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May 1, 2018 David J. Uings
The assumption that the human experience of being conscious is the only form of consciousness carries with it a corollary that is rarely made explicit, but creates the widespread acceptance that there is a mind-body problem—often described as the hard problem in the philosophy of mind. In the former case, a group of neurons in the chimpanzee brain identifies the apple, because neurons further...
May 1, 2018 Kendall Roper 1 citation
Post-modernism asserts that the world as we know it does not exist independently from the symbolic interpretations we formulate about it. This symbolic and ever unfolding interpretation of reality applies to our understanding of science as well as philosophy, to religion as well as art. In striving to describe religious experiences, various cultures have developed complex symbolic languages...
Routledge eBooks April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko 21 citations
We may have powerful intuitions about our own minds, but they must be questioned. Could vision, consciousness, self, and free will all be illusory – meaning that they are not what they seem? This chapter concentrates on whether vision is a ‘grand illusion’. This idea emerged from research on ‘change blindness’, which found that even large changes in an image can go unnoticed if made when the...
April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Is the age-old distinction between the ‘conscious mind’ and ‘the unconscious’ valid, or do powerful, but false, intuitions mislead us? Unconscious, implicit, or subliminal perception is reviewed, from early ideas of a ‘subliminal self’ to modern debates over subliminal perception, including signal detection theory, priming, and the differences between objective/subjective and direct/indirect...
April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
The metaphor of mind as a theatre is common and alluring, but might it lead us astray? Dennett criticises those who imagine a ‘Cartesian theatre’: a mythical place in which consciousness happens and its contents come and go. This cannot exist because the brain is a massively parallel system with no centre, place, or process where the ‘audience of one’ could be. Those who believe in it he calls...
April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
The problem of consciousness relates to what the world is made of, how it began, the nature of selves, and above all the mind–body problem. In philosophy, dualism is the idea that mind and matter are distinct – a common belief in most societies and religions. In Cartesian dualism (described by René Descartes), mind and matter are separate substances. Objections to this, and other forms of...
April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Can the brain tell us everything we need to know about consciousness? Some materialists say yes, while theorists of ‘extended mind’ and ‘embodied cognition’ criticise ‘neurocentrism’ and say no. Mysterians claim that we can never understand consciousness at all. This chapter briefly reviews the anatomy and function of the human nervous system, from spinal cord to neocortex. In searching for the...
April 27, 2018 Susan Blackmore, Emily T. Troscianko
Introspection is essential to the study of subjective experience but is problematic. Some call for a special ‘first-person science’ of consciousness based on irreducible subjective facts; others claim that ‘first-person methods’ such as introspection, meditation, or other personal explorations and training are valid, but science is a collective enterprise and a science of consciousness is no...
Scientific Reports April 26, 2018 Andrea Piarulli, Andrea Zaccaro, Marco Laurino et al.
The coupling between respiration and neural activity within olfactory areas and hippocampus has recently been unambiguously demonstrated, its neurophysiological basis sustained by the well-assessed mechanical sensitivity of the olfactory epithelium. We herein hypothesize that this coupling reverberates to the whole brain, possibly modulating the subject's behavior and state of consciousness....
Routledge eBooks April 24, 2018 Mark Solms, Oliver Hugh Turnbull 7 citations
Sigmund Freud was one of the first to claim that most of our mental life operates unconsciously and that consciousness is merely a property of one part of the mind. Many cognitive scientists argue that consciousness is of very little importance in mental life and that the vast bulk of our mental operations are performed without consciousness. Consciousness thus consists of feelings projected...