The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness

The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness PDF Author: Steven M. Miller
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268789
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry, attention, memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness (AiCR 90), this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic.

The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness

The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness PDF Author: Steven M. Miller
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268789
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry, attention, memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness (AiCR 90), this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic.

Phenomenal Consciousness

Phenomenal Consciousness PDF Author: Peter Carruthers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521543996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
How can phenomenal consciousness exist as an integral part of a physical universe? How can the technicolour phenomenology of our inner lives be created out of the complex neural activities of our brains? Many have despaired of finding answers to these questions; and many have claimed that human consciousness is inherently mysterious. Peter Carruthers argues, on the contrary, that the subjective feel of our experience is fully explicable in naturalistic (scientifically acceptable) terms. Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary resources, he develops and defends a novel account in terms of higher-order thought. He shows that this can explain away some of the more extravagant claims made about phenomenal consciousness, while substantively explaining the key subjectivity of our experience. Written with characteristic clarity and directness, and surveying a wide range of extant theories, this book is essential reading for all those within philosophy and psychology interested in the problem of consciousness.

Phenomenal Consciousness

Phenomenal Consciousness PDF Author: Dimitris Platchias
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317491866
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
How can the fine-grained phenomenology of conscious experience arise from neural processes in the brain? How does a set of action potentials (nerve impulses) become like the feeling of pain in one's experience? Contemporary neuroscience is teaching us that our mental states correlate with neural processes in the brain. However, although we know that experience arises from a physical basis, we don't have a good explanation of why and how it so arises. The problem of how physical processes give rise to experience is called the 'hard problem' of consciousness and it is the contemporary manifestation of the mind-body problem. This book explains the key concepts that surround the issue as well as the nature of the hard problem and the several approaches to it. It gives a comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon incorporating its main metaphysical and epistemic aspects, as well as recent empirical findings, such as the phenomenon of blindsight, change blindness, visual-form agnosia and optic ataraxia, mirror recognition in other primates, split-brain cases and synaesthesia.

Consciousness and Moral Status

Consciousness and Moral Status PDF Author: Joshua Shepherd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315396327
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but also the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and humans with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness

Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness PDF Author: William S. Robinson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


The Constitution of Visual Consciousness

The Constitution of Visual Consciousness PDF Author: Steven M. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789027213570
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Binocular rivalry is often considered an experimental window on the neural processes of consciousness. We propose three distinct approaches to exploit this window. First, one may look through the window, using binocular rivalry as a passive tool to dissociate unaltered sensory input from wavering perceptual output. Second, the mechanisms underlying binocular rivalry may yield detailed knowledge of the neuronal underpinnings of binocular vision and increase the value of rivalry as a tool to study consciousness. Finally, smart experimental manipulations allow experimenters to 'reach through the window' and interact with mechanisms of conscious visual perception. Within this distinction, we discuss the major open questions in binocular rivalry research and examine how recent technological developments may be incorporated in future studies...

Illusionism

Illusionism PDF Author: Keith Frankish
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845409663
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness (in the philosophers' sense) is an illusion. This book is a reprint of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to this topic. It takes the form of a target paper by the editor, followed by commentaries from various thinkers, including leading defenders of the theory such as Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, Derk Pereboom and Georges Rey. A number of disciplines are represented and different viewpoints are discussed and defended. The colleciton is tied together with a response to the commentaries from the editor.

Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge

Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge PDF Author: Torin Alter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195171659
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
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Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties

Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties PDF Author: Mihretu P. Guta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351598899
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This book aims to show the centrality of a proper ontology of properties in thinking about consciousness. Philosophers have long grappled with what is now known as the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., how can subjective or qualitative features of our experience—such as how a strawberry tastes—arise from brain states? More recently, philosophers have incorporated what seems like promising empirical research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology in an attempt to bridge the gap between measurable mental states on the one hand, and phenomenal qualities on the other. In Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, many of the leading philosophers working on this issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 14 new essays on this problem. The essays address topics as diverse as substance dualism, mental causation, the metaphysics of artificial intelligence, the logic of conceivability, constitution, extended minds, the emergence of consciousness, and neuroscience and the unity and neural correlates of consciousness, but are nonetheless unified in a collective objective: the need for a proper ontology of properties to understand the hard problem of consciousness, both on non-empirical and empirical grounds.

Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing

Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing PDF Author: Michael D. Kirchhoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351367579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In this jointly authored book, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein defend the controversial thesis that phenomenal consciousness is realised by more than just the brain. They argue that the mechanisms and processes that realise phenomenal consciousness can at times extend across brain, body, and the social, material, and cultural world. Kirchhoff and Kiverstein offer a state-of-the-art tour of current arguments for and against extended consciousness. They aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly influential predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience. They show how predictive processing can be given a new reading as part of a third-wave account of the extended mind. The third-wave claims that the boundaries of mind are not fixed and stable but fragile and hard-won, and always open to negotiation. It calls into question any separation of the biological from the social and cultural when thinking about the boundaries of the mind. Kirchhoff and Kiverstein show how this account of the mind finds support in predictive processing, leading them to a view of phenomenal consciousness as partially realised by patterns of cultural practice.