Abstract Despite our proclivity to make either tacit or overt passage of time judgments in daily life, insufficient work has been done to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning such determinations. A prima facie promising account of passage of time judgments derives from the predictive processing framework. More precisely, Hohwy et al. (2016) propose that the reported speed of the...
Abstract Although wayfinding is a central domain for 4E research, much work on spatial cognition and navigation still operates within an internalist framework. This is particularly damaging in evaluating the cognitive impact of technologies like Global Positioning Systems (GPS), where negative assessments about ‘de-skilling’ and the digital disruption of biocognitive spatial memory capacities...
Abstract ‘Modern times’ are consistently associated with a sense of temporal acceleration and disruption brought on by the breakneck speed of modern sociotechnology. But how does modern sociotechnology impact our sense of time and temporality? This paper seeks to establish the relationship between human time and technology in order to explain the contemporary phenomenon of temporal disruption....
Abstract Temporal disorientation in episodic memory includes recalling episodes we struggle to posit in time. In this paper, we theorize how this disorientation arises by arguing for a constrained functional analogy between mental time travel and spatial navigation. We characterize temporal orientation as coordination between egocentric anchors and temporal structure (order, interval, and...
This paper critically examines the methodological strategy of iterative bootstrapping within marker-based natural kind reasoning, with specific application to the science of consciousness. By drawing an explicit parallel to its use in the domain of computation, the analysis demonstrates that bootstrapping procedures—particularly under assumptions of theory-neutrality—fail to generalise...
Abstract The performance of complex motor and craft skills is a norm-governed process, reliant on an agent’s sensitivity to standards of correct and incorrect performance. Whilst norm-governed practical skills tend to be understood in terms of social norms, this paper proposes an alternative, pluralistic perspective, which recognises socially underdetermined normative dimensions in practical...
Abstract The sense of agency is the experience of predicting, initiating, or controlling actions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the sense of agency that appears in perceptual consciousness. I follow theorists such as Bayne and Prinz in suggesting that the perceptual sense of agency (PSoA) is underpinned by self-monitoring processes. The self-monitoring mechanism compares sensory...
Abstract Mindfulness is a large research field, involving disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and Buddhist studies. Despite this widespread interest, one question remains unanswered: Is there a psychological capacity that is essential to mindfulness and which demarcates mindfulness from most other mental activities? The most promising idea is that...
The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A...
AbstractRecently, the construct ‘lucid dreamless sleep’ has been proposed to explain the state of ‘clear light’ described by Tibetan Buddhist traditions, a special state of consciousness during deep sleep in which we’re told to be able to recognise the nature or essence of our mind (Padmasambhava & Gyatrul 2008; Ponlop 2006; Wangyal 1998). To explain the sort of awareness experienced during...
Abstract Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of...
Predictive Processing (henceforth PP) is a recent, exciting framework emerging at the crossroads of cognitive science, statistical modeling and philosophy of mind (Friston 2005(Friston , 2010)).Informed by recent developments in computational neuroscience and Bayesian psychology, it offers a paradigm shifting approach to studying cognition, often being presented as "the first truly unifying...
Abstract The claim that phenomenal consciousness essentially involves self-consciousness, in the sense of mineness , has gained momentum in recent years. In this paper, I discuss the main non-phenomenological, theoretical argument for this claim: the so-called “transcendental argument” for universal mineness (Zahavi 2018, p. 711), which, in essence, corresponds to Shoemaker’s critique of the...
In consciousness science, theories often differ not only in the account of consciousness they arrive at, but also with respect to how they understand their starting point. Some approaches begin with experimentally gathered data, whereas others begin with phenomenologically gathered data. In this paper, I analyse how the most influential phenomenology-first approach, namely the Integrated...
Abstract In the 1960s, a school formed in Heidelberg around Dieter Henrich that criticized—with reference to J. G. Fichte—the ‘reflection model’ of self-consciousness according to which self-consciousness consists in a representational relation between two mental states or the self-representation of a mental state. I present a new “Heidelberg perspective” of pre-reflective self-consciousness....
Self-Consciousness ranks among the most urgent topics in today's Philosophy of Mind.In particular, one of the most challenging agenda is the explanation of prereflective self-consciousness. 1 According to philosophers like Anna Giustina and Uriah Kriegel pre-reflective self-consciousness consists in a subject's awareness of her ongoing experience. 2 It is a case of "peripheral"...
This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of collective affective niche construction, which extends the extended mind (ExM) thesis from cognitive to affective phenomena. Although theoretically innovative, the theory lacks a detailed psychological account of how collective affectivity is scaffolded. It has also been criticized for its uncritical assumption of the subject qua the...
This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as computational phenomenology because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy...
In this paper I critically examine uses of introspection in present-day philosophy of perception. First, I introduce a distinction between two different meanings of the term ‘introspection’: introspective access and introspective method. I show that they are both at work in the philosophy of perception but not adequately distinguished. I then lay out some concerns about the use of introspection...
The mainstream science of consciousness offers a few predominate views of how the brain gives rise to awareness. Chief among these are the Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and hybrids thereof. In parallel, rapid development in predictive processing approaches have begun to outline concrete mechanisms by which interoceptive inference...
Recently, the mechanistic framework of active inference has been put forward as a principled foundation to develop an overarching theory of consciousness which would help address conceptual disparities in the field (Wiese 2018; Hohwy and Seth 2020). For that promise to bear out, we argue that current proposals resting on the active inference scheme need refinement to become a process theory of...
According to illusionism, phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why we are powerfully disposed to judge—erroneously—that we are phenomenally conscious. I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem. I argue that on the basis of three hypotheses about the mind—which I call introspective opacity,...
The discussion of the nature of consciousness seems to have stalled, with the “hard problem of consciousness” in its center, well-defined camps of realists and eliminativists at two opposing poles, and little to none room for agreement between. Recent attempts to move this debate forward by shifting them to a meta-level have heavily relied on the notion of “intuition”, understood in a rather...
In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the "qualitative character" of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its "subjective character", i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of...
In natural language, looks-talk is used in a variety of ways. I investigate three uses of 'looks' that have traditionally been distinguished - epistemic, comparative, and phenomenal 'looks' - and endorse and develop considerations in support of the view that these amount to polysemy. Focusing on the phenomenal use of 'looks', I then investigate connections between its semantics, the content of...