Schizophrenia is usually described as a fragmentation of subjective experience and the impossibility to engage in meaningful cultural and intersubjective practices. Although the term schizophrenia is less than 100 years old, madness is generally believed to have accompanied mankind through its historical and cultural ontogeny. What does it mean to be “mad”? The failure to adopt social practices or to internalize cultural values of common sense? Despite the vast amount of literature and research, it seems that the study of schizophrenia (...) and of the psychoses is suffering from a generic disintegration. In this introduction, we offer an historical overview of the variety of theories and approaches to schizophrenia. We also provide an overview of how the authors in this volume attempt an integrative account where training, practice, theory and research are considered as parts of a larger whole. This is a varied and pluralistic volume, and it is up to the readers to make use of different chapters according to their own needs. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between schizophrenia and common sense. It approaches this theme from a multidisciplinary perspective. Coverage features contributions from phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, and social cognition. -/- The contributors address the following questions: How relevant is the loss of common sense in schizophrenia? How can the study of schizophrenia contribute to the study of common sense? How to understand and explain this loss of common sense? -/- They also consider: What is the relationship of (...) practical reasoning and logical formal reasoning with schizophrenia? What is the relationship between the person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and social values? -/- Chapters examine such issues as rationality, emotions, self, and delusion. In addition, one looks at brain structure and neurotransmission. Others explore phenomenological and Wittgensteinian theories. The book features papers from the Schizophrenia and Common Sense International Workshop, held at New University of Lisbon, November 2015. It offers new insights into this topic and will appeal to researchers, students, as well as interested general readers. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between schizophrenia and common sense. It approaches this theme from a multidisciplinary perspective. Coverage features contributions from phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, and social cognition. The contributors address the following questions: How relevant is the loss of common sense in schizophrenia? How can the study of schizophrenia contribute to the study of common sense? How to understand and explain this loss of common sense? They also consider: What is the relationship of practical reasoning (...) and logical formal reasoning with schizophrenia? What is the relationship between the person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and social values? Chapters examine such issues as rationality, emotions, self, and delusion. In addition, one looks at brain structure and neurotransmission. Others explore phenomenological and Wittgensteinian theories. The book features papers from the Schizophrenia and Common Sense International Workshop, held at New University of Lisbon, November 2015. It offers new insights into this topic and will appeal to researchers, students, as well as interested general readers. (shrink)

Diante de uma crise sanitária mundial, a pandemia do COVID-19, iniciada em 2020, fez com a humanidade se reorganizasse, entrando em uma nova era. Os órgãos de saúde competentes, juntamente com as nações, expuseram suas preocupações, editando decretos e normativas a serem seguidas, com medidas rigorosas de isolamento social. E a Educação foi uma das áreas mais afetadas, por ser um dos pilares mais importante na sociedade moderna. A rotina que antes era totalmente presencial, passou a ser a distância, novas (...) ferramentas foram ganhando palco, as tecnologias entraram em cena, as mídias sociais passam a ser recursos, estratégias para novas abordagens, metodologias passaram a ser repensadas, reorganizadas, para oferecer uma educação de qualidade, mesmo em tempos de crise. E partindo dessa ideia, o presente trabalho visa discutir e compreender se toda essa mudança, essa troca de cenário de forma abrupta, e as estratégias conseguiram alcançar os objetivos propostos no processo de ensino-aprendizagem. A análise ocorreu em uma escola pública municipal da região norte de Cuiabá- MT, no período letivo de 2020 e 2021, sendo observadas o curso das disciplinas Arte e Educação Física, com um público de alunos variados, da pré-escola ao 3° ano do Ensino Fundamental I. (shrink)

Introduction: The aim of this review was to systematically synthesize the published literature describing the psychological and behavioral correlates of recreational running in adults, defined as running for leisure, with or without a competitive component.Methods: Quantitative research published in peer-reviewed journals until January 2021 were included. Studies were identified through MEDLINE, PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science and were included in this review if they were aimed at recreational running, included general adult samples, and assessed psychological or behavioral correlates of (...) recreational running.Results: Fifty-six articles reporting 58 studies met the eligibility criteria and were included. There were 27 cross-sectional studies, 12 longitudinal studies, and 19 trials. Twenty-eight studies assessed antecedents of running behavior, and 25 studies used running behavior as treatment or predictor of a given effect or outcome. Four studies examined both predictors and outcomes of running. Thirty-one studies showed poor quality, while 20 had fair and 7 good quality. Motives were the most frequently studied antecedent of running behavior, and results suggest that the highest-ranked or more prevalent motives were physical health, psychological motives, and personal achievement. Additionally, perceived control, attitude toward running, intention and subjective norms, self-efficacy, and social support may have also played a role in the adoption of recreational running. Moreover, improvements in mood and well-being were the most frequently reported positive outcomes of running. Reductions in depression, anxiety, and stress were also reported in included studies.Discussion: To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review on this topic. The identification of behavioral and psychological correlates of recreational running across populations can contribute to inform and guide a public policy agenda, focused on helping people sustain regular physical activity, through a modality they have chosen and appear to enjoy.Systematic Review Registration:https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=68954, identifier: CRD42017068954. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss the contemporary activities and roles that scientific associations play in science and society. It is based on a comprehensive study of scientific associations in Portugal, relying on a multi-method, quantitative and qualitative approach. After a brief review of the literature on associations in the social studies of science, we provide an outline of the expanding field of scientific associations in Portugal. We then proceed to present and discuss the five main roles of associations identified through (...) the research: communication among peers, promotion of research, science dissemination, representation of professional interests and policy advice. We conclude that the external roles of associations have become more important than the internal ones. Whereas the internationalisation of science has moved the communication, collaboration and competition between researchers into the transnational sphere, the links that associations forge between science and other social spheres are still deeply rooted in national settings and much dependant on specific configurations and practices by government, business and other social actors. (shrink)

In 2015 Dag Prawitz proposed a natural deduction ecumenical system, where classical logic and intuitionistic logic are codified in the same system. In his ecumenical system, Prawitz recovers the harmony of rules, but the rules for the classical operators do not satisfy separability. In fact, the classical rules are not pure, in the sense that negation is used in the definition of the introduction and elimination rules for the classical operators. In this work we propose an ecumenical system adapting, to (...) the natural deduction framework, Girard’s mechanism of stoup. This allows for the definition of a pure harmonic natural deduction system for the propositional fragment of Prawitz’s ecumenical logic. We conclude by presenting an extension proposal to the first-order setting and a different approach to purity based on some ideas proposed by Julien Murzi. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Inés Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our theorization and (...) normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's canonical approach and enlists overlooked resources to radicalize, democratize, and transnationalize cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Burnout is a phenomenon characterized by fatigue and frustration, usually related to work stress and dedication to a cause, a way of life that does not match the person’s expectations. Although it seems to be associated with risk factors stemming from a professional environment, this problem may affect any person. Palliative care is provided in a challenging environment, where professionals often have to make demanding ethical decisions and deal with death and dying. This article reports on the findings of a (...) systematic review aimed at identifying described burnout levels in palliative care nurses and physicians, and the related risks and protective factors. The main findings indicate that burnout levels in palliative care, or in health care settings related to this field, do not seem to be higher than in other contexts. (shrink)

This chapter is devoted to the discussion of religious freedom and the anti-racist fight in the Black Diaspora in Latin America, considering the historical processes that involve such discussion, including legal apparatus such as Human Rights and local legislation. Therefore, as a starting point, we take the historical conditions of the emergence of Candomblé in Brazil, that are linked to the trafficking of enslaved African peoples and their resistance to keep alive in their memories, their religious beliefs and their worldviews. (...) Wherefore, it is a discussion in which religious freedom is not dissociated from the anti-racist struggle in the case of Brazil, where, in the 20th century, the myth of racial democracy is produced in the light of studies carried out by Gilberto Freyre in the midst of the 1922 post-week modernist movement. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance - in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations - is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural (...) representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account: an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive systems; our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors. (shrink)

A militância política de Jorge Amado no Partido Comunista é um capítulo à parte na história do comunismo no Brasil, que completou 100 anos no dia 25 de março. Ela também é algo marcante em sua obra, a ponto da crítica literária brasileira, de tradição uspiana, considerá-la uma forma de panfleto partidário da nossa esquerda. Nesta exposição, pretende-se realizar uma breve discussão acerca de suas lutas políticas, das quais se destacam as questões religiosa e racial, que levaram Jorge Amado a (...) criar um projeto de lei, no período que exerceu o mandato de deputado constituinte pelo PCB, em 1946, assegurando a liberdade religiosa no Brasil. Aqui, também se destaca a sua amizade com o povo de candomblé que lhe honrou com títulos, como o de Obá de Xangô e Ogã de Iansã; além da forma como a crítica o rotulava de regionalista e escritor panfletário. Contudo, esta é uma forma de homenagear tanto o mais famoso dos doze Obás de Xangô da Bahia, quanto o Partidão, nesse seu centenário. Em termos metodológicos, trata-se de uma leitura ensaística foucaultiana sobre esses fatos e acontecimentos que marcaram duplamente a vida de Jorge Amado e do Comunismo no Brasil, já que lançamos mão de uma parte da maquinaria teórica do militante comunista do PCF (Partido Comunista Francês), Michel Foucault, como vontade de verdade, comentário, discurso, autoria, obra, descontinuidade (na continuidade) e dispersão. (shrink)

Este estudo tem como objetivo principal discutir qual o lugar da memória nas pesquisas históricas empreendidas pelo filósofo francês Michel Foucault, o qual foi responsável pelo desenvolvimento de duas frentes metodológicas de trabalho: a arqueologia do saber e a genealogia do poder, conhecidas hoje como arqueogenealogia foucaultiana. Ao longo de mais de 30 anos dedicados a estas pesquisas, Michel Foucault ganhou projeção nacional e internacional pela sua inquietante forma de aliar a militância política com o trabalho acadêmico, demonstrando, com isso, (...) qual era o papel do intelectual frente aos desafios e demandas no mundo do pós-guerra. Recebeu a maior honraria no mundo da intelectualidade francesa ao ser eleito professor do célebre Collège de France, assumindo, por mais de uma década, a cátedra história dos sistemas de pensamentos. Em uma de suas últimas entrevistas, declarou que todos os seus gestos tinham como principal objetivo: criar a história como os seres humanos se tornam sujeitos em nossa cultura. Esta declaração deixa evidente qual o lugar que a história ocupa em sua obra, mas qual seria o lugar da memória nesses seus empreendimentos? Por que a história aparece em seu trabalho como lugar privilegiado enquanto a memória tem um lugar de coadjuvante? São estas as reflexões iniciais que buscamos realizar neste nosso trabalho. (shrink)

Neste capítulo, vamos tratar do discurso-corpo demarcado pelas utopias em justaposição com as heterotopias em duas produções cinematográficas do horror francês contemporâneo. Dessa forma, o corpo que operamos é feito de discurso, ou seja, todo seu tecido, seus órgãos, seus sistemas, seus ossos são discursos sobrepostos pelo visível e pelo dizível, da mesma forma, como demonstrou Foucault na obra O Nascimento da Clínica em 1963.

This book addresses the fundamentals of machine ethics. It discusses abilities required for ethical machine reasoning and the programming features that enable them. It connects ethics, psychological ethical processes, and machine implemented procedures. From a technical point of view, the book uses logic programming and evolutionary game theory to model and link the individual and collective moral realms. It also reports on the results of experiments performed using several model implementations. Opening specific and promising inroads into the terra incognita of (...) machine ethics, the authors define here new tools and describe a variety of program-tested moral applications and implemented systems. In addition, they provide alternative readings paths, allowing readers to best focus on their specific interests and to explore the concepts at different levels of detail. Mainly written for researchers in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, philosophy of technology and engineering of ethics, the book will also be of general interest to other academics, undergraduates in search of research topics, science journalists as well as science and society forums, legislators and military organizations concerned with machine ethics. (shrink)

Following the trend of sharing, and associating being on-line with being 'on-life', many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web. In Europe, recent proposals for regulation include an explicit 'Right to be Forgotten'; this right stated in the European Commission Proposal for Regulation COM 2011/12 does not emerge without controversy. It is being criticised on several grounds, including clashing with other rights, such as (...) freedom of expression, as well as setting the terrain for censorship. Besides the purely legal aspects of the proposed provisions, the chapters of this volume discuss how those legal provisions correspond in practice to worldviews and how individual and collective memory must be governed. They look into the deeper consequences of such provisions to construction of identity, culture and community formation, and how such a right affects how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of contractual relations in sport from the standpoint of the Croatian legislative system. Due to the complexity of the subject matter, the author considers only a small fragment of it - the significance and the role of sport in Croatian society and the law of contracts „as a cornerstone on which „sports law“ has been built and which is of primary importance in most areas where there is an interface between sport and the law, irrespective (...) of whether the sport is being played at an elite level or at a more humble one“. Bearing in mind the limited extent of this article, the autor tries to provide some clarifications and some guidance on how to deal with the designation and the determination of the applicable law for contracts in the sporting context. Considering that there are different legal regimes which may come into play with regard to the designation of the law applicable to contracts in the sporting context, the author first presents the determination of the applicable law according to the Rome I Regulation and then according to the Croatian Arbitration Act, Swiss Private International Law Act and the CAS Code of Sports-related Arbitration, as the most common in sports practice. Then, the author deals with contracts concluded with minor athletes and the determination of the law applicable to some preliminary questions. Finally, the author presents her perception of the problems encountered and some suggestions for the improvement of the existing legal framework. (shrink)

Os corpos no cinema estão sob a ordem de um olhar soberano que nos diz para onde devemos olhar e como devemos fazer isso. É um olhar poderoso que tudo sabe e tudo pode. Um olhar que nos posiciona não como simples espectadores, mas como sujeitos. É a partir daí que buscamos compreender como se arquitetam o medo, ou seja, qual é a ordem do cinema de horror, tecido com a pena do medo? Nessa arquitetura, os corpos aparecem como lugares (...) para vigiar e punir em espaços utópicos e heterotópicos. Espaços de memórias. Espaços de poder vigiar e punir. Espaço onde se impõe uma posição de sujeito, um poder sobre o sujeito. Portanto, os corpos no cinema de horror são artefatos para uma arqueologia do medo, escrita pelo poder do horror sobre estes corpos. Daí nosso interesse por esses lugares. Para demonstrar essa arqueologia, utilizaremos dois filmes franceses, produzidos em 2007, Frontière(s) e À l’interieur como espaços de horror construídos para o medo pelas vias da utopia e heterotopias pensadas por Michel Foucault, filósofo do presente, do nosso presente para compreender como se arquitetam tal medo por meio de sua história arqueológica, prática de um espaço chamado Labedisco/UESB. (shrink)

How was historical time conceptualized in intellectual cultures diverging from the competitive opposition of "Old" and "New"? This book introduces a broad panorama of 18th-century Central European scholarship in its institutional and epistemological.

Admiration and adoration have been considered as emotions with the power to change people, yet our knowledge of the specific nature and function of these emotions is quite limited. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we present a prototype approach to admiration and what has variously been labelled adoration, worship, or reverence. Both admiration and adoration contribute to the formation of personal and collective ideals, values, and identities, but their workings differ. We offer a detailed theoretical account of commonalities and differences in (...) the appraisal patterns and action tendencies associated with the two emotions. This analysis reveals that admiration motivates the internalisation and emulation of ideals embodied by an outstanding role model. Adoration motivates adherence to the teachings and expectations of a meaning maker and benefactor perceived as superhuman or sacred. Thus, the primary function of admiration is to promote individual learning and change, whereas adoration primarily serves to bind communities together. (shrink)

A percepção é a maneira como interagimos com o mundo exterior. É a nossa capacidade de receber informações sensoriais do ambiente, como ver, ouvir, tocar e cheirar. Através da percepção, experimentamos o mundo e seus objetos como eles são em sua materialidade. A imaginação, por outro lado, é a capacidade de criar representações mentais e de ir além das informações sensoriais diretas, nos permitindo conceber o que não está presente, recriar o passado, ou até mesmo antecipar o futuro. Baseados na (...) interpretação sartriana segundo a qual há uma tensão dinâmica entre percepção e imaginação, nosso objetivo é problematizar a distinção rígida entre esses dois conceitos, reconhecendo que essa dinâmica desempenha um papel central em nossa experiência existencial e que a relação entre esses dois elementos não é dicotômica, mas sim uma interação constante que enriquece nossa compreensão do mundo e de nossa própria existência. (shrink)

This edited book deepens the engagement between 21st century philosophy of mind and the emerging technologies which are transforming our environment. Many new technologies appear to have important implications for the human mind, the nature of our cognition, our sense of identity and even perhaps what we think human beings are. They prompt questions such as: Would an uploaded mind be 'me'? Does our reliance on smart phones, or wearable gadgets enhance or diminish the human mind? and: How does our (...) deep reliance upon ambient artificial intelligence change the shape of the human mind? Readers will discover the best philosophical analysis of what current and near future 21st technology means for the metaphysics of mind. Important questions are addressed on matters relating to the extended mind and the distributed self. Expert authors explore the role that the ubiquitous smart phone might have in creating new forms of self-knowledge. They consider machine consciousness, brain enhancement and smart ambient technology, and what they can tell us about phenomenal consciousness. While ideas of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and the smart environment are widely commented on, serious analysis of their philosophical implications is only getting started. These contributions from top scholars are therefore very timely, and are of particular relevance to students and scholars of the philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, computer science and psychology. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial (...) logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

Explorando a relação entre a memória e o cinema, principalmente, em Anti-Rétro, uma entrevista que Michel Foucault concedeu, em 1974, à revista Cahiers du Cinéma, esta obra vai tratar sobre a importância da memória no pensamento desse filósofo contemporâneo que morreu em 1984, apresentando ainda uma análise sobre o corpo em filmes de horror, em produções francesas. A Biopolítica também faz parte das discussões apresentadas neste trabalho. Boa parte da obra resulta da pesquisa de doutorado que o autor empreendeu na (...) Universidade Estadual do Sudoesta da Bahia e na França, onde realizou estágio doutoral em 2014, com bolsa da CAPES no Programa de Doutorado Sanduíche no Exterior. A obra de Foucault influenciou diretamente cada escrito que compõe esta coletânea. Ela é um convite para pensar com Foucault. Em outras palavras, o autor nos convida a entrar na ordem do pensamento de Michel Foucault por meio da memória e dos corpos em filmes franceses de horror, tratando-os sob o prisma da arqueogenealogia. (shrink)

Esta obra apresenta uma reflexão sobre a identidade dos professores de língua portuguesa construída nos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais e nas Orientações Curriculares Nacionais para o ensino de Língua Portuguesa. Este estudo foi motivado, porque em tais documentos curriculares há uma imposição de uma nova postura teórico-prática que acaba forjando uma nova identidade a tais profissionais. O autor utilizou a abordagem discursivo-desconstrutiva apresentada por Coracini em reflexões que tratam da mesma temática. A obra gira em torno da questão kantiana “quem somos (...) nós?”, tendo como preocupação principal a identidade do professor de Língua Portuguesa construída sob força de lei, num processo que envolve uma certa violência simbólica, em termos da teoria de Bourdieu e Passeron. (shrink)

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert’s 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple. More specifically, it is attempted to show that every ‘thing’, from particles to mind, can be partitioned into systemic states by virtue of (...) self-organising symmetry break, i.e. self-entropy in terms of the balance between risk and ambiguity to achieve epistemic gain. By virtue of its explanatory reach, the FEP becomes the simplest principle under quantum, statistical and classical mechanics conditions. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)