Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 22, 2024
Zbigniew Orbik
3 citations
Abstract Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenological philosophy, developed the concept of the so-called pure transcendental consciousness. The author of the article asks whether the concept of consciousness understood this way can constitute a model for AI consciousness. It should be remembered that transcendental consciousness is the result of the use of the phenomenological method, the...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 20, 2024
Joanne Chung-yan Wun
AbstractThis article explores the notion of the unconscious (das Unbewusste) in terms of its nature and constitutive manifestations in consciousness. In contrast to the psychoanalytic formulation, the unconscious is conceptualized here distinctively as sedimentation (die Sedimentierung) within the Husserlian framework. All `experiences sediment and are “stored” in a darkened, affectless region...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 3, 2024
T. Solymosi
In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel at home in the world. This feeling at home, however, is not fully problematized, nor explored, nor resolved by Johnson. Rather, Johnson and his collaborators, Don Tucker (2021) and Jay Schulkin (2023), defend this updated pragmatism within the...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2024
Brendan P. Zietsch
Evolutionary fitness threats and rewards are associated with subjectively unpleasant and pleasant sensations, respectively. Initially, these correlations appear explainable via adaptation by natural selection. But here I analyse the major metaphysical perspectives on consciousness – physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism – and conclude that none help to understand the adaptive-seeming...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 27, 2024
Zixuan Liu
AbstractHusserl characterizes sleep with the idea of “the relaxation of the will.” One finds a similar approach in the work of Maine de Biran, who explains sleep as “the suspension of the will.” More recently, Brian O’Shaughnessy and Matthew Soteriou have argued that mental actions constitute wakeful consciousness. In clinical practice, patients with disorders of consciousness who show...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 26, 2024
Georg Northoff, Steven S. Gouveia
12 citations
Abstract Does artificial intelligence (AI) exhibit consciousness or self? While this question is hotly debated, here we take a slightly different stance by focusing on those features that make possible both, namely a basic or fundamental subjectivity. Learning from humans and their brain, we first ask what we mean by subjectivity. Subjectivity is manifest in the perspectiveness and mineness of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 28, 2023
Morten Overgaard
The contrasts between so-called objective and subjective measures of consciousness have been a dominating topic of discussion for decades. The debate has classically been dominated by two positions – that subjective measures may be completely or partially reduced to objective measures, and, alternatively that they must exist in parallel. I argue that many problems relate to subjective reports...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 8, 2023
Enara García
9 citations
Abstract Several enactive-phenomenological perspectives have pointed to affectivity as a central aspect of mental disorders. Indeed, from an enactive perspective, sense-making is an inherently affective process. A question remains on the role of different forms of affective experiences (i.e., existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, and emotions) in sense-making and, consequently, in mental...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 21, 2023
Tom Cochrane
3 citations
Abstract This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: (i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. (ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 26, 2022
Thomas Fuchs
18 citations
Abstract Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre- or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term of Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious . This not-yet-conscious mostly unfolds spontaneously and without plan; it is not directly anticipated or aimed at, but rather comes to awareness in...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 19, 2022
Simon Høffding, Katrin Heimann, Kristian Moltke Martiny
27 citations
“IPA”, “DES”, “micro phenomenology”, “phenomenological psychology”, “hermeneutic phenomenological method”, “neurophenomenology”, “reflective lifeworld research”, and “ethnographic phenomenological interviews” are just some examples of the many methods out there. While they all claim to work with subjective experience, it is not easy to identify their specificities and differences. When you work...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
December 1, 2022
Peter Langland-Hassan
Whether a person is pretending, or not, is a function of their beliefs and intentions. This poses a challenge to 4E accounts of pretense, which typically seek to exclude such cognitive states from their explanations of psychological phenomena. Resulting tensions are explored within three recent accounts of imagination and pretense offered by theorists working in the 4E tradition. A path forward...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 22, 2022
Mark-Oliver Casper, Philipp Haueis
7 citations
Abstract Questions about phenomenology’s role in non-philosophical disciplines gained renewed attention. While we claim that phenomenology makes indispensable, unique contributions to different domains of scientific practice such as concept formation, experimental design, and data collection, we also contend that when it comes to explanation, phenomenological approaches face a dilemma. Either...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 7, 2022
Laura Candiotto
Through a discussion of the socially extended mind, this paper advances the “not possible without principle” as an alternative to the social parity principle. By charging the social parity principle with reductionism about the social dimension of socially extended processes, the paper offers a new argumentative strategy for the socially extended mind that stresses its existential significance....
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 10, 2022
Katrin Heimann, Hanne Bess Boelsbjerg, Chris T. Allen et al.
17 citations
Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 15, 2022
G. Ongaro, Doug I Hardman, Ivan Deschenaux
The extended mind thesis states that the mind is not brain-bound but extends into the physical world. The philosophical debate around the thesis has mostly focused on extension towards epistemic artefacts, treating the phenomenon as a special capacity of the human organism to recruit external physical resources to solve individual tasks. This paper argues that if the mind extends to artefacts...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 7, 2022
A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio
13 citations
We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary theory of biological autonomy devoted to the study of cognition and the mind. What is at...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 1, 2022
Jelena Markovic
13 citations
Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion ( 1917 ) and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 2, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
13 citations
Abstract In contentless experience (sometimes termed pure consciousness ) there is an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. The path to contentless experience in meditation can be taken to comprise the meditation technique, and the experiences (“interim-states”) on the way to the contentless “goal-state/s”. Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 24, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
17 citations
Abstract Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. In academic work it has been classically treated as including states like those aimed for in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation. We have used evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from within the three traditions. In this paper we identify the...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
2022
Martin Weichold, Zuzanna Rucińska
3 citations
In his recent paper "Getting Real About Pretense: A Radical Enactivist Proposal", Daniel Hutto raises several objections against our so-called praxeological enactivist account of pretense (Weichold & Rucińska 2022). He argues that one should, instead, adopt his radical enactivist explanation of pretend play. In this short reply, we defend our praxeological enactivist account against his...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 3, 2021
Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez
21 citations
Abstract This paper presents a pilot study that explores instances of objectless awareness during sleep: conscious experiences had during sleep that prima facie lack an object of awareness. This state of objectless awareness during sleep has been widely described by Indian contemplative traditions and has been characterised as a state of consciousness-as-such; while in it, there is nothing to...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 10, 2021
Simon Høffding, Kristian Moltke Martiny, Andreas Roepstorff
45 citations
Abstract The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 9, 2021
J. Deery
For some, the states and processes involved in the realisation of phenomenal consciousness are not confined to within the organismic boundaries of the experiencing subject. Instead, the sub-personal basis of perceptual experience can, and does, extend beyond the brain and body to implicate environmental elements through one’s interaction with the world. These claims are met by proponents of...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
March 31, 2021
George Britten-Neish
Clark ( Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (3–4), 71–87, 2018 ) worries that predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density...