A useful theory linking dynamical systems to phenomenal experience will be a story thrice told. It will involve some description of phenomenal experience, which should be true. It will also involve some sort of dynamical model (second). But (third) the model will have to be at least plausibly implementable in human beings – that’s where the theory becomes useful. Finally, once all three stories...
The continual background awareness of duration is an essential structure of consciousness, conferring temporal extension to the many objects of awareness within the evanescent sensory present. Seeking the possible neural correlates of ubiquitous temporal awareness, this article reexamines fMRI data from off-task "default mode" (DM) periods in 25 healthy subjects studied by Grady et al....
Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis of multiple experimental datasets. Here, four preprocessed datasets from the National fMRI Data Center are considered: Hazeltine et al., Neural activation...
Commentary on “Searle and the ‘Deep Unconscious’” Dan Lloyd (bio) Can another person know my thoughts with better authority than I know them myself? With his affirmative answer to this question, Freud invented the twentieth-century human, a being whose mind is accessible to scrutiny from outside, and whose attempts at conscious self-explanation are at best partial and in many cases wrong. Even...