It is widely held that there is an asymmetry between our access to our minds and our access to others’ minds. Philosophers in the literature tend to focus on the asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states of others that are not shared by us. What if a mental state can have multiple subjects? Is there still an asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental (...) states of others that are also ours? In this paper, I discuss the implications of a case of shared consciousness—the case of the Hogan twins—for asymmetry. I start by clarifying the notion of asymmetry. Here I develop a characterization of asymmetry and argue that it is preferable to the standard approaches in the literature. I then present the twins’ case and argue that it does not threaten asymmetry. I close by drawing some lessons. (shrink)

If we were to connect two individuals’ brains together, how would this affect the individuals’ conscious experiences? In particular, it is possible for two people to share any of their conscious experiences; to simultaneously enjoy some token experiences while remaining distinct subjects? The case of the Hogan twins—craniopagus conjoined twins whose brains are connected at the thalamus—seems to show that this can happen. I argue that while practical empirical methods cannot tell us directly whether or not the twins share conscious (...) experiences, considerations about the locality of content processing in the brain entails that they most likely do so. (shrink)

This chapter explains how mindmelding — the direct experience by one person of another's conscious states — is in fact possible. The temporal lobes causally interact with the prefrontal lobes by way of fiber bundles that run underneath the cortical surface. This provides the perfect first experiment in mindmelding: to ‘branch’ those fiber bundles and run the other end into the brain of another person. Evidence is provided that these bundles have close connections to consciousness, in that whatever affects (...) them has immediate effects on consciousness. Then, before responding to several objections, the chapter considers another issue brought up by these experiments — the question of the relation between mindmelding and mindreading. Is mindmelding similar to mindreading? Does the existence of a mindreading system help us achieve mindmelding? (shrink)

Since Norbert Wiener presented a new research field called the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine, the biological and the artificial universes are each time more integrated as pieces of a game that involves science, philosophy, technology, arts, architecture and several other fields. It is astonishing to take a look at an imaginary non-linear timeline where it is possible to see the ancient Ars Mnemonica inspiring the Leibniz combinatoria and how all these virtual knowledge structures (...) inspired the development of a communication and control machine called the computer. A machine that is quite an exploded black box artificial systems integrated into biological systems in a cybernetic structure through which most diverse kinds of information flows. We are living in times in which the logic of this machine becomes the core of our post-biological era in its essence, the era in which the biological and artificial realms are immersed in one another. An era in which we see [] humans in fact integrating with the fiction of their imagination as conjured up digitally by the computer, and in which the digital arts emanating from the cosmology of number are also a link between digital finality and infinity imagination, defending man in his impossibility to be simulated (Weibel 1999: 222). Considering this panorama in the contemporary artistic context, it could be stimulating to think about interactive digital art installations as systems in which the elements are both organic and artificial, both physical and virtual, interconnected like they were performing a cybernetic ballet. The aim of the present research is to study this choreography using the complex sciences framework. Following this objective, a series of parameters based on systemic measures of organization and complexity were structured. Our intention is, obviously, not to say that the work of art is more or less systemic, more or less complex or organized, but to help in understanding and to conceive the installation as a system: a complex adaptive system (CAS). (shrink)

We propose conscious awareness as a mechanism for creating “shared value”; a form of value that Porter describes as putting social and community needs before profit. We explore the mechanism empirically in an entrepreneurial context and find that spiritual practices increase conscious awareness which, in turn, shapes entrepreneurial intentions and venture characteristics focused on shared value.

This study examines the possible common characteristics between human and non-human consciousness. It mainly addresses animal consciousness and, to a certain extent, intelligent AI. It provides an overview of the main theories regarding consciousness, more specifically those of neuroscience and cognitive science, and also their materialistic base at a neuroanatomical and neurophysiological level, emphasizing the role the prefrontal cortex plays, both in humans and animals. Then, it considers particular aspects of consciousness, such as emotion, and presents (...) the three broad traditions considering human emotions, which are emotions as feelings, evaluations, and judgments, as well as studies on animal emotions. Then, it continues with the proposed models of metacognition and memory to deepen the analysis regarding common characteristics of human and non-human consciousness. It also touches on the platform theory, which may bridge human, animal, and AI consciousness, although this theory is under consideration. It ends with references to animals’ social behavior, their interactions with humans, their possible ontogenic proximity as expressed in biolinguistics, and the findings of computational ethology, which help to establish models of mental human disorders. The study concludes that findings support proximities between humans and animals, consciousness at the level of neurophysiology, and emotion and metacognition. Contrary to animals and AI, human consciousness is more complicated and far from cybernetic and computational models since it is linked with various kinds of malleability, reconsolidation, neural plasticity, different conceptions of emotions, and certain mental pathologies. (shrink)

Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we (...) observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex , and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex . The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain. (shrink)

Merker, Williford, and Rudrauf make several arguments against the integrated information theory of consciousness; whereas some have merit, their conclusion that the theory should be discarded is premature. Coming years promise advances in the empirical study of consciousness, and only after theories are independently tested with shared data can they be ruled in or out. We propose future research directions.

BackgroundDespite consensus about the importance of implementing shared decision-making (SDM) in clinical practice, this ideal is inconsistently enacted today. Evidence shows that SDM practices differ in the degree of involvement of patients or family members, or in the amount of medical information disclosed to patients in order to “share” meaningfully in treatment decisions. Little is known on which representations and moral justifications physicians hold when realizing SDM. This study explored physicians’ experiences of SDM in the management of paediatric patients (...) with prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC). Specifically, we focused on physicians’ SDM approaches, representations, and ethical justifications for engaging in SDM.MethodsWe used a qualitative approach to explore the SDM experiences of 13 ICU physicians, paediatricians, and neurologists based in Switzerland who have been or were involved in the care of paediatric patients living with PDOC. A semi-structured interview format was used and interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data were analysed through thematic analysis.ResultsWe found that participants followed three main decision-making approaches: the “brakes” approach, characterized by maximized family’s decisional freedom, though conditional to physician’s judgment regarding the medical appropriateness of a treatment; the “orchestra director” approach, characterized by a multi-step decision-making process led by the main physician aimed at eliciting the voices of the care team members and of the family; and the “sunbeams” approach, characterized by a process oriented to reach consensus with family members through dialogue, where the virtues of the physician are key to guide the process. We also found that participants differed in the moral justifications sustaining each approach, citing the duty to respect parental autonomy, to invest in an ethics of care, and to employ physicians’ virtues to guide the decision-making process.ConclusionOur results show that physicians come to perform SDM in different ways, with several representations, and distinct ethical justifications. SDM training among health care providers should clarify the ductility of SDM and the several ethical motivations underpinning it, rather than insisting on the principle of respect for patient’s autonomy as its only moral foundation. (shrink)

The position advanced in this paper is that the bedrock of emotional feelings is contained within the evolved emotional action apparatus of mammalian brains. This dual-aspect monism approach to brain–mind functions, which asserts that emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamics of brain systems that generate instinctual emotional behaviors, saves us from various conceptual conundrums. In coarse form, primary process affective consciousness seems to be fundamentally an unconditional “gift of nature” rather than an acquired skill, even though those systems facilitate (...) skill acquisition via various felt reinforcements. Affective consciousness, being a comparatively intrinsic function of the brain, shared homologously by all mammalian species, should be the easiest variant of consciousness to study in animals. This is not to deny that some secondary processes cannot be evaluated in animals with sufficiently clever behavioral learning procedures, as with place-preference procedures and the analysis of changes in learned behaviors after one has induced re-valuation of incentives. Rather, the claim is that a direct neuroscientific study of primary process emotional/affective states is best achieved through the study of the intrinsic , albeit experientially refined, emotional action tendencies of other animals. In this view, core emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamic attractor landscapes of a variety of extended trans-diencephalic, limbic emotional action systems—including SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. Through a study of these brain systems, the neural infrastructure of human and animal affective consciousness may be revealed. Emotional feelings are instantiated in large-scale neurodynamics that can be most effectively monitored via the ethological analysis of emotional action tendencies and the accompanying brain neurochemical/electrical changes. The intrinsic coherence of such emotional responses is demonstrated by the fact that they can be provoked by electrical and chemical stimulation of specific brain zones—effects that are affectively laden. For substantive progress in this emerging research arena, animal brain researchers need to discuss affective brain functions more openly. Secondary awareness processes, because of their more conditional, contextually situated nature, are more difficult to understand in any neuroscientific detail. In other words, the information-processing brain functions, critical for cognitive consciousness, are harder to study in other animals than the more homologous emotional/motivational affective state functions of the brain. (shrink)

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines. Imitation is surveyed in this target article under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model (SCM) explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation. It (...) is cast at a middle, functional level of description, that is, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The SCM connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other, and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception.;>;>The SCM is developed heuristically, in five layers that can be combined in various ways to frame specific ontogenetic or phylogenetic hypotheses. The starting point is dynamic online motor control, whereby an organism is closely attuned to its embedding environment through sensorimotor feedback. Onto this are layered functions of prediction and simulation of feedback, mirroring, simulation of mirroring, monitored inhibition of motor output, and monitored simulation of input. Finally, monitored simulation of input specifying possible actions plus inhibited mirroring of such possible actions can generate information about the possible as opposed to actual instrumental actions of others, and the possible causes and effects of such possible actions, thereby enabling strategic social deliberation. Multiple instances of such shared circuits structures could be linked into a network permitting decomposition and recombination of elements, enabling flexible control, imitative learning, understanding of other agents, and instrumental and strategic deliberation. While more advanced forms of social cognition, which require tracking multiple others and their multiple possible actions, may depend on interpretative theorizing or language, the SCM shows how layered mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation can enable distinctively human cognitive capacities for imitation, deliberation, and mindreading. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been much focus on the apparent heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms. By contrast, this article proposes a unifying account emphasizing basic abnormalities of consciousness that underlie and also antecede a disparate assortment of signs and symptoms. Schizophrenia, we argue, is fundamentally a self-disorder or ipseity disturbance that is characterized by complementary distortions of the act of awareness: hyperreflexivity and diminished self-affection. Hyperreflexivity refers to forms of exaggerated self-consciousness in which aspects of oneself are experienced (...) as akin to external objects. Diminished self-affection or self-presence refers to a weakened sense of existing as a vital and self-coinciding source of awareness and action. This article integrates recent psychiatric research and European phenomenological psychiatry with some current work in cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy. After introducing the phenomenological approach along with a theoretical account of normal consciousness and self-awareness, we turn to a variety of schizophrenic syndromes. We examine positive, then negative, and finally disorganization symptoms—attempting in each case to illuminate shared distortions of consciousness and the sense of self. We conclude by discussing the possible relevance of this approach for identifying early schizophrenic symptoms. (shrink)

In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between (...) consciousness and attention by examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. -/- Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. -/- Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind. (shrink)

This paper argues that qualia share their physical correlates' locations. The first premise comes from the theory of relativity: If something shares a time with a physical event in all reference frames, it shares that physical event’s location. The second premise is that qualia share times with their correlates in all reference frames. Having qualia and correlates share locations makes relations between them easier to explain, improving both physicalist and dualist theories.

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines; it is here surveyed under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation. It is cast at a (...) middle, functional level of description, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The shared circuits model connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness divide over whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse in specific representational content and whether it requires cognitive access. These two issues are often treated in tandem because of a shared assumption that the representational capacity of cognitive access is fairly limited. Recent research on working memory challenges this shared assumption. This paper argues that abandoning the assumption undermines post-cue-based “overflow” arguments, according to which perceptual conscious is rich and does not require cognitive (...) access. Abandoning it also dissociates the rich/sparse debate from the access question. The paper then explores attempts to reformulate overflow theses in ways that don’t require the assumption of limited capacity. Finally, it discusses the problem of relating seemingly non-probabilistic perceptual consciousness to the probabilistic representations posited by the models that challenge conceptions of cognitive access as capacity-limited. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This study investigates the antecedents and mechanisms of consumers’ adoption of a public bicycle-sharing scheme as a form of shared sustainable consumption. Drawing on marketing ethics and sustainability literature, it argues that cultural and consumption values drive or deter the adoption of PBSS through the mediating mechanism of ethical evaluation. This study tests its hypotheses using a sample of 755 consumers from one of the largest PBSS programs in China. The results confirm the significance of collectivism, man–nature orientation, materialism, (...) and face-consciousness as key determinants of the adoption of PBSS. Interestingly, these values play mixed roles in influencing PBSS adoption. It also finds that such values and beliefs need to be effectively translated into ethical evaluations of PBSS adoption, and need to be addressed in the specific social context. Thus, ethical evaluation constitutes a cognitive strategy that allows consumers to justify and defend their adoption of sustainability practices. The results suggest that a desirable sustainability program needs to not only cater to the cultural and psychological motivations of consumers, but also reflect the social norms and social context in which the sustainability practices and consumers are embedded. (shrink)

In recent years, several minimalist accounts of joint action have been offered (e.g. Tollefsen Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35:75–97, 2005; Sebanz et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6): 234–1246, 2006; Vesper et al. Neural Networks 23 (8/9): 998–1003, 2010), which seek to address some of the shortcomings of classical accounts. Minimalist accounts seek to reduce the cognitive complexity demanded by classical accounts either by leaving out shared intentions or by characterizing them in a way (...) that does not demand common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Moreover, they propose models of the actual factors facilitating online coordination of movements. The present proposal aims to enrich a minimalist framework by showing how shared emotions can facilitate coordination without presupposing common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions. Shared emotions are defined for the purposes of this paper as affective states that fulfill two minimal criteria: (a) they are expressed (verbally or otherwise) by one person; and (b) the expression is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) by another person. Various ways in which the fulfillment of (a) and (b) can lead to effects that function as coordinating factors in joint action are distinguished and discussed. (shrink)

Could a sufficiently detailed computer simulation of consciousness replicate consciousness? In other words, is performing the right computations sufficient for artificial consciousness? Or will there remain a difference between simulating and being a conscious system, because the right computations must be implemented in the right way? From the perspective of Karl Friston's free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, but are not instantiated by (...) computers with a classical (von Neumann) architecture. I argue that at least one of these properties, viz. a certain kind of causal flow, can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness. Since this property is instantiated by all systems that conform to the free energy principle (not just conscious beings), the account on offer here can be extended to draw a distinction between simulating and being a certain type of system, more generally. In particular, this may inform meta-ethical accounts of artificial moral status and artificial moral agency. (shrink)

This paper offers a framework for consciousness of internal reality. Recent PET experiments are reviewed, showing partial overlap of cortical activation during self-produced actions and actions observed from other people. This overlap suggests that representations for actions may be shared by several individuals, a situation which creates a potential problem for correctly attributing an action to its agent. The neural conditions for correct agency judgments are thus assigned a key role in self/other distinction and self-consciousness. A series (...) of behavioral experiments that demonstrate, in normal subjects, the poor monitoring of action-related signals and the difficulty in recognizing self-produced actions are described. In patients presenting delusions, this difficulty dramatically increases and actions become systematically misattributed. These results point to schizophrenia and related disorders as a paradigmatic alteration of a ''Who?'' system for self-consciousness. (shrink)

Abstract The language of consciousness and that of brain function seem vastly different and incommensurable ways of approaching human mental life. If we look at what we mean by consciousness we find that it has a great deal to do with the sensitivity and responsiveness shown by a subject toward things that happen. Philosophically, we can understnd ascriptions of consciousness best by looking at the conditions which make it true for thinkers who share the concept to say (...) that one of them is conscious. This depends on consciousness being manifest. When we also note that manifest, flexible and exploratory responses to one's environment are the basis of concept use, an a priori link between concepts and consciousness is forged. The brain structures subserving such responses are complex but crucially involve the multi?tracked and cross?linked information processing to be found in the neocortex. This function draws on the motivational and orienting activity arising in lower brain systems but orchestrates that into an articulated structure of behaviour control. The conclusion is that human consciousness is an umbrella term for complex and animated mental activity which makes extensive use of many different perceptual systems and also of the social milieu within which human cognition develops. (shrink)

Tim Crane maintains that beliefs cannot be conscious because they persist in the absence of consciousness. Conscious judgments can share their contents with beliefs, and their occurrence can be evidence for what one believes; but they cannot be beliefs, because they don’t persist. I challenge Crane’s premise that belief attributions to the temporarily unconscious are literally true. To say of an unconscious agent that she believes that p is like saying that she sings well. To say she sings well (...) is to say that when she sings, her singing is good. To say that she believes that p is to say that when she consciously considers the content that p she consciously affirms it. I also argue that the phenomenal view of intentional content Crane appears to endorse prima facie commits him to the view, at least controversial, perhaps incoherent, that there is unconscious phenomenology. Keywords : Belief; Consciousness; Unconscious; Intentional Content; Judgment. Credenze coscienti Riassunto: Tim Crane sostiene che le credenze non possano essere coscienti, dal momento che perdurano anche in assenza di coscienza. I giudizi formulati consapevolmente possono condividere i loro contenuti con le credenze e il loro verificarsi può essere una forma di evidenza a supporto di quanto uno crede. E tuttavia essi non possono essere credenze, dal momento che non perdurano. Nel commento metto in discussione la premessa di Crane secondo cui porre l’attribuzione di credenze su un piano temporaneamente inconscio sia vero in senso letterale. Dire di un agente non cosciente che esso creda che p è come dire che canti bene. Dire che canti bene è dire che quando canta, il suo canto è buono. Dire che crede che p è dire che quando considera consapevolmente il contenuto p costui lo afferma consapevolmente. Inoltre intendo affermare che la visione fenomenica del contenuto intenzionale che Crane sembra abbracciare lo impegni prima facie nei confronti della prospettiva, quantomeno controversa e probabilmente incoerente, secondo cui esisterebbe una dimensione fenomenica inconscia. Parole chiave: Credenza; Coscienza; Inconscio; Contenuto intenzionale; Giudizio. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore this idea of a collective consciousness. I propose that individuals can share in a collective consciousness by forming a collective subject. I begin the essay by considering and rejecting three possible pictures of collective subjectivity: the group mind, the emergent mind, and the socially embedded mind. I argue that each of these accounts fails to provide one of the following requirements for collective subjectivity: (1) plurality, (2) awareness, and (3) collectivity. I then look (...) to Edmund Husserl’s idea of ‘social subjectivities’ for a possible account, but I agree with Alfred Schutz that Husserl fails to explain how such subjectivities are constituted by the conscious acts of individuals. In an effort to provide such an explanation, I turn to a discussion of our basic capacities for social intentionality: empathy, intersubjectivity, and co-subjectivity. In the final section of the essay, I argue that individuals can form a collective subject by taking a first-person plural perspective and ‘simulating’ the consciousness of the collective that they form. This account has the required features of plurality, awareness, and collectivity. (shrink)

Every scientific theory is a simulacrum of reality, every written story a simulacrum of the canon, and every conceptualization of a subjective perspective a simulacrum of the consciousness behind it—but is there a shared essence to these simulacra? The pursuit of answering seemingly disparate fundamental questions across different disciplines may ultimately converge into a single solution: a single ontological answer underlying grand unified theory, hard problem of consciousness, and the foundation of mathematics. I provide a hypothesis, a (...) speculative approximation, supported by a comprehensive overview of scientific evidence and philosophical literature, of a unified epistemic and phenomenological model and, in doing so, propose a parsimonious solution to the hard problem of consciousness. -/- The proposition of the hypothesis bears important implications for cross-disciplinary study between linguistics, mathematics, physics, and computer science, and offers new epistemic, ontological, and ethical propositions about the nature of AI consciousness, as well as existential risk mitigation. (shrink)

The explosion of interest in consciousness among scientists in recent decades has led to a revival of interest in the work of Whitehead. This has been associated with the challenge of biophysics to molecular biology in efforts to understand the nature of life. Some claim that it is only through quantum field theory that consciousness will be made intelligible. Most, although not all work in this area, focusses on the brain and how it could give rise to (...) class='Hi'>consciousness. In this paper, I will support this challenge, but I will suggest that the focus of work in this area reflects the failure to fully overcome the assumptions of Cartesian thought, associated above all with a defective understanding of consciousness as a ‘thinking substance’. Firstly, as Bergson, Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty argued, consciousness is embodied. Secondly, as Jacob von Uexküll argued, consciousness is only comprehensible in relation to the organism’s world defined as such by the organism. Thirdly, in the case of humans, this is a ‘with-world’, a world shared with others. The consequent social nature of human consciousness is better captured by the German word for mind: Geist, which also translates as ‘Spirit’. And as Hegel argued, along with Subjective Spirit, there is also Objective Spirit, the realm of institutions, and Absolute Spirit, the realm of culture, with Subjective, Objective and Absolute Spirit being conditions, and even components, of each other. My argument is that this broader notion of mind as Spirit should be embraced, but without abandoning the work in biophysics. What is required is a further expansion of the notion of mind and Spirit as humanity comes to appreciate that it is part of nature and that it is through the development of institutions and culture that nature, through human subjects, is becoming conscious of itself and its significance. The development of process philosophy inspired by Whitehead, associated with the development of the concepts of field and ecology, should be seen as a development of the semiosphere and the advance of the Spirit of Gaia, essential for the creation of a global civilization able to augment the life of the current regime of the global ecosystem of which we are part. It is to orient humanity to create an ecologically sustainable civilization; an ecological civilization. (shrink)

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but (...) dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to (...) more than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like. (shrink)

Shared knowledge of intentionality as well as shared knowledge of anything depends on the organism's understanding of itself, others, and the possible relations between self and other. This understanding involves mental representations of me, which emerges in the second half of the second year in the human infant, and it is this ability that gives rise to humanlike social understanding and complex self-conscious emotions.

This paper discusses supportive neurological and social evidence for 'collective consciousness', here understood as a shared sense of being together with others in a single or unified experience. Mirror neurons in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices respond to the intentions as well as the actions of other individuals. There are also mirror neurons in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices which have been implicated in empathy. Many authors have considered the likely role of such mirror systems (...) in the development of uniquely human aspects of sociality including language. Though not without criticism, Menant has made the case that mirror-neuron assisted exchanges aided the original advent of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Combining these ideas with social mirror theory it is not difficult to imagine the creation of similar dynamical patterns in the emotional and even cognitive neuronal activity of individuals in human groups, creating a feeling in which the participating members experience a unified sense of consciousness. Such instances pose a kind of 'binding problem' in which participating individuals exhibit a degree of 'entanglement'. (shrink)

In complexity theory, both the brain and consciousness are understood as trophic systems—they consume metabolic energy when they function. Complex systems are dynamic and nonlinear and comprise diverse entities that are interdependent and interconnected in such a way that information is shared and that entities adapt to one another. Some natural complex systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS), which are sensitive to change in relation to their environments and are often chaotic. Consciousness and the neural systems mediating (...) consciousness may be modeled as CAS and, more specifically, as intelligent complex adaptive systems (ICAS), where intelligence means that a nervous system can solve problems successfully by intervening between sensory input and behavioral output. Evolution of any ICAS will result in emergent properties, particularly advanced brains. Two processes are involved in integrating experience and knowledge: the effort after meaning and the effort after truth. These efforts are mediated by the predominance given to direct experience presented to the brain's sensorium and modeling processes mediated by higher cognitive functions. Understanding consciousness as an ICAS has profound repercussions in how anthropology conceives of culture. (shrink)

In this chapter, we discuss a selection of current views of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). We focus on the different predictions they make, in particular with respect to the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) during visual experiences, which is an area of critical interest and some source of contention. Our discussion of these views focuses on the level of functional anatomy, rather than at the neuronal circuitry level. We take this approach because we currently understand more about (...) experimental evidence at this coarse level and because these results are appropriate for arbitrating between current theoretical frameworks. We discuss the Two-Visual-Systems Hypothesis (Milner & Goodale 1995; 2006), Local Recurrency (Lamme 2010; Lamme 2006), Higher Order (Lau 2008; Lau & Rosenthal 2011) and Global Workspace theories (Baars 1997; Baars 2005; Dehaene & Naccache 2001; Dehaene 2014). Despite the apparent stark differences between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing, available evidence suggests that their neural substrates must be largely shared. This indicates that the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing is likely to be subtle and highly specialized. We argue that current experimental evidence about the involvement of specific activity in prefrontal cortex supports the higher order neural theory of consciousness. In consequence, imaging techniques that focus only on marked differences between conscious and unconscious level of activity are likely to be insensitive to the relevant neural activity patterns that underlie conscious experiences. Finally, it follows from the evidence we discuss that the functional advantages of conscious over unconscious perceptual processing may be more limited than commonly thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that while supervenience accounts of mental causation in general have difficulty avoiding epiphenomenalism, the situation is particularly bad in the case of conscious experiences since the function-realizer relation, arguably present in the case of intentional properties, does not obtain, and thus, the metaphysical link between supervenient and subvenient properties is absent. I contend, however, that the identification of experiential types with their neural correlates dispels the spectre epiphenomenalism, squares nicely both with the phenomenology of embodiment (...) and the subjectivity of experience, and does not conflict with the supposed multiple realizability of consciousness. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

We review evidence that, from birth, infants have purposeful consciousness of rhythmic whole‐body movement, with multi‐modal perception of objects outside their body, and self‐related emotional appraisal of experiences. Newborns also exhibit a special human awareness of the vitality of company in actions and feelings, and a capacity to use imitation of action signs for dialogic exchange of intentions. These abilities are prepared by specific systems of body and brain that develop before birth. Through the first two years, a baby (...) shows age‐related advances with growth of motor powers in use of intersubjective play and object awareness. These developments are adapted for life‐time learning how to identify and share meaningful conventions of a culture, and the description of experiences in words of a living language. Teaching is stimulated and assimilated by the affections, playful humor, and imaginative curiosity of the child in the company of people they know well. (shrink)

Subjectivity theories of consciousness take self-reference, somehow construed, as essential to having conscious experience. These theories differ with respect to how many levels they posit and to whether self-reference is conscious or not. But all treat self-referencing as a process that transpires at the personal level, rather than at the subpersonal level, the level of mechanism. -/- Working with conceptual resources afforded by pre-existing theories of consciousness that take self-reference to be essential, several attempts have been made to (...) explain seemingly anomalous cases, especially instances of alien experience. These experiences are distinctive precisely because self-referencing is explicitly denied by the only person able to report them: those who experience them deny that certain actions, mental states, or body parts belong to self. The relevant actions, mental states, or body parts are sometimes attributed to someone or something other than self, and sometimes they are just described as not belonging to self. But all are referred away from self. -/- The cases under discussion here include somatoparaphrenia, schizophrenia, depersonalization, anarchic hand syndrome, and utilization behavior; the theories employed, Higher-Order Thought, Wide Intrinsicality, and Self-Representational. Below I argue that each of these attempts at explaining or explaining away the anomalies fails. Along the way, since each of these theories seeks at least compatibility with science, I sketch experimental approaches that could be used to adduce support for my position, or indeed for the positions of theorists with whom I disagree. -/- In a concluding section I first identify two presuppositions shared by all of the theorists considered here, and argue that both are either erroneous or misleading. Second, I call attention to divergent paths adopted when attempting to explain alienation experiences: some theorists choose to add a mental ingredient, while others prefer to subtract one. I argue that alienation from experience, action, or body parts could result from either addition or subtraction, and that the two can be incorporated within a comprehensive explanatory framework. Finally, I suggest that this comprehensive framework would require self-referencing of a sort, but self-referencing that occurs solely on the level of mechanism, or the subpersonal level. In adumbrating some features of this “subpersonal self,” I suggest that there might be one respect in which it is prior to conscious experience. (shrink)

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and (...) self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to present and defend a thesis according to which conceptual representations of some types of mental states are encoded in the same neural structures that underlie the first-personal experience of those states. To support this proposal here, I will put forth a novel account of the cognitive function played by ‘shared representations’ of emotions and bodily sensations, i.e. neural structures that are active when one experiences a mental state of a certain type (...) as well as when one observes someone else experiencing a state of the same type. I will argue that shared representations in fact constitute vehicles of certain mental state concepts (more precisely, concepts of specific types of emotions and somatosensory states). The main line of arguing for this will consist in showing that shared representations exhibit specific, ‘conceptual’ functional properties:(1) causal effect on forming metacognitive judgments, (2) cognitive penetrability, (3) diversity of input types. (shrink)

The Consciousness Reframed proposition is exciting because it is both interdisciplinary and offers the possibility of a macrocosmic perspective on the world – a view of the world as simultaneously a whole in itself, the sum of its parts, and as part of a wider whole – or as Koestler put it, ‘After a period of some 500 years when the western eye has been focussed primarily on the microcosmic, scaling up from the micro to the macro does not (...) at first come easily’. Global civilization has too often been misled by grand narratives – never more so than in the twentieth century, when grand narratives of race and class slugged it out bringing death to millions. On the other hand the planetary ‘big picture’ nowadays forces itself upon us through global information networks that all of us simultaneously share in a time-compact world. As such we are creatures of the macrocosmos, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. The Planetary Collegium, this article suggests, is a beach-head on the shores of a macrocosmos awaiting both discovery and re-discovery. (shrink)

Introduction: "we are all Egypt" -- The allure of commonality -- Sharing the world in common with others -- Imagining the demos: sharing identity in feminist and democratic theory -- Politicizing the demos: sharing affect as self-conscious world-building -- Pluralizing the demos: sharing agency and the dilemma of democratic exclusion -- "This is what democracy looks like": protests as democratic imaginary.

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests (...) that consciousness is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make “deeper” predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species. (shrink)

We live in a world in which we are socially, politically, economically, and environmentally connected with other people. Online communication has facilitated people coming together from different parts of the world. In terms of social justice movements, people have come together to share ideas about how they perceive social inequality and how to address it, which is what academics call critical consciousness. While scholars have explored critical consciousness in the American context, whether it operates on a global scale (...) is under-explored. To address this question, we administered the Critical Consciousness Scale (a validated survey) with students from the United States, Iran, and Ukraine. Our findings demonstrate that critical consciousness maintains its factor structure across the entire sample, meaning that students from these three countries share some notions of critical consciousness. However, when comparing national groups, we find that critical consciousness is defined differently by students in different countries. In a practical sense, these findings mean that some aspects of critical consciousness are shared, but there are important differences in how it is perceived and how its components relate to one another. By attempting to understand critical consciousness internationally, this study serves as a cautionary narrative for international solidarity movements organized around the goal of social justice. (shrink)

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

In this paper I argue that a strong concept of sharing – a close interactive relation that pre-consciously allows humans to grasp themselves and each other as human – is crucial for the human form of life. This concept of sharing is used to reconstruct some of Peirce’s insights. Sharing is no part of Peirce’s account of person, morality and interpersonal relations. But his rhetorical analysis of assertion as close, indexical interaction shows that sharing is necessary in semiotics and pragmatism. (...) The concept of sharing is used to reconstruct his metaphysics of evolutionary agape love and sympathetic relations as a selection principle of commonly pursued purposes. Finally, sharing is shown to have economic meaning: the form of life in which humans may satisfy their needs may consist in sharing directly the necessities of life with each other. If humans live together and develop projects and purposes with one another because they share with one another what is here and now, democracy is needed: as the only form of government that allows for free and equal participation of the people. (shrink)