Conscious Experience

Conscious Experience PDF Author: Thomas Metzinger
Publisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845058
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 thematic sections, compiled by David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger.

Conscious Experience

Conscious Experience PDF Author: Thomas Metzinger
Publisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845058
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Get Book Here

Book Description
The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 thematic sections, compiled by David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger.

Conscious Experience

Conscious Experience PDF Author: Anil Gupta
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
A distinguished philosopher offers a novel account of experience and reason, and develops our understanding of conscious experience and its relationship to thought: a new reformed empiricism. The role of experience in cognition is a central and ancient philosophical concern. How, theorists ask, can our private experiences guide us to knowledge of a mind-independent reality? Exploring topics in logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Conscious Experience proposes a new answer to this age-old question, explaining how conscious experience contributes to the rationality and content of empirical beliefs. According to Anil Gupta, this contribution cannot be determined independently of an agent’s conceptual scheme and prior beliefs, but that doesn’t mean it is entirely mind-dependent. While the rational contribution of an experience is not propositional—it does not, for example, provide direct knowledge of the world—it does authorize certain transitions from prior views to new views. In short, the rational contribution of an experience yields a rule for revising views. Gupta shows that this account provides theoretical freedom: it allows the observer to radically reconceive the world in light of empirical findings. Simultaneously, it grants empirical reason significant power to constrain, forcing particular conceptions of self and world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through novel treatments of presentation, appearances, and ostensive definitions. Collectively, Gupta’s arguments support an original theory: reformed empiricism. He abandons the idea that experience is a source of knowledge and justification. He also abandons the idea that concepts are derived from experience. But reformed empiricism preserves empiricism’s central insight: experience is the supreme epistemic authority. In the resolution of factual disagreements, experience trumps all.

The Conscious Brain

The Conscious Brain PDF Author: Jesse J. Prinz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971813X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.

Individual Differences in Conscious Experience

Individual Differences in Conscious Experience PDF Author: Robert G. Kunzendorf
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027299935
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Individual Differences in Conscious Experience is intended for readers with philosophical, psychological, or clinical interests in subjective experience. It addresses some difficult but important issues in the study of consciousness, subconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The book’s fourteen chapters are written by renowned, pioneering researchers who, collectively, have published more than fifty books and more than one thousand journal articles. The editors’ introductory chapter frames the book’s subtext: that mind-brain theories embodying the constraints of individual differences in subjective experience should be given greater credence than nomothetic theories ignoring those constraints. The next five chapters describe research and theory pertaining to individual differences in conscious sensations — specifically, individual differences in pain perception, phantom limbs, gustatory sensations, and mental imagery. Then, two succeeding chapters focus on individual differences in subconsciousness. The final six chapters address individual differences in altered states of self-consciousness — dreams, hypnotic phenomena, and various clinical syndromes. (Series B)

Dimensions of Conscious Experience

Dimensions of Conscious Experience PDF Author: Paavo Pylkkänen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027298378
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book, which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde, Sweden, provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive and computer science, biology, physics, art and the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity, nonconceptuality vs conceptuality, language, evolutionary aspects, neural correlates, microphysical level, creativity, visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (Series A)

Mindworks

Mindworks PDF Author: Ernst Pöppel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness PDF Author: Barry Dainton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113459349X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Stream of Consciousness is about the phenomenology of conscious experience. Barry Dainton shows us that stream of consciousness is not a mosaic of discrete fragments of experience, but rather an interconnected flowing whole. Through a deep probing into the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time consciousness, Dainton offers a truly original understanding of the nature of consciousness.

The Structure of Conscious Experience

The Structure of Conscious Experience PDF Author: Lee Roy Beach
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527538559
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
There must exist a point at which the molecular and electro-chemical processes that comprise brain function are transformed into rich, orderly conscious experience which seamlessly blends the present moment, what led up to it, and what will follow it. This is the stuff of our everyday lives, and it raises questions about its organization and how that organization facilitates engagement with the world at large. In short, what is the structure of conscious experience and what is gained by it being structured that way? This book argues that the structure is what is familiarly known as narrative form and that the gain is the ability to communicate about one’s experience with oneself and others, as well as to make informed predictions about what will happen in the fundamentally unknowable and potentially dangerous future. In the latter case, because the essence of narrative form is time and causality, structuring events from memory (the past) and from perception (the present) in narrative form causally implies future events (expectations). The potential threat (the bad or the absence of good) of these expected future events can be assessed, and, if required, action can be taken to prevent their occurrence or to diminish their impact. The implications about thinking and action, and about who we are as individuals, are also discussed here.

Perplexities of Consciousness

Perplexities of Consciousness PDF Author: Eric Schwitzgebel
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262295083
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
A philosopher argues that we know little about our own inner lives. Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

Conscious Experience

Conscious Experience PDF Author: W.H. Sparks
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1491737751
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The fundamental principles that explain the heretofore mysterious phenomena of consciousness are: (1) Consciousness is energies of the environment, and energies developed in intrafusal muscle spindles are conscious experience, and (2) the experience occurring as the developed energies, depending on purpose and intensity, are detected by muscle receptors. The conscious experience occurs as perception (the experience of the environment), imagery (imagination, memory, and dreams), feelings (emotion), or, when agreed to, the meanings of language. Consciousness and conscious experience are not subject to the interpretations of scientific and religious knowledge because consciousness is the individual experience of each and every person. In Conscious Experience, author W.H. Sparks presents a discussion of the relationship of consciousness and experience based on his extensive research and his personal experiences. Along with a review of the development of the theory of consciousness, Sparks offers a plethora of facts and thoughts about conscious experience, including: - An explanation of the nature and experience of consciousness - How the experience of energies detected by receptors constitutes conscious experience - The idea that conscious experience is detected as the energies developed in the intrafusal spindles by muscle receptors - How consciousness is experienced by the muscle system - The structures of experience are the intrafusal muscle spindles - The impulse activity transduced from the detected energies innervates the muscle system - The recognition of the part the muscle receptors play in conscious experience is the process that finally answers the question of consciousness and conscious experience In the Conscious Experience, Sparks provides information that shows conscious experience includes perception, imagery, feelings, and the meanings of language-all qualities unique to each individual.