March 13, 2024
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
46 citations
Altered states of consciousness (ASCs) are surprisingly hard to define and to measure. Neither ‘subjective’ methods (like verbal reports) nor ‘objective’ measures (such as how the state is induced, or physiological and behavioural criteria) are entirely satisfactory. Attempts to map ASCs are reviewed, including two- or three-dimensional maps such as Tart&s;s and Laureys’, and Hobson&s;s AIM...
March 13, 2024
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
After briefly surveying the basics of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, this chapter turns from physiology to experience. Dreams are often bizarre, with incongruity, uncertainty, and sudden scene changes, possibly due to failed feature binding. Studies of dream recall and content reveal sex differences in content and show how children&s;s dreams develop along with their cognitive abilities. Dream...
Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism
September 1, 2020
Emily T. Troscianko
Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing...
Routledge eBooks
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
21 citations
We may have powerful intuitions about our own minds, but they must be questioned. Could vision, consciousness, self, and free will all be illusory – meaning that they are not what they seem? This chapter concentrates on whether vision is a ‘grand illusion’. This idea emerged from research on ‘change blindness’, which found that even large changes in an image can go unnoticed if made when the...
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
3 citations
Although there is no recognised definition of consciousness, many researchers refer back to the famous question, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ If there is anything it is like for the bat, that is what is meant by being conscious. This is also called ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (P-consciousness) or ‘phenomenality’ and is sometimes contrasted with ‘access consciousness’ (A-consciousness)....
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Is the age-old distinction between the ‘conscious mind’ and ‘the unconscious’ valid, or do powerful, but false, intuitions mislead us? Unconscious, implicit, or subliminal perception is reviewed, from early ideas of a ‘subliminal self’ to modern debates over subliminal perception, including signal detection theory, priming, and the differences between objective/subjective and direct/indirect...
Routledge eBooks
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
The Buddha claimed to have ‘woken up’, describing a way to end suffering by seeing all phenomena as impermanent and letting go of desire and the illusory self. Many others have described awakening, but do they all undergo the same changes in self and consciousness? Buddhism has interacted more closely with science and psychotherapy than other religions, perhaps because of its relative lack of...
Routledge eBooks
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Could machines ever be conscious? Ways to find out include reverse-engineering human machines or artificial ones. A brief history of artificial intelligence (AI) leads from early automata through calculating machines and ‘Good Old-Fashioned AI’ to connectionism, embodied cognition, and swarm robotics. Turing asked ‘Can machines think?’ Attempts to pass his famous test are reviewed, including...
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Introspection is essential to the study of subjective experience but is problematic. Some call for a special ‘first-person science’ of consciousness based on irreducible subjective facts; others claim that ‘first-person methods’ such as introspection, meditation, or other personal explorations and training are valid, but science is a collective enterprise and a science of consciousness is no...
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Can the brain tell us everything we need to know about consciousness? Some materialists say yes, while theorists of ‘extended mind’ and ‘embodied cognition’ criticise ‘neurocentrism’ and say no. Mysterians claim that we can never understand consciousness at all. This chapter briefly reviews the anatomy and function of the human nervous system, from spinal cord to neocortex. In searching for the...
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
The problem of consciousness relates to what the world is made of, how it began, the nature of selves, and above all the mind–body problem. In philosophy, dualism is the idea that mind and matter are distinct – a common belief in most societies and religions. In Cartesian dualism (described by René Descartes), mind and matter are separate substances. Objections to this, and other forms of...
April 27, 2018
Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
The metaphor of mind as a theatre is common and alluring, but might it lead us astray? Dennett criticises those who imagine a ‘Cartesian theatre’: a mythical place in which consciousness happens and its contents come and go. This cannot exist because the brain is a massively parallel system with no centre, place, or process where the ‘audience of one’ could be. Those who believe in it he calls...