While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

: This paper investigates epistemological differences in the cognitive neuroscientific and phenomenological approaches to outstanding questions in psychiatry. We argue that clinical neuroscience provides scientific explanation in line with a mechanistic approach and describe several examples from computational approaches that illustrate what research on neural processing can tell us about psychiatric diseases. By contrast, phenomenology offers complex descriptions of experiential phenomena. Through a discussion of executive function and the related construct of impulsivity, we show that both cognitive neuroscience (...) and phenomenology provide valuable types of explanation. Our focus on psychopathology also allows us to address some important epistemic differences between these two disciplines. Keywords: Phenomenology; Consciousness; Clinical Neuroscience; Computational Neuroscience; Cognitive Mechanisms Coscienza e meccanismi cerebrali: ricerche epistemologiche tra fenomenologia e neuroscienza clinica Riassunto: Il presente lavoro propone di esaminare le differenze epistemologiche tra la fenomenologia e le neuroscienze cognitive riguardo dibattiti psichiatrici. Le neuroscienze cliniche saranno discusse in linea con un approccio meccanicista della spiegazione scientifica, mentre descrizioni fenomenologiche saranno proposte nel momento in cui complessi fenomeni esperenziali dovranno essere indagati. Un’interpretazione meccanicista delle neuroscienze cognitive sarà esemplificata ricorrendo ad alcuni esempi dagli approcci computazionali che si occupano di questi temi, i quali ci aiuteranno a definire cosa le ricerche sui processi neurali ci stanno dicendo rispetto alle sintomatologie psichiatriche. Questi argomenti saranno sviluppati attraverso una discussione che verterà sulle funzioni esecutive e il costrutto di impulsività a esse legato. Sarà discusso come sia le neuroscienze cognitive sia la fenomenologia possano fornire specifiche forme di spiegazione. Allo stesso tempo, si proporrà un’argomentazione che consentirà di discernere differenze epistemiche che caratterizzano i suddetti approcci, le quali potranno con più facilità emergere nel dibattito psichiatrico. Parole chiave : Fenomenologia; Coscienza; Neuroscienza clinica; Neuroscienza computazionale; Meccanismi cognitivi. (shrink)

Dr. Vukov analyzing patients with disorders of consciousness, proposed that medical well-regarded policy recommendations cannot be justified by looking solely to patients’ actual levels of consciousness (minimally conscious state – MCS versus vegetative state – VS), but that they can be justified by looking to patients’ potential for consciousness. One objective way to estimate this potential (actual physical possibility) is to consider a neurophysiologically informed strategy. Ideally such strategy would utilize objective brain activity markers of consciousness/unconsciousness. (...) The Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain-mind functioning is an example of such a strategy. Besides being mathematically simple, neurophysiologically accurate, and compatible with the cognitive/phenomenal perspectives on consciousness, application of OA strategy to quantitative EEG analysis of patients in VS and MCS revealed that the absence of consciousness in VS is paralleled by impairment of overall EEG operational architecture. Specifically, neuronal assemblies become smaller, their life span shortened, and they became highly unstable and functionally disconnected (desynchronized). At the same time, fluctuating (minimal) awareness in patients in MCS was paralleled by partial restoration of EEG operational architecture (increased size, life span, and stability of neuronal assemblies, together with an increased number and strength of functional connections among them), approaching the level found in healthy fully conscious participants. Moreover OA strategy to EEG analysis allowed predicting the emergence of consciousness in VS patients after six years following the brain trauma. Therefore, the OA methodology could reliably predict which patients may regain consciousness, and thus determine which patients may have the potential for consciousness. (shrink)

This article provides a retrospective, current and prospective overview on developments in brain research and neuroscience. Both theoretical and empirical studies are considered, with emphasis in the concept of multivariability and metastability in the brain. In this new view on the human brain, the potential multivariability of the neuronal networks appears to be far from continuous in time, but confined by the dynamics of short-term local and global metastable brain states. The article closes by suggesting some of the implications (...) of this view in future multidisciplinary brain research. (shrink)

Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account is the first book-length treatment of philosophical issues and implications in current cellular and molecular neuroscience. John Bickle articulates a philosophical justification for investigating "lower level" neuroscientific research and describes a set of experimental details that have recently yielded the reduction of memory consolidation to the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation (LTP). These empirical details suggest answers to recent philosophical disputes over the nature and possibility of psycho-neural scientific reduction, including the (...) multiple realization challenge, mental causation, and relations across explanatory levels. Bickle concludes by examining recent work in cellular neuroscience pertaining to features of conscious experience, including the cellular basis of working memory, the effects of explicit selective attention on single-cell activity in visual cortex, and sensory experiences induced by cortical microstimulation. (shrink)

The present dissertation starts from the general claim that neuroscience is not neutral, with regard to theoretical questions like the nature of consciousness, but it needs to be complemented with dedicated conceptual analysis. Specifically, the argument for this thesis is that the combination of empirical and conceptual work is a necessary step for assessing the significant questions raised by the most recent study of the brain. Results emerging from neuroscience are conceptually very relevant in themselves but, notwithstanding (...) its theoretical sophistication, neuroscience is not sufficient to provide a complete interpretation or an appropriate understanding of their impact. Consequently, the present thesis starts from the need for an interdisciplinary and hybrid field of research, i.e. fundamental neuroethics. Within this framework, the thesis takes consciousness and related disorders and the addicted brain as illustrative cases of the potential fruitful collaboration between empirical and conceptual investigations. The general goal of the thesis is to contribute to the overall development of bridging the gap between empirical and conceptual understandings of consciousness. The first paper sets the theoretical framework, providing an empirically-based description of the brain with significant philosophical implications for an understanding of consciousness. The last three papers of the thesis try to apply the theoretical framework to illustrative cases. Papers II and III analyse the possible application of science and technology for an easier detection and clinical care of patients with disorders of consciousness, with particular attention to communication mediated by neurotechnology and the simulation of the conscious brain, respectively; paper IV provides a potentially new ethical analysis of addiction within the elaborated general conceptual framework. The conclusion of the thesis is that the impact of neuroscientific results needs that a dedicated conceptual approach reveals and investigates their conceptual meaning. This conceptual analysis is not exclusive but integrative and complementary to the empirical science. The case of consciousness, analysed from both an ethical and conceptual point of view, is highly illustrative in this respect. In the end, a conceptual/linguistic work of clarification is urgently needed. (shrink)

The Hippocratic Oath is a code of ethics defining correct behaviour by physicians they are required to commit themselves to before being accepted into the profession. It was the first code of ethics for any profession. While originating in Ancient Greece, it subsequently evolved, but the current code still embodies many of the core injunctions of the original code. The most widely accepted current form is the 2006 The Declaration of Geneva by the World Medical Association to be taken before (...) being admitted as a member of the medical profession. The most important of its injunctions are: ‘The health of my patient will be my first consideration’ and ‘I will maintain the utmost respect for human life’. The first is a rewording of the injunction from Epidemics, Book I, of the Hippocratic school: ‘Practice two things in your dealings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient.’ This was later simplified to the most basic precept of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘First, do no harm.’ It is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare that, given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good. The development of neurotechnology could be subsumed with little modification under the Geneva formulation of the Hippocratic Oath, extending this precept to a commitment not to damage people’s psychological health. (shrink)

How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason (...) to doubt their authority, and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is ‘Yes’? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! The paper argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. The paper argues that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified by the explanations it allows. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective (...) qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective (...) qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness. (shrink)

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience? _Consciousness and Mental Life_ questions our present approach to the study of (...) consciousness and the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time. Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, _Consciousness and Mental Life_ corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness. (shrink)

The target paper of Schoeller, Perlovsky, and Arseniev is an essential and timely contribution to a current shift of focus in neuroscience aiming to merge neurophysiological, psychological and physical principles in order to build the foundation for the physics of mind. Extending on previous work of Perlovsky et al. and Badre, the authors of the target paper present interesting mathematical models of several basic principles of the physics of mind, such as perception and cognition, concepts and emotions, instincts and (...) learning. Their conceptualization helps to clarify the distinction between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind that is often neglected and further provide a clear description of the mental hierarchy, which extends from physical objects in the physical world to abstract ideas in the mental/subjective realm. While we agree that identification of a few fundamental principles is a first step toward developing the physics of the mind, and we concur with the selection of those principles in the target review paper, we think that the theory of the physics of mind would much benefit from considering also the most basic principles that are common for the physics/matter/brain and the mind/subjectivity/cognition. In this respect, such basic principles as time and space, as well as criticality, self-organization, and emergence seem to be the most interesting. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Consciousness and emotion are ancient topics, both as old as culture, yet still in their scientific infancy, slowly emerging into full respectability after decades of systematic neglect by science. Despite a recent modest resurgence of interest, emotion remains perhaps the least understood subject -- relative to its importance in human life -- in the whole of neuroscience. This is probably overdetermined. It may be in part a hangover from Lange-James perspectives in which emotion was largely reduced (...) to an epiphenomenon, a sensory-motor feedback of autonomic and other afferents, a kind of compelling but ultimately irrelevant after-image. Additionally, the explosion of cognitive neuroscience, in concert with the extensive discrediting of much of psychoanalytic thinking, has left emotion in a largely secondary role, despite a dramatic lessening of the stranglehold that behaviourism had over thinking in psychology. Cognition is very much in ascendance these days, including in consciousness circles, with some even assuming its foundations are fundamentally independent of affect, a position for which there is little evolutionary or neurological evidence. (shrink)

This book by Dr. Desmarais is by all means a positive contribution in the field of Yoga, Indology and cognitive neurosciences. It covers Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, religion and metaphysics, psychology and epistemology, as well as the cultural heritage for these. The book is arranged in six chapters using our common concept of show as a metaphysical stage: getting ready for the show; entering the theatre; taking the stage; all the world as stage; following the plot; thickening of (...) the plot; and finally, the lights come up. This has its source in the Samkhya metaphor of prakrti as analogous to a divine actor, on the world stage and in a cosmic drama. Another symbolic metaphor that comes before our mind is that of Ardhanarinatesvara of Lord Siva, depicted as the Cosmic divine Supreme actor endowed with half-female in his person. The reader, the spectator or audience member, symbolizes the Purusa of Samkhya and yoga. (shrink)

A breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events (...) behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness. (shrink)

This article concerns the interplay between two issues that involve both philosophy and neuroscience: whether the content of phenomenal consciousness is 'rich' or 'sparse', whether phenomenal consciousness goes beyond cognitive access, and how it would be possible for there to be evidence one way or the other.

Upshot: This interdisciplinary work draws on phenomenology, Indian philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, cognitive neurosciences and a variety of personal and literary examples of conscious phenomena. Thompson proposes a view of consciousness and self as dynamic embodied processes, co-dependent with the world. According to this view, dreaming is a process of spontaneous imagination and not a delusional hallucination. This work aims at laying the ground for systematic neurophenomenological investigation of first-person experience.

This information-packed volume, without doubt a landmark event in the developing neuroscientific study of consciousness, deserves the attention of anyone interested in this subject. It is a sequel and companion to an earlier collection, The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology, also edited by Steven Laureys (2005), which contains the proceedings of a 2004 conference sponsored by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). Published initially as a special issue of Progress in Brain Research (volume (...) 150), Boundaries has been reissued in paperback and appears on the ASSC website as one of its official titles. Both volumes include many prominent figures in contemporary neuroscience, and the two volumes together constitute about as clear, comprehensive, and authoritative a picture as one can find anywhere of the current state of mainstream neuroscientific thinking about consciousness and the brain. Like classical physics of the late 19th century, it is a picture of great power and beauty; nevertheless, just as discordant phenomena such as black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect presaged the rise of quantum mechanics, this book, precisely because of its clarity, reveals signs of trouble ahead. (shrink)

The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness is central to debates about consciousness and its neural correlates. However, this distinction has often been limited to the domain of perceptual experiences. On the basis of dream phenomenology and neuroscientific findings this paper suggests a theoretical framework which extends this distinction to dreaming, also in terms of plausible neural correlates. In this framework, phenomenal consciousness is involved in both waking perception and dreaming, whereas access consciousness is weakened, but (...) not fully eliminated, during dreaming. However, access consciousness is more active during lucid dreaming. The proposed framework accounts for different aspects of dream phenomenology, including levels of integration of perceptual, cognitive and affective features in dreams, bizarreness, dream amnesia and the occurrence of meta-awareness and accessibility in lucid dreaming. Self-related experiences and their neural substrates are suggested to be differently involved in waking cognition and dreaming. Further, phenomenal consciousness during both waking and dream experiences involve widespread recurrent interactions and convergence-divergence zones in the thalamo-cortico-limbic system, activated before conscious access in global workspace areas. Finally, we discuss the relationships of the proposed framework with other neurocognitive theories and models of consciousness and major theories of dreaming, and propose novel experimental predictions. (shrink)

The prominent contributors provide background information, survey the issues and positions, and take controversial stands from a wide variety of perspectives, including neuroscience and neurology, law and policy, and philosophy and ethics.

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, (...) we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate--either in the waking state or in a lucid dream--we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives. (shrink)

I argue that informational models of consciousness, including those proposed by the Integrated Information Theory, don’t presuppose or entail any particular view about the physical or metaphysical nature of consciousness. Such models only tell us how certain properties of consciousness can be mathematically described, thus providing a quantitative characterization of the phenomenon of consciousness that may contribute to the development of new methods of assessment and guide the explanatory project by supplying additional constraints on theoretical proposals. (...) While informational models are in principle compatible with multiple physical interpretations, a preliminary argument in favour of the continuity between informational approaches and the mechanistic project in neuroscience can be made based on historical precedents. (shrink)

Impressions, energy radiated by phenomena in the momentary environmental scene, enter sensory neurons, creating in afferent nerves a data stream. Following Kant, by our inner sense the mind perceives its own thoughts as it ties together sense data into an internalized scene. The mind, residing in the brain, logically a Language Machine, processes and stores items as coded grammatical entities. Kantian synthetic unity in the linguistic brain is able to deliver our experience of the scene as we appear to see (...) it. Uniquely, the brain records its own history, synthesizing a Movie-in-the-Brain, called the Noumenal Cosmos. Attempting thereby to represent the actual Universe, this makes for a sovereign brain that governs itself. The brain is domicile of an Ego, with its selfhood at stake at all times. Yet, it can know itself only by its actions, in which it appears as an actor in its own movie. Phenomena enter garbled, as confused apparitions, and must be put in good form using top–down feedback control by Ego, so that each movie frame makes rational sense within the overall context of the Noumenal Cosmos. A stack of frames is processed typically in 40 Hz rhythm with 300 ms process time each, for about 12 in the stack at any time. Successive neural centers are processing the stack in the brain assembly line, based on data from increasingly global receptive fields. Ego stitches together the movie frames, but only the top frame is in consciousness for 25 ms. The top frame contains the whole scene where the Ego makes an appearance as the actor that imposes Kantian synthetic unity on the scene, merely an assembly of grammatical texts, in a system-internal coded process language, fitting the scene into the Noumenal Cosmos. But Ego observes Ego only to the extent permitted by the objectivity rule, only what it does and thinks, not its true face. From the Noumenal Cosmos, the Ego receives grammatical messages in the internal sense code. They are integrated into a whole in the reaction of the Ego to the momentary scene. The voluntary nature of Ego’s decisions is explained, based on its ability to code in advance its own actions sequentially in time, as it sees fit with a view to an orderly Noumenal Cosmos, records of code being arranged spatially in neural structures. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that if a completed neuroscience of consciousness is to be attained, we must give the synchronic and diachronic application conditions for brain states and phenomenal states. I argue that, due to the temporal nature of our experiences, such states must be viewed as being temporally extended events, and illustrate how to give such application conditions using examples of other temporally extended events. However, I also raise some difficulties for the project of giving application (...) conditions for brain states and phenomenal states and suggest these as challenges for further philosophical work. (shrink)

Block argues that relevant data in psychology and neuroscience shows that access consciousness is not constitutively necessary for phenomenality. However, a phenomenal state can be access conscious in two radically different ways. Its content can be access conscious, or its phenomenality can be access conscious. I’ll argue that while Block’s thesis is right when it is formulated in terms of the first notion of access consciousness, there is an alternative hypothesis about the relationship between phenomenality and access (...) in terms of the second notion that is not touched by Block’s argument. (shrink)

The study analyzes modern reductivist and antireductivist approaches to understanding the interaction between philosophy and neuroscience. It analyzes the content and grounds for using the concepts of neuroscience and neurosciences, philosophy of neuroscience, and neurophilosophy. The milestones in the development of neuroreductivism, from Patricia Churchland’s arguments in support of intertheoretic reduction through Francis Crick’s eliminativism to John Bickle’s ruthless reductionism, are described. The ontological, methodological, and epistemic grounds for the reduction to neurosciences of other ways of representing (...) mind and body are analyzed. Drawing on the post-Wittgensteinian paradigm of the philosophy of neuroscience of Max Bennett, Peter Hacker, and Andrew Reynolds, the semantic problems that arise in the neurosciences when epistemic reduction is attempted are described and derive from the inability to eliminate the basic metaphorical level of meaning-making and transmission rooted in everyday language and its figures, among which metaphors are fundamental. The descriptivist approach to the language of neurosciences is contrasted with neurorevisionism, an attempt to “correct” established ways of conceptualizing consciousness and corporeality, akin to earlier revisionisms, particularly physicalism, and forced to deal with similar problems. Reduction - the operation of the “return,” itself understood metaphorically - and antireduction, which resists scientific revisionism and “returns” understanding to the level of everyday language and philosophy to descriptive work, is presented as a circular hermeneutical movement necessary for scientific and philosophical understanding, but not leading to disciplinary hegemony or the “victory” of either side. The study concludes with a sketch of the publications included in the rubric. (shrink)

Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive about the contents of consciousness: we will not address neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective what might be called the ‘enabling factors’ for conscious- attention, working memory and cognitive control ness (e.g. appropriate neuromodulation from the brain- stem, etc.). involve competition between widely distributed rep-.

Human brain organoids (HBOs) are novel entities that may exhibit unique forms of cognitive potential. What moral status, if any, do they have? Several authors propose that consciousness may hold the answer to this question. Others identify various _kinds of_ consciousness as crucially important for moral consideration, while leaving open the challenge of determining whether HBOs have them. This paper aims to make progress on these questions in two ways. First, it proposes a framework for thinking about the (...) moral status of entities other than paradigmatic persons. This framework identifies four qualities that ground moral status: evaluative stance, self-directedness, agency, and other-directedness. Second, we speculate on ways in which these qualities are relevant to dimensions of conscious experience that have been, or could be, identified in nonhuman animals. We further explore how these approaches could be adapted for use in HBOs, and argue that such studies, or something similar to them, will have to be performed if we wish to have empirical indications that HBOs have consciousness of a morally significant kind. We end by proposing that in our current scientific and epistemic situation, it is too soon to attribute any moral status to HBOs, but that this might change in the future. (shrink)

What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural. This (...) groundbreaking hypothesis is supported by recent empirical findings in both perception and neuroscience, and is herein tested against a series of objections of both conceptual and empirical nature: the traditional mind-brain identity arguments from illusion, hallucinations, dreams, and mental imagery. The theory is then compared with existing externalist approaches including disjunctivism, realism, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind. Can experience and objects be one and the same? (shrink)

The relationship between consciousness and brain, subject and body, appears today far away from being elucidated. All attempts to reduce consciousness and subject to the brain end up abolishing the subject, i.e., what is evidently most relevant for each one of us. Luigi Giussani proposes a method to investigate human consciousness based on the analysis of oneself personal experience, verifiable by every human being. He is very attentive to avoiding during the experiential analysis interference of prejudices, ideological (...) conceptions, and conjectures. His method remains perfectly coherent and open to all contributions from neuroscience and scientific discoveries. He leaves completely open the major question about the relationship between brain physical-chemical functioning and subjective experience, individual consciousness. A comparison between Giussani’s method and the starting point and the fundamental assumption that lays the basis of various modern neuroscientific conceptions of consciousness is conducted. A discussion about the assumption that stays at the basis of the various neuroscientific currents appears necessary and the method proposed by Giussani may constitute a common and acceptable by everyone background for future development and advances in studying the greatest problem of our culture, the relation between brain and human consciousness. (shrink)

This chapter considers two issues that have gained currency in contemporary philosophy because of the recent surge of liberal naturalist attitude that endeavours to place self, mind, consciousness and religious belief back into nature. The first issue, at the intersection of philosophy of religion and cognitive science, concerns the ubiquity and transmission of cross‐cultural religious belief despite being condemned by sceptics as an evolutionary costly negative social force. The second issue, at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive (...) science, concerns whether Buddhist philosophy and its associated first‐person methodologies can lead to reconceptualization and perhaps a richer understanding of the very notion of consciousness. (shrink)

This book is forthcoming in Routledge. Here is the barest sketch of our aims: -/- We have two aims in this book. First, we aim to persuade you that conscious experience is sometimes realised by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement. Second, we aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly powerful predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience.

It is well known that the nature of consciousness is elusive, and that attempts to understand it generate problems in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Less appreciated are the important – even if still elusive – connections between consciousness and issues in ethics. In this chapter we consider three such connections. First, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status. Second, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions (...) surrounding moral responsibility for action. Third, we consider the relevance of consciousness for the acquisition of moral knowledge. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of a proper methodological strategy of interaction between psychology and neuroscience. In recent decades, due to the intensive development of neurosciences, the interaction of the two disciplines has been dominated by the theme of the search for so-called neural correlates of mental phenomena and events. Meanwhile, in recent literature, an opinion has been expressed about the possibility of a genuine integration of psychology and neuroscience. In this work, the author critically examines three (...) recent projects of reduction of psychology to neuroscience: the conception of integration of functional and mechanistic types of explanation by the philosophers Gualtero Piccinini and Carl Craver, the project of the neurophilosophy by the famous philosopher Patricia Churchland, and the reductionist hypothesis of one of the leaders of the modern science of consciousness Stanislas Dehaene. The author shows that at the present moment there are no grounds for reduction of psychology to neuroscience. Moreover, it is noted that in the absence of real alternatives for specific empirical investigations even opponents of the strategy of identification of neural correlates of mental phenomena and events are forced to appeal to it in their works. It is argued that the currently dominating practice of identification of neural correlates of mental, cognitive and conscious phenomena will retain its leading methodological status in the interaction between psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)

The papers gathered here were first presented at an “Author Meets Critics” invited session that I organized for the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association meeting, held in Vancouver, April 1–5, 2015, on Evan Thompson’s book Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Thompson opened the session with a précis of his book, which was followed by critical commentaries from John Dunne, Owen Flanagan, and Jay Garfield; Jennifer Windt was also an invited contributor (...) to this symposium although she was not able to attend the session. Together with Thompson’s reply, these papers are presented here in their final, revised format.Thompson’s... (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)