It was not long ago when the consciousness was not considered a problem for science. However, this has now changed and the problem of consciousness is considered the greatest challenge to science. In the last decade, a great number of books and articles have been published in the field, but very few have focused on the how consciousness evolves and develops, and what characterizes the transitions between different conscious states, in animals and humans. This book addresses these (...) questions. Renowned researchers from different fields of science (including neurobiology, evolutionary biology, ethology, cognitive science, computational neuroscience and philosophy) contribute with their results and theories in this book, making it a unique collection of the state-of-the-art of this young field of consciousness studies. - First book on the topic - Focus on different levels of consciousness, including: Evolutionary, developmental, and functional - Highly interdisciplinary. (shrink)

By pushing Descartes to more clearly explain the union of body and soul beyond the functioning of a ‘strong’ passion, namely sadness, Elisabeth wants Descartes to review his idea of the passions, and his understanding of the ‘theory of the four humors’. This chapter aims at showing that Descartes turns away from Galen’s theory of the humors, which he globally adopts in the 1633 Treatise of Man. With the shift in his conceptualization of the humors between this Treatise and the (...) Treatise of the Passions (1649), Descartes analyzed more specifically the inner feelings, consciousness, and the passions, by considering that a man is not simply a body, but a psychophysical being, with a body and a soul. (shrink)

We offer a scientific approach to the philosophical 'hard problem' of consciousness, as formulated by David Chalmers in this journal. Our treatment is based upon two recent insights concerning the endogenous nature of consciousness and the minimal thermodynamic conditions for being alive. We suggest that a combination of these insights specifies sufficient conditions for attributing feeling to being.

(1997). The physiology of collective consciousness. World Futures: Vol. 48, The Concept of Collective Consiousness: Research Perspectives, pp. 57-104.

The integrated information theory equates levels of consciousness with the amount of information integrated over the elements that constitute a system. Conscious visual perception provides two observations that contradict the IIT. First, objects are accurately perceived when presented for ≪100 ms during which time no neural integration is possible. Second, an object is seen as an integrated whole and, concurrently, all constituent elements are evident. Because integration destroys information about details, IIT cannot account for perceptual detail preservation.

This paper addresses the following questions from the point of view of Nietzsche’s philosophy: What is the mind, and which kind of relationship does it hold to the body? Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy suggested a view of the mind that allows to outline an alternative stance to both mentalism and physicalism, as well as to both dualism and reductionism. It is argued that Nietzsche’s rehabilitation of the body as the specific seat of (...) the mind in opposition to the Cartesian supremacy of the Ego still is of a great interest for contemporary philosophy, since it is not equivalent either to a reversed form of Cartesian dualism or to a physicalist reductionism. It is argued that Nietzsche did restrict the concept of the mind but in order not to eliminate it, rather to “de-substantialise” it. As the body is described as “Leib-Organisation”, the mind becomes the course of various and manifold mental states that depend on a bodily basis. (shrink)

The Global Workspace Theory and Information Integration Theory are two of the most currently accepted consciousness models; however, these models do not address many aspects of conscious experience. We compare these models to our previously proposed consciousness model in which the thalamus fills-in processed sensory information from corticothalamic feedback loops within a proposed 3D default space, resulting in the recreation of the internal and external worlds within the mind. This 3D default space is composed of all cells of (...) the body, which communicate via gap junctions and electrical potentials to create this unified space. We use 3D llustrations to explain how both visual and non-visual sensory information may be filled-in within this dynamic space, creating a unified seamless conscious experience. This neural sensory memory space is likely generated by baseline neural oscillatory activity from the default mode network, other salient networks, brainstem, and reticular activating system. (shrink)

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka propose a new theory about the origin of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the transition (...) to basic consciousness. Using a methodology similar to that used by scientists when they identified the transition from non-life to life, Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest a set of criteria, identify a marker for the transition to minimal consciousness, and explore the far-reaching biological, psychological, and philosophical implications. After presenting the historical, neurobiological, and philosophical foundations of their analysis, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose that the evolutionary marker of basic or minimal consciousness is a complex form of associative learning, which they term unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL enables an organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, non-reflex-inducing stimulus or action, and use it as the basis for future learning. Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, drove the Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms. Finally, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose symbolic language as a similar type of marker for the evolutionary transition to human rationality—to Aristotle's “rational soul.”. (shrink)

While gender and race often are considered socially constructed, this book argues that they are physiologically constituted through the biopsychosocial effects of sexism and racism. This means that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy need to examine not only the financial, legal, political and other forms of racist and sexism oppression, but also their physiological operations. Examining a complex tangle of affects, emotions, knowledge, and privilege, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression develops an (...) understanding of the human body whose unconscious habits are biological. On this account, affect and emotion are thoroughly somatic, not something "mental" or extra-biological layered on top of the body. They also are interpersonal, social, and can be transactionally transmitted between people.Ranging from the stomach and the gut to the hips and the heart, from autoimmune diseases to epigenetic markers, Sullivan demonstrates the gastrointestinal effects of sexual abuse that disproportionately affect women, often manifesting as IBS, Crohn's disease, or similar functional disorders. She also explores the transgenerational effects of racism via epigenetic changes in African American women, who experience much higher pre-term birth rates than white women do, and she reveals the unjust benefits for heart health experienced by white people as a result of their racial privilege. Finally, developing the notion of a physiological therapy that doesn't prioritize bringing unconscious habits to conscious awareness, Sullivan closes with a double-barreled approach for both working for institutional change and transforming biologically unconscious habits. The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression skillfully combines feminist and critical philosophy of race with the biological and health sciences. The result is a critical physiology of race and gender that offers new strategies for fighting male and white privilege. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore whether masked emotional faces can elicit changes in physiology without awareness. We also explore whether emotional miss-discrimination involves the physiological correla...

The Problem of Consciousness This chapter will introduce you to consciousness and its most important characteristics. We will look at definitions of consciousness, and examine what it means to say that consciousness is a private experience. We will look at the idea that it is like something to be you or me. The chapter mentions ideas and themes that will be covered in more detail in the rest of the book, and explains why the topic is (...) an important one. Research on consciousness is big on questions but shorter on answers. Nevertheless these questions are central to what it means to be human, or indeed at the heart of what it's like to be anything - what it's like to be conscious. Think of yourself just now. What does it feel like you to be you right at this moment? Think of a loved one. What do you think it is like to be them? Do they know exactly what they're feeling, and do you know just what they're feeling? We might have some idea, but the answer in both cases is no, and not only "no", we can't see how we ever could know for sure. It's my consciousness and your consciousness. (shrink)

This paper argues that the many and various conceptions of consciousness propounded by cognitive scientists and philosophers can all be understood as constituted with reference to four fundamental sorts of criterion: epistemic (concerned with kinds of consciousness), semantic (dealing with orders of consciousness), physiological (reflecting states of consciousness), and pragmatic (seeking to capture types of consciousness). The resulting four-fold taxonomy, intended to be exhaustive, suggests that all of the distinct varieties of consciousness currently encountered (...) in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of mind, clinical psychology, and other related fields ultimately refer to a unified natural process, analysed under four general aspects. The proposed taxonomy will, it is hoped, possess sufficient clarity to serve as a sound theoretical framework for further scientific studies, and to count as a significant step in the direction of a properly formulated unified concept of consciousness. (shrink)

“This is surely the ultimate expression of the top-down approach to consciousness, written with Sommerhoff's characteristic clarity and precision. It says far more than other books four times the size of this admirably concise volume. This book is destined to become a pillar of the subject.” —Rodney Cotterill, Technical University of Denmark The problem of consciousness has been described as a mystery about which we are still in a terrible muddle and in Understanding Consciousness: Its Function and (...) Brain Processes, the author attempts to unravel this mystery by offering a clarification of the main concepts related to consciousness, and positing a comprehensive biological explanation. Consequently, this book will be ideal for a wide-range of upper level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The author interprets consciousness as a property that can be possessed by many creatures lacking a language faculty and comprises all of the following: awareness of the surrounding world; awareness of the self as an entity; and awareness of such things as thoughts and feelings. He argues that a biological approach can achieve both the necessary conceptual clarifications and a joint explanation of these divisions of awareness in terms of just two accurately defined concepts of 'internal representation' and two empirically supported assumptions about the functional architecture of a specific set of brain processes. Despite this striking simplicity, his model covers these divisions of awareness both as objective faculties of the brain and as subjective experience. These conclusions are applied to a broad range of fundamental questions, including the biological rationale of subjective experience and where consciousness resides in the neural networks. (shrink)

What processes of the brain or the mind can explain the uniquely personal experience we have of smelling a rose, or feeling the pain of toothache, or seeing the point of a newspaper cartoon, or sensing a pang of post-modernist angst in the run up to the Millenium. The phenomenon of humanhigher-order consciousness has puzzled philosophers, naturalists, and theologians down the ages. Now, somewhat belatedly, consciousness has caught the interest of scientists, some of whom believe they are on (...) the brink of discovering its basis in neurobiological processes. This book, drawing together leading figures from the spheres of science and philosophy, is about the prospects of finding a scientific explanation of consciousness. And it is also about how our view of ourselves could be affected by such a scientific explanation. Until recently, the vast complexityof the brain had kept researchers from tackling the thorny topic of consciousness. But now, new imaging techniques are revealing many of the brain's mysteries to neuroscientists, while some researchers in the field of artificial intelligence believe they will be able to replicate consciousness withsilicon and circuitry. Meanwhile, philosophers continue to take issue with the methodology used by science to investigate this phenomenon. These are the issues that are debated in this book, in which exponenets of each view have the opportunity to argue their case, and the result is a collectionthat will both enlighten all those interested in the question of consciousness, and stimulate debate among those at the forefront of research in the many fields now investigating it. (shrink)

In the beginning: introduction -- This I believe: preview -- This they believe: other views -- Where it begins: anatomy and environment -- Where it began: evolution -- What is it?: consciousness -- There was the word: self-consciousness and language -- See here: attention -- Perhaps to dream: sleep -- x=2y: representation -- The dance of life: movement -- They all fall down: dissolution of function -- Been there, done that: experience -- Which have eyes and see not: (...) stimulus hierarchy -- Buy one, get one free: volition -- Play it again: speculative reprise -- In the end: conclusion. (shrink)

In Sherrington's Loom, Alan McComas provides a historical account of the research that has led to recognition of key mechanisms underlying consciousness. Evidence is assembled from a rich variety of sources--neurological patients, animal behavior, laboratory studies, and especially brain stimulation and recording in humans and animals. Among the remarkable advances in the field has been the ability to identify nerve cells in the human brain that store memories of specific people, places, and objects. In addition to dealing with the (...) issue of "free will," the book assembles the information into possible working models for sensations, intentions, and actions. McComas concludes by considering the possibility of consciousness in artificially intelligent systems. (shrink)

How making up our minds and the makeup of our minds can help us live better and die better. We live in a climate where feelings trump reason and evidence. Lies are treated as "alternative facts." At the same time, it seems our culture does not want us to treat altered or higher states of consciousness seriously. Focusing both on evidence and on such states of consciousness can reorient our attitudes. Jack Crittenden asks the reader to think about (...) life after death, about the basis of morality and the essence of spirituality, about the meaning of happiness, about the path of dying, and about the proper role of work in our lives and how education connects to that role. What if our memories, thoughts, and whole personality lived on after we died? What if morality were based on reasons and evidence and not on God and sacred texts? What if happiness lies not in what we think, how we feel, and what we long for, but in living in the present and in the dying of the self itself? Experiences of and the evidence on altered and higher states of consciousness can lead us to better lives and better deaths. (shrink)

Most early studies of consciousness have focused on human subjects. This is understandable, given that humans are capable of reporting accurately the events they experience through language or by way of other kinds of voluntary response. As researchers turn their attention to other animals, “accurate report” methodologies become increasingly difficult to apply. Alternative strategies for amassing evidence for consciousness in non-human species include searching for evolutionary homologies in anatomical substrates and measurement of physiological correlates of conscious states. In (...) addition, creative means must be developed for eliciting behaviors consistent with consciousness. In this paper, we explore whether necessary conditions for consciousness can be established for species as disparate as birds and cephalopods. We conclude that a strong case can be made for avian species and that the case for cephalopods remains open. Nonetheless, a consistent effort should yield new means for interpreting animal behavior. (shrink)

The human brain is the first computer to which all others are compared. Yet we know painfully little about how a brain accomplishes its peculiar computations. In particular, consciousness is at once familiar and mysterious, and needs to be understood both for science and for medicine. Boldly, but gently this book introduces a reader to the neural circuitry that achieves consciousness. This amazing interconnection enables consciousness to flow like a stream, intimately relevant to the outside world; and (...) for this to happen, fundamental cues emerge from mental images to bring forth associated recalls. Alas cues can be inconsistent, causing memory failure; fortunately a subliminal cue editor encourages remembering forgotten items. Furthermore, cues generally address several memories, forcing the brain to make a selection. This necessitates another special circuit whose purpose is subliminal editing. The simplified explanations provided in this book make it clear that neurons do far more than ordinary devices, since a single neuron is capable of remarkably dense combinational and sequential logic. Beginning with their interesting and unexpected logical behavior, the reader will genuinely enjoy Dr. Burger's synthesis of a system for biological consciousness, a system that may someday result in credible artificial consciousness. (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)

Pockett has drawn an alternative conclusion from the data of Libet, Alberts, Wright, and Feinstein , and suggested that it takes 80 ms, rather than 500 ms, for the sensation evoked by a stimulus to enter awareness. Here, I suggest that our conscious sensation evolves over time, during the period from 80 to 500 ms after a stimulus, until the sensation is stably localized in space.

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman (...) refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. (shrink)

A succinct, neurobiological explanation of the pathways that 'wake up the brain' from deep anesthesia, sleep and brain injury.

The phenomenon of hypnosis provides a rich paradigm for those seeking to understand the processes that underlie consciousness. Understanding hypnosis tells us about a basic human capacity for altered experiences that is often overlooked in contemporary western societies. Throughout the 200 year history of psychology, hypnosis has been a major topic of investigation by some of the leading experimenters and theorists of each generation. Today hypnosis is emerging again as a lively area of research within cognitive (systems level) neuroscience (...) informing basic questions about the structure and biological basis of conscious states. This book describes the latest advances in understanding hypnosis and similar trance states by researchers within the neuroscience of consciousness. It contains many new and exciting contributions from up and coming researchers and provides a lively debate on methodological and theoretical issues central to the development of emerging research paradigms in the neuroscience of conscious states. The book introduces and describes many of the recent new tools that have become available to researchers in this field. Academics, researchers, and clinicians wanting to develop their knowledge of the latest findings, theories and methods in the scientific study of hypnosis and related states of consciousness will find this an up to date guide to this rapidly advancing field. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular (...) rivalry, attention, memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness, this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic. (shrink)

A conscious mind in a sleeping brain: the title of this book provides a vivid image of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which dreamers are consciously aware that they are dreaming while they seem to be soundly asleep. Lucid dreamers could be said to be awake to their inner worlds while they are asleep to the external world. Of the many questions that this singular phenomenon may raise, two are foremost: What is consciousness? And what is sleep? Although (...) we cannot pro vide complete answers to either question here, we can at least explain the sense in which we are using the two terms. We say lucid dreamers are conscious because their subjective reports and behavior indicate that they are explicitly aware of the fact that they are asleep and dreaming; in other words, they are reflectively conscious of themselves. We say lucid dreamers are asleep primarily because they are not in sensory contact with the external world, and also because research shows physiological signs of what is conventionally considered REM sleep. The evidence presented in this book-preliminary as it is-still ought to make it clear that lucid dreaming is an experiential and physiological reality. Whether we should consider it a paradoxical form of sleep or a paradoxical form of waking or something else entirely, it seems too early to tell. (shrink)

The paper seeks to refute the idea that physiology can explain at best an organism’s behaviour, outward and inner, but not the conscious experiences that accompany that behaviour. To do so, the paper clarifies the idea by confrontation with an actual example of psychophysical explanation of perceptual experience. This reveals that the idea relies on a prejudice about physiological practice. Then the paper explores some peculiar ways in which this prejudice may survive its refutation. This is to bring out (...) that such explanations of experience as are actually offered by contemporary psychophysics explain nothing less than what they purport to explain; and that these achievements are not, in some peculiar way, more remarkable than equally clever physical explanations of other phenomena. (shrink)

In recent years consciousness has become a significant area of study in the cognitive sciences. The Frontiers of Consciousness is a major interdisciplinary exploration of consciousness. The book stems from the Chichele lectures held at All Souls College in Oxford, and features contributions from a 'who's who' of authorities from both philosophy and psychology. The result is a truly interdisciplinary volume, which tackles some of the biggest and most impenetrable problems in consciousness. The book includes chapters (...) considering the apparent explanatory gap between science and consciousness, our conscious experience of emotions such as fear, and of willed actions by ourselves and others. It looks at subjective differences between two ways in which visual information guides behaviour, and scientific investigation of consciousness in non-human animals. It looks at the challenges that the mind-brain relation presents for clinical practice as well as for theories of consciousness. The book draws on leading research from philosophy, experimental psychology, functional imaging of the brain, neuropsychology, neuroscience, and clinical neurology. Distinctive in its accessibility, authority, and its depth of coverage, Frontiers of Consciousness will be a groundbreaking and influential addition to the consciousness literature. (shrink)

We need to clarify at least four aspects of selfhood if we are to reach a better understanding of consciousness in general, and of its alternate states. First, how did we develop our self-centred psychophysiology? Second, can the four familiar lobes of the brain alone serve, if only as preliminary landmarks of convenience, to help understand the functions of our many self-referent networks? Third, what could cause one's former sense of self to vanish from the mental field during an (...) extraordinary state of consciousness? Fourth, when a person's physical and psychic self do drop off briefly, how has conscious experience then been transformed? In particular, what happens to that subject's personal sense of time? Our many-sided self arose in widely distributed brain networks. Since infancy, these self-oriented circuits have been over-conditioned by limbic biases. Selfhood then seems to have evolved along lines suggesting at least in shorthand the operations of a kind of ‘I-Me-Mine’ complex. But what happens when this egocentric triad briefly dissolves? Novel states of consciousness emerge. Two personally-observed states are discussed: insight-wisdom ; internal absorption. How do these two states differ phenomenologically? The physiological processes briefly suggested here emphasize shifts in deeper systems, and pivotal roles for thalamo-cortical interactions in the front and back of the brain. (shrink)

Research on consciousness is currently enjoying a spectacular revival of interest in the cognitive sciences. From an empirical point of view, the NCC program — the search for the “Neural Correlates of Consciousness” — holds the promise of establishing correlations between physiological and phenomenal states in a way that directly resembles G. T. Fechner´s (1860) so-called “inner psychophysics”. Should the NCC program be entirely successful, we would thus be able to predict phenomenal states based on physiological states. we (...) would be able to predict phenomenal states based on physiological states. In this paper, we explore some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties of this approach. In both neurobiology and psychology, there are serious measurement problems that stand in the way of correlation research, even after the “hard problem” has been set aside. Thus, even if one had identified certain internal functional states as indicators of phenomenal states, the empirical psychologist would still be confronted with fundamental problems, such as determining the absence or presence of these functional states. In this respect, philosophy of science may help and provide a metatheoretical framework for the current interdisciplinary project. (shrink)

The phenomenon of hypnosis provides a rich paradigm for those seeking to understand the processes that underlie consciousness. Understanding hypnosis tells us about a basic human capacity for altered experiences that is often overlooked in contemporary western societies. Throughout the 200 year history of psychology, hypnosis has been a major topic of investigation by some of the leading experimenters and theorists of each generation. Today hypnosis is emerging again as a lively area of research within cognitive neuroscience informing basic (...) questions about the structure and biological basis of conscious states. This book describes the latest advances in understanding hypnosis and similar trance states by researchers within the neuroscience of consciousness. It contains many new and exciting contributions from up and coming researchers and provides a lively debate on methodological and theoretical issues central to the development of emerging research paradigms in the neuroscience of conscious states. The book introduces and describes many of the recent new tools that have become available to researchers in this field. Academics, researchers, and clinicians wanting to develop their knowledge of the latest findings, theories and methods in the scientific study of hypnosis and related states of consciousness will find this an up to date guide to this rapidly advancing field. (shrink)

Anthropology of the Brain In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system. He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness.