This chapter inaugurates the book’s investigation of the Hard Problems of consciousness by asking how subjectivity can be situated within an objective world. It begins by reframing the traditional Hard Problem through the broader lens of the Placement Problem, drawing on recent works in naturalism to clarify how subjective phenomena resist straightforward integration into a scientific ontology....
This chapter examines the debate over neural correlates of consciousness, focussing on whether the prefrontal cortex forms part of the neural basis of perceptual awareness. It begins by clarifying the concept of neural correlates of consciousness and surveying methodological challenges, including the distinction between correlates, causes, and enabling conditions. The discussion then turns to...
AbstractIn this letter we focus on the cognitive science of consciousness. The general message is that, while this interdisciplinary area has made much progress in recent years, there is a tendency of downplaying conceptual issues, and therefore underestimating the difficulties of various problems. We briefly focus on a few prominent examples only, due to the space limit, but the general...
It has been shown that P3b is not a signature of perceptual awareness per se but is instead more closely associated with postperceptual processing (Cohen et al., 2020). Here, we seek to investigate whether human participants' attentional states are different in the report and the no-report conditions. This difference in attentional states, if exists, may lead to degraded consciousness of the...
Abstract Background Ketamine has emerged as a fast-acting and powerful antidepressant, but no head to head trial has been performed, Here, ketamine is compared with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the most effective therapy for depression. Methods Hospitalized patients with unipolar depression were randomized (1:1) to thrice-weekly racemic ketamine (0.5 mg/kg) infusions or ECT in a parallel,...