams involves a division of consciousness between them, for it is the ventral stream that has the responsibility for visual consciousness. Hence, the dorsal visual stream is a ‘zombie’ stream. In this article, I argue that certain information carried by the dorsal stream likely plays a central role in the egocentric spatial content of experience, especially the experience of visual spatial constancy. Thus, the dorsal (...) stream contributes to a pervasive feature of consciousness. (shrink)

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest (...) of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors. (shrink)

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits (...) with and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications. (shrink)

It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis , according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious . In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, (...) selecting targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform” . Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention. (shrink)

According to Milner and Goodale’s dual visual systems (DVS) theory, a division obtains between visual consciousness and motor action, in that the visual system producing conscious vision (the ventral stream) is distinct from the one guiding action (the dorsal stream). That there would be this division is often taken (by Andy Clark and others) to undermine the folk view on how consciousness and action relate. However, even if this division obtains, this leaves open the possibility that (...) con- scious ventral information is often transmitted to the uncon- scious dorsal stream and then used to guide action, a possibility seeming to preserve a significant role for consciousness in action. This article assesses this possibility. In course of doing so, we will review those arguments recently having been made against the DVS view on how visual consciousness and action relate (ones due to, e.g., Briscoe and Schwenkler, or Schenk and McIntosh). What we will find is that, if we properly analyze the data upon which these arguments are based, we are still left with the impression that the DVS view is largely correct; i.e., it is only rarely that visual experience guides action. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of evidence for Puccetti's hypothesis of normal dual consciousness, i.e., the hypothesis that a stream of consciousness flows in each cerebral hemisphere when both are functioning normally in intact, healthy people. Evidence counts as supportive only if it is not explainable by a certain close alternative hypothesis that holds consciousness to proceed in the nondominant hemisphere only when the dominant hemisphere is unable to inhibit it . From this perspective, I discuss (...) two experiments involving anesthesia of the dominant hemisphere that were proposed, respectively, by Wilson and Puccetti, an actual experiment on normal, unanesthetized subjects reported by Landis, Graves, and Goodglass, as well as a further kind of experiment which, I suggest, may discriminate between the hypotheses. Assuming Puccetti is right, this experiment should yield a distinct pattern of reports from the dominant hemisphere about its experiences of acting as the individual deals with different kinds of tasks . Also considered is the common introspective evidence to the effect that we have only a single stream, never two distinct experiences at the same time. I argue, in support of Puccetti, that this is as it should be because introspection-at-a-distance is impossible; privileged access is internal to a stream, never occurs between streams. (shrink)

Consciousness has been widely regarded as the central arena for the mental solution of problems. A variant view locates the business end of problem solving elsewhere, with conscious intervention only for intermittent monitoring and goal-setting. In this scenario conscious awareness, with `intelligent' processes generally, is largely specialized to the construction and communication of appropriate after-the-event histories and explanations.The first part of the paper traces a long march undertaken by main-stream artificial intelligence basing itself on the first assumption. Disappointment (...) with the result has prompted interest in the second view, which forms the main topic of Part 2, 1995, pp. 52-66). (shrink)

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to (...) William James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret (...) conscious events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

Consciousness has been widely regarded as the central arena for the mental solution of problems. A variant view locates the business end of problem solving elsewhere, with conscious intervention only for intermittent monitoring and goal-setting. In this scenario conscious awareness, with `intelligent' processes generally, is largely specialized to the construction and communication of appropriate after-the-event histories and explanations.The first part of the paper traces a long march undertaken by main-stream artificial intelligence basing itself on the first assumption. Disappointment (...) with the result has prompted interest in the second view, which forms the main topic of Part 2 , 1995, pp. 52-66). (shrink)

My primary aim in this paper is to show that the structure of experience must include a subject (or self). I argue that the subjectless (No-Self) views of our experience must be rejected, primarily because without the consciousness-unifying function of a subject they are unable to account for the unities of consciousness present in our experience. In addition, I contend that such views fail in another respect. They emphasize the streaming of experience, the ever-changing flow of conscious events, (...) but have difficulty identifying what must stand unmoving to provide the contrast needed for the experience of motion. (shrink)

David Milner and Melvyn Goodale’s dissociation hypothesis is commonly taken to state that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in striate (V1) cortex: a dorsal, action-related “unconscious” stream and a ventral, perception-related “conscious” stream. As Milner and Goodale acknowledge, findings from blindsight studies suggest a more sophisticated picture that replaces the distinction between unconscious vision for action and conscious vision for perception with a tripartite division between unconscious vision for action, conscious vision for (...) perception, and unconscious vision for perception. The combination excluded by the tripartite division is the possibility of conscious vision for action. But are there good grounds for concluding that there is no conscious vision for action? There is now overwhelming evidence that illusions and perceived size can have a significant effect on action (Bruno & Franz, 2009; Dassonville & Bala, 2004; Franz & Gegenfurtner, 2008; McIntosh & Lashley, 2008). There is also suggestive evidence that any sophisticated visual behavior requires collaboration between the two visual streams at every stage of the process (Schenk & McIntosh, 2010). I nonetheless want to make a case for the tripartite division between unconscious vision for action, conscious vision for perception, and unconscious vision for perception. My aim here is not to refute the evidence showing that conscious vision can affect action but rather to argue (a) that we cannot gain cognitive access to action-guiding dorsal stream representations, and (b) that these representations do not correlate with phenomenal consciousness. This vindicates the semi-conservative view that the dissociation hypothesis is best understood as a tripartite division. (shrink)

Philosophers have used the term ‘consciousness’ for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection and phenomenal experience . This entry discusses the last two uses . Something within one’s mind is ‘introspectively conscious’ just in case one introspects it . Introspection is often thought to deliver one’s primary knowledge of one’s mental life. An experience or other mental entity is ‘phenomenally conscious’ just in case there is ‘something it is like’ for one to have it. The clearest examples (...) are: perceptual experiences, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one’s own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking ‘in words’ or ‘in images’. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial. (shrink)

Setting aside the problems of recognising consciousness in a machine, this article considers what would be needed for a machine to have human-like conscious- ness. Human-like consciousness is an illusion; that is, it exists but is not what it appears to be. The illusion that we are a conscious self having a stream of experi- ences is constructed when memes compete for replication by human hosts. Some memes survive by being promoted as personal beliefs, desires, opinions and (...) pos- sessions, leading to the formation of a memeplex (or selfplex). Any machine capa- ble of imitation would acquire this type of illusion and think it was conscious. Robots that imitated humans would acquire an illusion of self and consciousness just as we do. Robots that imitated each other would develop their own separate languages, cultures and illusions of self. Distributed seflplexes in large networks of machines are also possible. Unanswered questions include what remains of consciousness without memes, and whether artificial meme machines can ever transcend the illusion of self consciousness. (shrink)

Consciousness is known by the company it keeps. Story is its constant companion. This is the case even when it addresses itself to itself and says what it sees. It is like the pilot of a ship in one tale, but a thinking "I" in another. It is a theater where perceptions come and go, or an aviary where thoughts fly in and out like birds, or a stream. It is the manifestation of an immortal soul, or perhaps (...) the first rumor left behind by the disappearing soul on the air of philosophy. It is an ineffective nothing, a lyric cry in the midst of business, or the whistle of a steam engine. It is a mill, a tablet written on by experience, a telephone switchboard, a hologram, a computer. Anciently and most pertinently here... (shrink)

What type of artificial systems will claim to be conscious and will claim to experience qualia? The ability to comment upon physical states of a brain-like dynamical system coupled with its environment seems to be sufficient to make claims. The flow of internal states in such systems, guided and limited by associative memory, is similar to the stream of consciousness. A specific architecture of an artificial system, termed articon, is introduced that by its very design has to claim (...) being conscious. Non-verbal discrimination of the working memory states of the articon gives it the ability to experience different qualities of internal states. Analysis of the flow of inner states of such a system during typical behavioral process shows that qualia are inseparable from perception and action. The role of consciousness in learning of skills — when conscious information processing is replaced by subconscious — is elucidated. Arguments confirming that phenomenal experience is a result of cognitive processes are presented. Possible philosophical objections based on the Chinese room and other arguments are discussed, but they are insufficient to refute articon’s claims that it is conscious. Conditions for genuine understanding that go beyond the Turing test are presented. Articons may fulfill such conditions and in principle the structure of their experiences may be arbitrarily close to human. (shrink)

Let a "smooth experience" be an experience with perfectly gradual changes in phenomenal character. Consider, as examples, your visual experience of a blue sky or your auditory experience of a rising pitch. Do the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences have continuous or discrete structures? If we appeal merely to introspection, then it may seem that we should think that smooth experiences are continuous. This paper (1) uses formal tools to clarify what it means to say that an experience is continuous (...) or discrete, and (2) develops a discrete model of the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences. As a result, I'll argue that introspection leaves open whether smooth experiences are continuous or discrete. Yet I’ll also argue—perhaps surprisingly—that the discrete theory may better fit our introspective evidence. Along the way, I explain why the sense of ‘continuity’ ascribed to smooth experiences is distinct from the sense of ‘continuity’ ascribed to the stream of consciousness. (shrink)

Rationality of state is essential to consciousness, and depends both on self‐knowledge and on mental activeness—and above all upon the mental activity of thinking. What contribution does the overall activeness of the stream of consciousness make to the obtaining of consciousness? It firstly contributes to the epistemological and perceptual function, through ordering perceptual process. But it secondly conditions the intelligibility of the stream of consciousness of the conscious. The least apparently active experiences of the (...) conscious, such as daydreaming, are shown to be intentionally active, along with the others. This activeness makes possible rationality and explanatorial pellucidity in the development of that ‘stream’, which would otherwise be absent, because of the close link between activeness and rationality. This internal intelligibility has epistemological repercussions, for it is a necessary condition for making sense of the outer phenomenal world. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that mental states are conscious when, and only when, they are intentionally directed at themselves. Thus, if for subject x to perceive a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is intentionally directed at a tree, then for x to have a conscious perception of a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is primarily directed at the tree and secondarily directed at itself. If so, (...) class='Hi'>consciousness is reductively explicable in terms of intentionality. ;The argument of the dissertation proceeds in two phases. First, it is argued that the phenomenological feature common and peculiar to conscious states is intransitive self-consciousness, by which is meant the subtle and implicit self-awareness permanently accompanying the stream of consciousness. The first phase of the argument is to claim that it is this phenomenological feature, and, importantly, not the so-called sensory qualia often exhibited by conscious experiences, that is the mark of the conscious. ;The second phase of the argument is an account of intransitive self-consciousness in terms of the aforementioned sort of self-directed intentionality. It is argued, first, that self-directed intentionality is a necessary condition for intransitive self-consciousness, and second, that a specific kind of self-directed intentionality is also a sufficient condition for intransitive self-consciousness. ;The dissertation ends with a discussion of the prospects for naturalization, or demystification, of self-directed intentionality, and by consequence consciousness. A nomologically possible state of affairs is portrayed, in which physical states of the brain vehicle such self-directed intentionality. The nomological possibility of physically realized self-directed intentionality does not, of course, constitute a naturalization self-directed intentionality, but it does demonstrate the compatibility of self-directed intentionality with a physicalist-naturalist approach to consciousness. (shrink)

What type of artificial systems will claim to be conscious and will claim to experience qualia? The ability to comment upon physical states of a brain-like dynamical system coupled with its environment seems to be sufficient to make claims. The flow of internal states in such system, guided and limited by associative memory, is similar to the stream of consciousness. Minimal requirements for an artificial system that will claim to be conscious were given in form of specific architecture (...) named articon. Nonverbal discrimination of the working memory states of the articon gives it the ability to experience different qualities of internal states. Analysis of the inner state flows of such a system during typical behavioral process shows that qualia are inseparable from perception and action. The role of consciousness in learning of skills, when conscious information processing is replaced by subconscious, is elucidated. Arguments confirming that phenomenal experience is a result of cognitive processes are presented. Possible philosophical objections based on the Chinese room and other arguments are discussed, but they are insufficient to refute claims articon’s claims. Conditions for genuine understanding that go beyond the Turing test are presented. Articons may fulfill such conditions and in principle the structure of their experiences may be arbitrarily close to human. (shrink)

Even a cursory glance in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein makes it evident that one of Husserl’s major concerns in his 1917-18 reflections on time-consciousness was how to account for the constitution of time without giving rise to an infinite regress. Not only does Husserl constantly refer to this problem in Husserliana XXXIII – as he characteristically writes at one point “Überall drohen, scheint es, unendliche Regresse” – but he also takes care to distinguish between several different regresses. (...) One of the more troubling ones is the one that might be called the regress of foundation. It concerns the problem of how to avoid always having to presuppose yet another underlying constituting consciousness. As we will soon see, the attempt to avoid this specific regress is closely linked to the problem of how to come up with a satisfactory account of self-awareness. That Husserl himself was well aware of this link can be inferred from some of his reflections in the beginning of Husserliana XXXIII. As he writes at one point, consciousness exists, it exists as a stream, and it appears to itself as a stream. But how the stream of consciousness is capable of being conscious of itself, how it is possible and comprehensible that the very being of the stream is a form of self-consciousness, is the enduring problem of the entire treatise. In this article, I wish to take a closer look at some of Husserl’s attempts in the Bernau Manuscripts to account for time-consciousness without giving rise to an infinite regress. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Eric Schwitzgebel argues that if materialism about consciousness is true, then the United States is likely to have its own stream of phenomenal consciousness, distinct from the streams of conscious experience of the people who compose it. Indeed, most plausible forms of materialism have to grant that a certain degree of functional and behavioral complexity constitutes a sufficient condition for the ascription of phenomenal consciousness – and Schwitzgebel makes a case to show (...) that the United States as a whole fulfills this condition. One way to avoid this counter-intuitive consequence of materialism about consciousness is to adopt what Schwitzgebel calls an “anti-nesting principle”: a principle that states that there can be no nested forms of phenomenal consciousness and that therefore a conscious whole cannot have parts that are themselves conscious. However, Schwitzgebel then proceeds in his paper to draw up various objections, notably based on thought experiments, in order to dismiss these kinds of “anti-nesting” principles. My aim in this paper is to present a version of a sophisticated anti-nesting principle that avoids Schwitzgebel’s objections. This principle is reasonable, intuitive, and as non-arbitrary as possible. Moreover, it can resist the objections mounted by Schwitzgebel against simple anti-nesting principles. This principle helps materialists avoid the implication that the United States has its own stream of consciousness, while granting consciousness to some entities which, in many cases, are intuitive instantiators of phenomenal consciousness. This principle therefore constitutes a way out for a materialist who wants to deny that the United States is conscious. (shrink)

In the visual system, the represented features of individual objects (shape, colour, movement, and so on) are distributed both in space and time within the brain. Representations of inner and outer event sequences arrive through different sense organs at different times, and are likewise distributed. Objects are nevertheless perceived as integrated wholes - and event sequences are experienced to form a coherent "consciousness stream." In their thoughtful article, Dennett & Kinsbourne ask how this is achieved.

As Tulving argues, concepts shape psychologists’ thinking and determine how the end products of research are recorded. Currently in prominent use is not only Tulving’s concept of episodic memory but also his allied concept of autonoetic consciousness. And because, too, of the growing attention by psychologists to aspects of their subjects’ consciousness streams, I explore Tulving’s concept of autonoetic consciousness: to help improve the exercise of consciousness concepts in psychology generally. Two special topics among others are (...) discussed: the “flavor” Tulving claims characterizes recollective experience and corresponds to the warmth and intimacy James proposes consciousness states possess, and whether the autonoetic-consciousness concept applies to a brain-damaged man said to lack, probably, any capability for autonoetic awareness. (shrink)

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A.D.) meditated on the transcendent attributes of numbers that accountants so skillfully employ and on the attributes of moral rules. He thereby achieved a profound awareness of their Source in Truth. Nature is also governed by numbers; it is a “melody” that, again, woos one to its Source in Beauty. Whereas some businessmen meditate to clear their minds of clutter so as to make successful business decisions, Augustine persisted beyond the mere absence of clutter. Within the (...) stream of his own consciousness he found a focal point that led to the experience of the presence of a transcendent God in his own deeper self. The “order of love” enables one to achieve balance and a higher freedom wherein one cannot do wrong and possesses the courage to work toward building an earthly city that is just and beautiful, one that facilitates Everyman’s penetration of his own depth. (shrink)

When “divided attention” methods were discovered in the 1950s their implications for conscious experience were not widely appreciated. Yet when people process competing streams of sensory input they show both selective processesandclear contrasts between conscious and unconscious events. This paper suggests that the term “attention” may be best applied to theselection and maintenanceof conscious contents and distinguished from consciousness itself. This is consistent with common usage. The operational criteria for selective attention, defined in this way, are entirely different from (...) those used to assess consciousness. To illustrate the scientific usefulness of the distinction it is applied to Posner's brain model of visual attention. It seems that features that are often attributed to attention—like limited capacity—may more accurately be viewed as properties of consciousness. (shrink)

Consciousness is known to be limited in processing capacity and often described in terms of a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. In this paper, we discuss a purely temporal pattern code, functionally decoupled from spatial signals, for conscious state generation in the brain. Arguments in favour of such a code include Dehaene et al.’s long-distance reverberation postulate, Ramachandran’s remapping hypothesis, evidence for a temporal coherence index and coincidence detectors, and Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory. A time-bin (...) resonance model is developed, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation across large distances in highly plastic neural circuits. The temporal signatures are delivered by neural activity patterns which, beyond a certain statistical threshold, activate, maintain, and terminate a conscious brain state like a bar code would activate, maintain, or inactivate the electronic locks of a safe. Such temporal resonance would reflect a higher level of neural processing, one that is independent from sensorial or perceptual brain mechanisms. (shrink)

The equation of consciousness with qualia, of wakeful awareness with awareness-of-cognitive content (perceptions, conceptions, emotions), while intuitivelyattractive, and formally referenced as the primary index of consciousness by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, nevertheless has significant difficulties specifying precisely what it is that distinguishes conscious from non-conscious cognition. Moreover, there is a surprisingly robust congruence of evidence to the contrary, supporting the notion that consciousness, as a state of reflexive awareness, is distinct from the content one is aware (...) of, that this awareness/content amalgam is actually the product of an incorporation process of various intermittent, and constantly varying streams of content onto a pre-existing reflexively conscious state which is not reliant on these streams for its constitution as a reflexive state. Consciousness, the evidence strongly indicates, is not qualia, not the awareness of this or that perceptual, conceptual or emotional content, but reflexive, autonoetic awareness as such. (shrink)

Doubtless, the conscious brain integrates masses of information. But declaring that consciousness simply “emerges” when enough has accumulated, doesn't really explain how first person experience is implemented by neurons. Moreover, empirical observations challenge integrated information theory's (IIT) reliance on thalamo–cortical interactions as the information integrator. More likely, the cortex streams processed information to a still-enigmatic consciousness generator, one perhaps located in the brainstem.

Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism admirably shows the relevance of Indian philosophy to the interests of mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers. Garfield deploys the Indian tradition to critique phenomenal realism, the view that there really are qualia or phenomenal properties—that there really is ‘something it’s like’ to be undergoing the experience you are undergoing right now. I argue that Garfield’s critique probably turns on a false dilemma that omits the possibility of introspection as a fallible tool for getting at a real (...) class='Hi'>stream of experience that may or may not be accurately reported. Garfield also argues that if we are phenomenal realists, metaphysical idealism remains a philosophical possibility, whereas if we join him in rejecting phenomenal realism then we can also justifiably reject metaphysical idealism. I accept this conditional but reverse its valence: One advantage of phenomenal realism, and also of engaging with the Indian philosophical tradition, is that it opens up wonderful possibilities, like metaphysical idealism, that mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers tend to too swiftly dismiss. (shrink)

Like most people, I used to think of my conscious life as like a stream of experiences, passing through my mind, one after another. But now I’m starting to wonder, is consciousness really like this? Could this apparently innocent assumption be the reason we find consciousness so baffling?

Object files (OFs) are hypothesized mid-level representations which mediate our conscious perception of persisting objects—e.g. telling us ‘which went where’. Despite the appeal of the OF framework, not previous research has directly explored whether OFs do indeed correspond to conscious percepts. Here we present at least one case wherein conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays diverge from the analogous correspondence computed by the OF system. Observers viewed a ‘bouncing/streaming’ display in which two identical objects moved such (...) that they could have either bounced off or streamed past each other. We measured two dependent variables: (1) an explicit report of perceived bouncing or streaming; and (2) an implicit ‘object-specific preview benefit’ (OSPB), wherein a ‘preview’ of information on a specific object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different object), beyond display-wide priming. When the displays were manipulated such that observers had a strong bias to perceive streaming (on over 95% of the trials), there was nevertheless a strong OSPB in the opposite direction—such that the object files appeared to have ‘bounced’ even though the percept ‘streamed’. Given that OSPBs have been taken as a hallmark of the operation of object files, the five experiments reported here suggest that in at least some specialized (and perhaps ecologically invalid) cases, conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays can diverge from the mapping computed by the object-file system. (shrink)

Today many philosophers of mind accept that the two cortical streams of visual processing in humans can be distinguished in terms of conscious experience. The ventral stream is thought to produce representations that may become conscious, and the dorsal stream is thought to handle unconscious vision for action. Despite a vast literature on the topic of the two streams, there is currently no account of the way in which the relevant empirical evidence could fit with basic Husserlian phenomenology (...) of vision. Here I offer such an account. In this article, I show how the empirical evidence ought to be understood in a way that is informed by phenomenology. The differences in the two streams are better described as differences in spatial and temporal processing. Rather than simply “unconscious,” the dorsal stream can be better described as making a special contribution to what Husserl identified as the visual horizon. (shrink)

The processes whereby our brains continue to learn about a changing world in a stable fashion throughout life are proposed to lead to conscious experiences. These processes include the learning of top-down expectations, the matching of these expectations against bottom-up data, the focusing of attention upon the expected clusters of information, and the development of resonant states between bottom-up and top-down processes as they reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is there in the outside world. It (...) is suggested that all conscious states in the brain are resonant states and that these resonant states trigger learning of sensory and cognitive representations. The models which summarize these concepts are therefore called Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, models. Psychophysical and neurobiological data in support of ART are presented from early vision, visual object recognition, auditory streaming, variable-rate speech perception, somatosensory perception, and cognitive-emotional interactions, among others. It is noted that ART mechanisms seem to be operative at all levels of the visual system, and it is proposed how these mechanisms are realized by known laminar circuits of visual cortex. It is predicted that the same circuit realization of ART mechanisms will be found in the laminar circuits of all sensory and cognitive neocortex. Concepts and data are summarized concerning how some visual percepts may be visibly, or modally, perceived, whereas amodal percepts may be consciously recognized even though they are perceptually invisible. It is also suggested that sensory and cognitive processing in the What processing stream of the brain obey top-down matching and learning laws that are often complementary to those used for spatial and motor processing in the brain's Where processing stream. This enables our sensory and cognitive representations to maintain their stability as we learn more about the world, while allowing spatial and motor representations to forget learned maps and gains that are no longer appropriate as our bodies develop and grow from infanthood to adulthood. Procedural memories are proposed to be unconscious because the inhibitory matching process that supports these spatial and motor processes cannot lead to resonance. (shrink)

In this chapter, while acknowledging an important and famous early influence of Renouvier on James’s notions of belief and free will, the author documents a major and growing disagreement in their exchanges. The author argues that this disagreement is by no means a peripheral matter, since it involves James’s assessment of Renouvier’s neo-Kantianism. After having presented the core of Renouvier’s main influence in the section “Free Will’s Champion, Kantian Style,” the author gives a brief survey of James’s presence in the (...) Critique Philosophique in the section “James’s Contributions,” and deals, in the following sections, with James’s early criticisms of Renouvier on philosophical method (the section “Methods and Categories”), on the perception of space and time (the section ”Unbounded Spaces”) and on consciousness (the section ”The Stream of Thought”). In order to accomplish this, the author focuses on a more limited period than James' career as a whole: the author follows him from the early writings to the mid-1880s—that is, precisely to the point where James and Renouvier's philosophical itineraries begin to diverge. The author’s larger goal is to illustrate how the Critique Philosophique was at first a hospitable publication for the young James, but also how, from the end of this period on, important disputes emerged, in particular over consciousness, which gave rise to a paradoxical situation: the very organ that contributed to make James known turned out to be at odds with several of his most important theses, before the publication of the Principles, and even more before Pragmatism. (shrink)

According to what I’ll call the ‘two visual systems account’ (TWO-SYSTEMS), the visual system is divided into two independent sub- systems, a ventral system implementing ‘vision for perception’ and a dorsal system implementing ‘vision for action’ (Milner and Goodale, 2006). TWO-SYSTEMS is widely discussed in philosophy due to the counter-intuitive role that it posits for conscious experience in the control of actions. However, recent evidence undermines the model’s core tenets: it no longer appears that the ventral and dorsal streams constitute (...) isolated processing systems, and there is now evidence for the involvement of both streams in conscious experience and online motor control. I articulate a new ‘direct dorsal control account’ (DORSAL-CONTROL), show that it is immune to three empirical challenges facing TWO-SYSTEMS, and show that it nonetheless has similarly significant implications for the perceiving mind. -/- Section 1 articulates TWO-SYSTEMS and its philosophical implications. Section 2 describes three empirical challenges to TWO-SYSTEMS. Section 3 articulates DORSAL-CONTROL and shows that it is immune to the three challenges. Section 4 articulates DORSAL-CONTROL’s philosophical implications. (shrink)

Several lines of evidence indicate that rapid target-aiming movements, involving both the eyes and hand, can be biased by the visual context in which the movements are performed. Some of these contextual influences carry-over from trial to trial. This research indicates that dissociation between the dorsal and ventral systems based on speed, conscious awareness, and frame of reference is far from clear.

Consciousness is known to be limited in processing capacity and often described in terms of a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. In this paper, we discuss a purely temporal pattern code, functionally decoupled from spatial signals, for conscious state generation in the brain. Arguments in favour of such a code include Dehaene et al.'s long-distance reverberation postulate, Ramachandran's remapping hypothesis, evidence for a temporal coherence index and coincidence detectors, and Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory. A time-bin (...) resonance model is developed, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation across large distances in highly plastic neural circuits. The temporal signatures are delivered by neural activity patterns which, beyond a certain statistical threshold, activate, maintain, and terminate a conscious brain state like a bar code would activate, maintain, or inactivate the electronic locks of a safe. Such temporal resonance would reflect a higher level of neural processing, independent from sensorial or perceptual brain mechanisms. (shrink)

I examine an argument proposed by Tye and Wright, inspired by Geach, which holds that a correct understanding of how conceptual thought occurs in time demands we expel it from experience. This would imply—pace William James— that the “stream of consciousness” is not, even in part, a “stream of thought.” I argue that if we closely examine what seems to support crucial premises of their argument, we will find this undermines its other assumptions, and points us to (...) a way of placing thought in time that they neglect. Ultimately, attention to the phenomenology of language comprehension and production not only undercuts their “temporality argument” against including thought in experience; it prepares the ground for a case in favor of inclusion. In critiquing their argument I hope not just to disarm an objection to a view I espouse, nor even just to discover new support for it, but also to shed some light on the temporality of thought and its relation to self-expression. (shrink)