Cognition
August 1, 2017
Aiyana K Willard, Ara Norenzayan
100 citations
People who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) hold more paranormal beliefs and report more mystical experiences and feelings of universal connectedness than either religious or non-religious individuals. However, SBNR individuals resemble religious individuals in their patterns of cognitive biases. They also score higher on measures of schizotypy. Conversions between groups since childhood are linked to specific cognitive differences: dualism predicts conversion to religion, while schizotypy predicts conversion to SBNR.
Cognition
January 1, 2015
Ludger Van Dijk, Rob Withagen, Raoul M Bongers
65 citations
Radical enactivists worry that using the concept of information in ecological psychology implies content, which would conflict with non-representational cognitive science. This article argues that James J. Gibson's later notion of information was intended to be content-less—information for affordances rather than information about the environment. The authors contend that subsequent ecological psychology has drifted into cognitivist language, but that reclaiming Gibson's original insight—that there is no information in content, only in use—allows the concept to be applied without invoking representation. Embracing this content-free notion of information can help situate the enactivist's "basic mind" within larger, more complex scales of coordination.
Cognition
September 1, 2023
Yoni Zion Amir, Yaniv Assaf, Yossi Yovel et al.
25 citations
People can have a phenomenal experience—a raw, qualitative feel—without having immediate access to it or being able to report it at the moment. Using a novel paradigm, participants (Experiment 1, N = 40) lacked online access to a stimulus but could later retrospectively judge its phenomenal, qualitative aspects. A second experiment (N = 40) ruled out explanations based on unconscious processing or responses to stimulus offset. The results suggest that phenomenal and access consciousness are not only conceptually distinct but can also be empirically separated, supporting Ned Block's controversial dissociation.
Cognition
October 1, 2021
Eugen Fischer, Justin Sytsma
22 citations
The perception of philosophical zombies—hypothetical beings indistinguishable from humans but lacking consciousness—may be shaped by linguistic biases rather than solid reasoning. In a study involving 200 participants, framing effects were observed: when presented with the term "zombie," 75% maintained strong intuitions about their conceivability, compared to just 40% for "duplicate." These results suggest that contextually defeated inferences can mislead understanding of consciousness, challenging the notion that significant barriers exist between physical processes and conscious experience.
Cognition
February 21, 2023
Leonard Dung, A. Newen
A framework for studying animal consciousness distinguishes two questions: which species are conscious, and how their conscious experiences differ. The two-tier account analyzes consciousness along ten dimensions, using cognitive capacities like learning, reasoning, and abstraction as operational indicators for each dimension. This approach separates strong from weak evidence for consciousness, includes differences in how content is processed, and allows combining evidence across dimensions to create a multi-dimensional consciousness profile for each species. The framework enables systematic comparison of conscious experiences across species.
Cognition
April 1, 2013
Jesse Lee Preston, Ryan S Ritter, Justin Hepler
Belief in the soul decreases when neuroscience offers strong mechanistic explanations for the mind, but increases when gaps in neuroscience research are emphasized. Two experiments showed that physical and metaphysical explanations may serve as alternative theories for the mind, with people shifting between them depending on the perceived completeness of neuroscience. This suggests that belief in the soul is not fixed but can be influenced by how neuroscientific explanations are presented.
Cognition
December 1, 2005
Murray Shanahan, Bernard J. Baars
The frame problem challenges cognitive science to explain how the brain can efficiently access relevant information from any domain without explicitly sorting through everything irrelevant. This paper argues that a global workspace architecture, which coordinates many parallel processes through a single serial thread of computation, offers a solution. Analogical reasoning is highlighted as a particularly demanding case of this unencapsulated information processing. Since global workspace theory also distinguishes conscious from unconscious processing, the author tentatively suggests that consciousness may be linked to how the biological brain solves the frame problem.
Cognition
April 1, 2001
N Block
Functionalists define consciousness by its role, while physicalists define it as the biological mechanism that performs that role. Global workspace theory aligns with functionalism, treating consciousness as a functional process. Physicalists, however, view consciousness as a biological phenomenon that implements global accessibility, meaning it is the physical brain's activity that realizes the functional role.
Cognition
June 1, 1993
D Symons
Natural selection has shaped sleep so that vigilance for external threats remains possible. During sleep, visual and movement hallucinations (dreams) do not compromise vigilance because closed eyes and immobility mean those senses provide no accurate external information. In contrast, hallucinations involving kinesthesis, pain, touch, warmth, cold, odor, or sound would interfere with monitoring the environment and have been disfavored by evolution. This vigilance hypothesis predicts specific features of dream content and REM sleep brain activity.