ISSN 1381-589X
104 papers in the library · 351 citations · publishing 1995-2017
Advances in Consciousness Research October 19, 2017 Riccardo Manzotti
What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Berit Brogaard 20 citations
The most central metaphysical question about phenomenal consciousness is that of what constitutes phenomenal consciousness, whereas the most central epistemic question about consciousness is that of whether science can eventually provide an explanation of the phenomenon. Many philosophers have argued that science doesn’t have the means to answer the question of what consciousness is (the...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 14 citations
Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Jeroen J A Van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya 11 citations
In this chapter, we discuss possible confounds that need to be carefully controlled for when the neural constitution of phenomenal conscious perception is studied. First, we discuss previous psychological or neural studies that clearly dissociated confounding factors (in particular, attention, report and memory) from phenomenal consciousness. We discuss several important phenomena and...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Zoe Drayson 3 citations
The scientific study of consciousness is constantly making new discoveries, but one particular aspect of consciousness remains problematic to explain. This is the fact that conscious experiences present themselves to us in a first-person way: there is something it feels like to be the subject of a conscious experience. This ‘phenomenal’ aspect of consciousness seems to be subjective, private,...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Jonathan P. Opie, Gerard J. O’brien 2 citations
Philosophers have largely abandoned the claim that the special sciences will ultimately reduce to microphysics in favour of the view that the special sciences trade in functional explanations. However, a careful examination of scientific practice reveals that the explanatory strategy of the special sciences is neither reductionist nor functionalist, but mechanistic. Mechanistic explanations...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Derk Pereboom
In this article I set out in concise form the physicalist account of the mental I develop in Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Pereboom, 2011). I first set out a response to the knowledge and conceivability arguments against physicalism, one that features the open possibility that introspection represents phenomenal states as having qualitative features they actually lack. I then...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Antti Revonsuo
In this paper I overview my previous work concerning a multilevel framework for consciousness science. Constitutive, etiological and contextual dimensions of explanation are described. The multilevel framework is then applied to current issues within consciousness science including understanding the convergence of top-down and bottom-up constraints, the level of measurement problem and sorting...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Steven M Miller
The science of consciousness is founded on identifying the minimally sufficient neural correlates of consciousness. However, I have argued that science really seeks identification of the neural constitution of consciousness, and that there are no empirical strategies for distinguishing the correlates and constitution of consciousness. Here I review this correlation/constitution distinction...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Benjamin L. Curtis
Drawing upon material from my earlier chapter (with Noonan), in this paper I argue that if a completed neuroscience of consciousness is to be attained, we must give the synchronic and diachronic application conditions for brain states and phenomenal states. I argue that, due to the temporal nature of our experiences, such states must be viewed as being temporally extended events, and illustrate...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Benjamin Kozuch, Uriah Kriegel
Why is there need for a philosophy of consciousness, in addition to the science of consciousness? For two reasons: first, as a young science operating as yet under no guiding paradigm, the science of consciousness has been subject to considerable confusion regarding its methodological, conceptual, and philosophical foundations, and it is philosophy’s mandate to address such confusion in an...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Jaan Aru, Talis Bachmann, Wolf Singer et al.
It has been proposed that one key step for solving the mystery of consciousness is to locate the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). The experimental paradigms for revealing the NCC have commonly applied the contrast between conditions with and without conscious perception. However, such contrast does not exclusively reveal the neural processes directly related to conscious experience of...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Jaak Panksepp
The bipolar affective structures of brain emotional processes – namely negative and positive affects – provide ideal ways to make scientific progress on the “hard problem” of primal consciousness: wherever in subcortical brain regions one applies highly localized electrical deep brain stimulation, and obtains coherent emotional behaviors, animals treat these brain arousals as ‘rewards’ and...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 P. Christiaan Klink, Matthew W. Self, Victor A. F. Lamme et al.
The scientific study of consciousness has gained much interest over the past several decades. Here, we provide a primer on the topic by introducing the most commonly used concepts, the most prominent scientific theories, and an overview of broadly used methods of studying consciousness. With a focus on visual perception, we discuss the distinction between phenomenology and cognitive...
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Martin Mahner
The philosophy of mind employs plenty of metaphysical concepts such as “(mental) property”, “state”, “event”, “identity”, “causation”, or “supervenience”. However, it has no fully fledged metaphysical theory, let alone a generally accepted one. This flaw slows down the progress of the field in that the same old problems keep being discussed over and over without much hope of resolution....
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Tom A. de Graaf, Alexander T. Sack
What sorts of brain processes covary with consciousness? We argue that empirical neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) include neural substrates (actual conscious experience representation in the brain), neural prerequisites and neural consequences of a conscious experience. In a conventional correlative paradigm, these three NCCs are principally indistinguishable. However a multi-pronged...
Advances in Consciousness Research December 16, 2013 169 citations
The Series provides a forum for scholars from different scientific disciplines and fields of knowledge who study consciousness in its multifaceted aspects. Thus the Series includes (but is not limited to) the various areas of cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, brain science, philosophy and linguistics. The orientation of the Series is toward developing new interdisciplinary and...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 28, 2013 Jan W. Brascamp, Daniel H. Baker
For a given visual stimulus, much can be inferred about its neural representation by measuring an observer’s responses on simple behavioral tasks. This is the essence of psychophysics, the method of examining sensory processing by studying the relation between stimulation and perception or behavior. Binocular rivalry is the phenomenon of alternating perception that occurs when the two eyes...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 28, 2013 Frank Sengpiel
Ever since Horace Barlow (1972) proposed his neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology, the holy grail for neurophysiologists has been to find individual neurons or groups of neurons whose firing correlates with specific percepts or even a state of mind or consciousness. Binocular rivalry is a particularly attractive paradigm for this approach because a stable visual stimulus causes an...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 28, 2013 P. Christiaan Klink, Richard J.A. Van Wezel, Raymond Van Ee
Binocular rivalry is often considered an experimental window on the neural processes of consciousness. We propose three distinct approaches to exploit this window. First, one may look through the window, using binocular rivalry as a passive tool to dissociate unaltered sensory input from wavering perceptual output. Second, the mechanisms underlying binocular rivalry may yield detailed knowledge...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 28, 2013 Nicholas J. Wade, Trung T. Ngo
Contributions from 19th Century scholars to binocular rivalry research are well recognized, however, observations concerning the phenomenon commenced centuries earlier and suggest a rich seam of research that is much less well known. This chapter discusses these early investigations, along with conflicting views and observations thereafter. We also discuss the early application of notions of...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 28, 2013
This volume examines the neuroscience of visual consciousness, drawing on the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. It provides overviews of brain structure and function, the visual system, and neuroscientific methodologies, and then focuses on binocular rivalry from multiple perspectives: historical, psychophysical, electrophysiological, brain-imaging, brain stimulation, clinical and computational,...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 7, 2012 Roberto Palaia 3 citations
A semantic shift of the word consciousness (conscientia, conscience, Gewissen, Bewusstsein, coscienza) occurred in 17th- and 18th-century European languages. While in pre-modern times the term consciousness had been related to theology and ethics, in early modern thought, a new meaning was added to the term, somehow different from the original one. Early modern philosophers and scientists used...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 7, 2012 Monica Riccio
The paper deals with the transformation of sensation concept throughout modern thinking. A particularr focus is laid on the transition of sensation from the external – the body and his surface – into the inside – the depth and darkness of human consciousness. If “nothing but a body can touch and be touched” (Lucretius, De rerum natura, I, 304), it is namely in the passivity, in the stance of...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 7, 2012 Geri Cerchiai
Face to Descartes’ rationalism, in the book entitled De antiquissima Italorum sapientia Vico tries to examine non reflexive aspects of thought. According to Vico, the clear and distinct idea cannot originate the cogito as a criterion of truth; moreover, the clear and distinct idea exchanges the intelligere of God with the human cogitare; third, the method of doubt doesn’t consider the link, in...