This thesis delves into the topic of consciousness in artificial intelligence (AI) and the moral implications involved by looking into the Norwegian novelist Bjørn Vatne's Død og Oppstandelse ("death and resurrection"; my trans.)and the British novelist Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me.Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the various techniques each novel's protagonist utilizes to imagine and conceptualize a...
Naturalizing phenomenology or phenomenologizing neurosciences? This is the provocative and stimulating question that Gallese asks himself/us (taken from Enciclopedia Treccani, 2009) to try to better understand the explanatory significance of the mirror mechanism. The attempt to make neurosciences and phenomenology interact originally took shape as a project for the naturalization of...
Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the second-person perspective, not only in philosophy of mind, language, law and ethics, but also in various empirical disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. A distinctive and perhaps also slightly puzzling feature of this ongoing discussion is that whereas many contributors insist that a proper consideration of...
An unbiased metaphysics of consciousness allows us to put forward a thesis that consciousness is not an object, but a fundamental problem of modern philosophy and different solutions of this problem define the history of European philosophy. For Descartes, consciousness is Cogito, the personalization of substance by the mind acting in a variety of cogital, conscious acts. Kant, for whom...
The importance of bringing together perspectives in cognitive science and phenomenology cannot be overemphasized. Cognition as enacted, that is to say, as embodied action, is about the interdependence of world and mind. It is a mutuality of dependence made evident in the relations between mind and world, involving interaction or embodied action. Hence cognition as embodied action seems to be a...
In India, rates of anxiety are quite high in the general population with women, young adults and the elderly particularly vulnerable. In recent years, Holistic approaches are gaining increasing popularity in the management of psychiatric disorders. Yoga is among the oldest sciences with a holistic approach and hence, has been studied extensively in psychiatry. This increase in popularity is...
This article addresses the question of whether psychodrama can be viewed as an example of the extended mind thesis and can be applied in an educational context. The extended mind thesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) proposes that external artifacts can function as integral components of an individual's cognitive system, augmenting cognitive abilities. The article explores the notion that...
This article explores E. Neumann's concept of the Unitary Reality and its relevance to synchronicity and to numinous experiences in sandplay therapy. Our ego-consciousness differentiates and splits the reality into opposites. Neumann writes about another level of reality, the unitary reality, "which exists beyond and before the primal split and out of which the polarized reality of our...
Abstract The flow experience, first studied by Mihaly (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper Perennial, 1991), represents a glimpse into peak experiences, and suggests an expanded state of consciousness often accompanied by superior creativity and accomplishment. The experience of transcendence through Transcendental Meditation® (TM®), brought to the world by...