Language and Conscious Experience

Language and Conscious Experience PDF Author: W. H. Sparks
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450201075
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Language and Conscious Experience is a philosophical theory of consciousness. The book presents a theory that accommodates every aspect of consciousness and conscious experience. The aspects referred to are perception, imagery including memory and dreams, feelings (emotion) and the acquisition and development of language including the origination of meaning. The nature of consciousness is the energies detected by sensory receptors. The nature of conscious experience is the detection by spindle receptors of energies developed and enhanced in intrafusal muscle spindles. We experience the environment in the form of sensations: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, to use the common and traditional identifications. Consciousness is experienced by the detection of intrafusal muscle spindles. The spindle receptor detection is analogous to the detection of the environment by sensory receptors. The difference, of course, is that we are conscious as the detection of the intrafusal spindles. The purpose of the neuromuscular system is response to the energies of the environment. The purpose of the intrafusal spindles is to control the neuromuscular system. Efferent impulse activity from synaptic activity enhances the intrafusal spindles that can then be detected as conscious experience. Energies developed in the intrafusal spindles are determined by the innervation of the system. When enhanced from configured synaptic activity the innervation is modified by the synaptic activity configured by experience.

Consciousness and Language

Consciousness and Language PDF Author: John R. Searle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521597449
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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Discourse, Consciousness, and Time

Discourse, Consciousness, and Time PDF Author: Wallace Chafe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226100545
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on analyses of conversational speech, written fiction and nonfiction, the North American Indian language Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many topics of linguistic importance, such as anaphora, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages such as the historical present and free indirect style. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness for linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Language and Conscious Experience

Language and Conscious Experience PDF Author: W. H. Sparks
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450201075
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Language and Conscious Experience is a philosophical theory of consciousness. The book presents a theory that accommodates every aspect of consciousness and conscious experience. The aspects referred to are perception, imagery including memory and dreams, feelings (emotion) and the acquisition and development of language including the origination of meaning. The nature of consciousness is the energies detected by sensory receptors. The nature of conscious experience is the detection by spindle receptors of energies developed and enhanced in intrafusal muscle spindles. We experience the environment in the form of sensations: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, to use the common and traditional identifications. Consciousness is experienced by the detection of intrafusal muscle spindles. The spindle receptor detection is analogous to the detection of the environment by sensory receptors. The difference, of course, is that we are conscious as the detection of the intrafusal spindles. The purpose of the neuromuscular system is response to the energies of the environment. The purpose of the intrafusal spindles is to control the neuromuscular system. Efferent impulse activity from synaptic activity enhances the intrafusal spindles that can then be detected as conscious experience. Energies developed in the intrafusal spindles are determined by the innervation of the system. When enhanced from configured synaptic activity the innervation is modified by the synaptic activity configured by experience.

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: Anil Gupta
Publisher:
ISBN: 0674987780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
This book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that help us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine qualities at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.--

The World in Your Head

The World in Your Head PDF Author: Steven M. Lehar
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135636591
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The World In Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience represents a bold assault on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness and the human mind. Rather than examining the brain and nervous system to see what they tell us about the mind, this book begins with an examination of conscious experience to see what it can tell us about the brain. Through this analysis, the first and most obvious observation is that consciousness appears as a volumetric spatial void, containing colored objects and surfaces. This reveals that the representation in the brain takes the form of an explicit volumetric spatial model of external reality. Therefore, the world we see around us is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an internal representation. In fact, the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations clearly demonstrate the capacity of the brain to construct complete virtual worlds even in the absence of sensory input. Perception is somewhat like a guided hallucination, based on sensory stimulation. This insight allows us to examine the world of visual experience not as scientists exploring the external world, but as perceptual scientists examining a rich and complex internal representation. This unique approach to investigating mental function has implications in a wide variety of related fields, including the nature of language and abstract thought, and motor control and behavior. It also has implications to the world of music, art, and dance, showing how the patterns of regularity and periodicity in space and time--apparent in those aesthetic domains--reflect the periodic basis set of the underlying harmonic resonance representation in the brain.

Conscious Experience

Conscious Experience PDF Author: W.H. Sparks
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 149173776X
Category : Science
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 languageall qualities unique to each individual.

Language Structure, Discourse, and the Access to Consciousness

Language Structure, Discourse, and the Access to Consciousness PDF Author: Maksim Stamenov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027251320
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of conscious and unconscious mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (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)

Consciousness

Consciousness PDF Author: Peter Carruthers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199277362
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hardproblem' for a scientific world view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' (fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-orderanalog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings ofanimals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include abelief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science.