Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Marco Cavaglià, E. A. Zizzi, S. Dombrowski et al.
General anaesthesia has been used in medical practice since the mid-nineteenth century, but its pharmacological mechanism of action is still not entirely clear. In a top-down approach, investigations probe smaller and smaller scales to shed light on how anaesthetics disrupt or alter neural activity, ultimately resulting in loss of consciousness. In the past few decades, advances in neuroscience...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Sarika Arora, Mike Schmidt, James Boylan et al.
Previous research suggests anxious individuals demonstrate hypervigilance for threatening stimuli. Recent controversial studies suggested people's bodies (presentiment) and brain (precognition, Bem, 2011; Bem et al., 2015) can 'predict' biologically salient events, such as threatening stimuli, milliseconds to seconds before they occur. If true, this suggests a possible mechanism for...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
F. Kammerer
43 citations
Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Jonathan Birch, D. Broom, Heather Browning et al.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and on its own body. This idea of a ‘point of view’ is easiest to grasp in the case of vision. Ernst Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations, famously attempted to draw his own visual point of view (Figure 1). But there is far more to human subjective experience than vision. Our subjective point of view includes sounds, odours, tastes,...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Victor A. F. Lamme
Evidence for all sorts of cognition in animals is mounting. But is this accompanied by conscious sensation or phenomenology? To answer that question, it is noted that consciousness to us presents itself as a contrast: we are asleep or awake, we either see something or we don't, each state or condition accompanied by distinct neural correlates. The contrast implicitly holds there is conscious...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
A. Crump, Jonathan Birch
We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 15, 2022
Charles F. Detmar
The adaptational theory of consciousness is a new electromagnetic (EM) field theory of consciousness. It differs from other EM theories by integrating arguments about the mechanism, function, and evolution of consciousness. The development of awareness in the individual is also explained. New hypotheses proposed include (1) a specific resonance of the EM field can open sodium channels, making a...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 15, 2022
Javier Sánchez-Cañizares
Integrated information theory (IIT) stands out as one of the most promising approaches to scientifically understand the emergence of consciousness. Even if it borrows from the phenomenology of consciousness to derive its axiomatic formulation, IIT does not initially adhere to any particular ontological position. However, its founder leans towards panpsychism. More recently, Owen has studied the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Christopher F. Masciari
The phenomenal overflow debate is a debate about the richness of phenomenal consciousness. There are two candidate views: the rich view and the sparse view. The rich view says phenomenal consciousness outstrips access consciousness and the contents of working memory. The sparse view denies this. Moreover, according to some conceptions of the sparse view, the subjective impression of richness...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Michael Barkasi
Do perceptual experiences always inherit the content of their neural correlates? Most scientists and philosophers working on perception say 'yes'. They hold the view that an experience's content just is (i.e.is identical to) the content of its neural correlate. This paper presses back against this view, while trying to retain as much of its spirit as possible. The paper argues that type-2...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
James C. Blackmon
Integrated information theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing's having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT's consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Jonathan Edwards
Giving an account of the relation between evolution and consciousness is painted as posing a dilemma between panpsychism, with minimal consciousness in every grain of matter, and radical emergence, with consciousness appearing as from nowhere in living structures. Panpsychism has been seen as suffering from a combination problem and radical emergence as unjustified in physics. The underpinning...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Lionel Naccache
In this commentary, I discuss my main points of convergence and divergence with Mark Solms' conception of consciousness presented in his very stimulating opus, The Hidden Spring, and then frame two proposals to integrate some of his key concepts into the global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
A. Morán
This paper presents a novel challenge for the panpsychist solution to the problem of consciousness. It advances three main claims. First, that the problem of consciousness is really an instance of a more general problem: that of grounding the qualitative. Second, that we should want a general solution to this problem. Third, that panpsychism cannot provide it. I also suggest two further things:...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
S. Carroll
We have a much better understanding of the dynamics and ontology of physics than we do of consciousness. I consider ways in which intrinsically mental aspects of fundamental ontology might induce modifications of the known laws of physics, or whether they could be relevant to accounting for consciousness if no such modifications exist. I suggest that our current knowledge of physics should make...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
A. Ney
This essay critically engages with two themes in Philip Goff's book Galileo's Error regarding, first, the limits to what we can learn from physical science and, second, the comparative metaphysical and ethical implications of panpsychism and physicalism. I argue that the instrumentalist and structuralist theses Goff uses to prop up his claims about the limits of physical science are unmotivated...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
A. Harris
This paper supports the scientific position that panpsychism is a valid category of possible resolutions to the hard problem of consciousness, and it focuses on a solution to the 'combination problem' in panpsychism. I argue for a new way of thinking about consciousness in which consciousness is not viewed in reference to subjects, and that the concept of a 'subject' is borne of the illusion of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Marina Cortês, L. Smolin
We suggest that four of the deepest problems in science are closely related and may share a common resolution. These are (1) the foundational problems in quantum theory, (2) the problem of quantum gravity, (3) the role of qualia and conscious awareness in nature, (4) the nature of time. We begin by proposing an answer to the question of what a quantum event is: an event is a process in which an...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
R.S. Weir
In Galileo's Error, Philip Goff sets out a manifesto for a post-Galilean science of consciousness. Article three of the manifesto says that a post-Galilean science of consciousness should reject dualism. I argue that there is an important sense of 'dualism' whereby Goff's arguments are not only compatible with but entail dualism, and not only dualism but substance dualism. I do not suggest that...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Christof Koch
Panpsychism shares many intuitions with integrated information theory (IIT), in particular that consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems. Unlike panpsychism, however, IIT clearly articulates which systems are conscious and which ones are not (resolving panpsychism's combination problem) and why...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Damian Aleksiev
Panpsychists aspire to explain human consciousness, but can they also account for the physical world? In this paper, I argue that proponents of a popular form of panpsychism cannot. I pose a new challenge against this form of panpsychism: it faces an explanatory gap between the fundamental experiences it posits and some physical entities. I call the problem of explaining the existence of these...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
S. Ritchie
This article discusses the potential implications of panpsychism for the study and pursuit of spiritual flourishing, with a focus on emerging scientific and philosophical research on psychedelics. Psychedelics research (1) has the means to reliably and safely produce the conditions in which transformative experiences routinely occur, thereby allowing for robust neuroscientific and psychological...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
C. Fields
Galileo's Error (Goff, 2019) leaves important questions unasked and hence unanswered. I focus on two of these: the question of what a theory of consciousness is supposed to accomplish, and the question of what the materialism–dualism–panpsychism debate is actually about.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
L. Roelofs
Galileo's Error is a superlative work of public philosophy, particularly as a way of introducing modern academic panpsychism to a broader audience. In this commentary, I reflect on an issue that is prominent, though often with different background concerns, in both academic and popular discourse: what it means to be 'scientific' or 'unscientific'. Panpsychism is not itself a scientific...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
C. Rovelli
Twentieth-century physics has revealed a pervasive relational aspect of the physical world. This fact is relevant in view of some of the motivations for panpsychism. In fact, it may be seen as a vindication of the panpsychist idea of a monist continuity where some aspects of consciousness's perspectivalism are universal. On the other hand, this same fact may undermine some of the motivations...