Lack of vivid sensory imagery has recently become an active subject of research, under the name of aphantasia. Extremely vivid imagery, or hyperphantasia, is at the other end of the spectrum of individual differences. While most research has focused on visual imagery in this paper I argue that from a neuropsychological perspective this phenomenon is much more widespread, and should be...
Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive- Scientific Philosophy of Mind. By Dan Arnold. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+ 311. $50.
The cognitive phenomenology debate centers on two questions. (1) What is an apt characterization of the phenomenology of conscious thought? And (2), what role does this phenomenology play? I argue that the answers to the former question bear significantly on the answers to the latter question. In particular, I show that conservatism about cognitive phenomenology is not compatible with the view...
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is an audacious attempt to pin down the abstract, phenomenological experiences of consciousness into a rigorous, mathematical framework. We show that IIT's stance in regards to neuronal noise is inconsistent with experimental data demonstrating that neuronal noise in the brain plays a critical role in learning, visual recognition, and even categorical...
Philosophy of Mind is currently one of the most prolific fields of research in philosophy and has witnessed a progressive hybridization with cognitive science. It focuses on fundamental questions to neuroscience and psychiatry, such as the nature of mental states and cognitive processes, or the relationships between mental states and the world. Anticipating the accumulation of experimental data...
In recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper...
The final chapter moves fully into speculative metaphysics. After discussing the ontological and conceptual problems that would ensue if ‘nature’ and ‘life’ were used as realist concepts of being, an alternative is introduced, namely ‘becoming existence’. It is discussed as a concept of being able to come to terms both with the becoming and the relational nature of being, without erasing all...
In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry have typically been operationalized with psychological tasks. If we are interested in measuring the target phenomena, we must inquire into the validity of the task; that is, to what extent does the task elicit the phenomenon in question. If we subscribe to the second view, evaluating the validity and the interpretation of the gathered...
The way one asks a question is shaped by a-priori assumptions and constrains the range of possible answers. We identify and test the assumptions underlying contemporary debates, models, and methodology in the study of the neural correlates of consciousness, which was framed by Crick and Koch's seminal paper (1990). These premises create a sequential and passive conception of conscious...
Abstract The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are...
In this essay, the authors explore the phenomenon of utterance we find in speech and teaching. Jean-Luc Marion’s third phenomenological reduction serves as a methodological foundation for this exploration which moves through Biblical literature and autobiography – both centred on the story of the election of Samuel – before leading into a meditation on the Call of and Response to the Other. The...
In this paper, I use a comparative analysis of mysticism in Zen and the Abrahamic faiths to formulate a phenomenological account of mysticism “as such.” I argue that, while Zen Buddhism is distinct from other forms of mystical experience in important ways, it can still be fit into a general phenomenological category of mystical experience. First, I explicate the phenomenological accounts of...
"A New Concept of ‘Person’ in Wojtylian Philosophy: A Phenomenological and Metaphysical Analysis of The Acting Person”: This article discusses Karol Wojtyła’s study on the concept of “person” and its anthropological foundations. It refers to his great book: The Acting Person, in which Wojtyła approaches the reality of the person from the perspective of the person’s action. The article shows...
This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by imitating a cognitive architecture similar to that of conscious beings. Throughout this document, a cognitive model of an autonomous agent-based in a global workspace architecture is presented. We hypothesize that consciousness is an evolutionary advantage, so if our autonomous agent can be potentially...
Husserl’s “noema” and “noesis” are main concepts in phenomenology able to represent its originality. Following the trace of a recent paper, its formal and philosophical approach is extended to both correlative notions, in the present article. They are able to reveal the genesis of the world from consciousness in a transcendental method relevant to Husserl, but furthermore described formally as...
We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws. Some biological points are also briefly considered. The arguments are of logical, mathematical and physical character, and although elementary they require a...
The article outlines the author’s vision of the formation and development of “intersubjectivity” as a concept of socially oriented thought. Introduced into sociohumanitarian knowledge by E. Husserl’s phenomenology, this notion initially possessed powerful sociological potential and was called to explain on an abstract-philosophical level the existence of social order from an egological...
Enactivism is a major research programme in the philosophy of perception. Yet its metaphysical status is unclear, since it is claimed to avoid both idealism and realism yet still has aspects of both within it. One attempt to solve this conundrum is based on the fusion of enactivism with phenomenology and the mathematical concept of symmetry breaking (Moss Brender, 2013). I suggest this is not...
We cast aspects of consciousness in axiomatic mathematical terms, using the graphical calculus of general process theories (a.k.a symmetric monoidal categories and Frobenius algebras therein). This calculus exploits the ontological neutrality of process theories. A toy example using the axiomatic calculus is given to show the power of this approach, recovering other aspects of conscious...
The hard problem of consciousness has been a perennially vexing issue for the study of consciousness, particularly in giving a scientific and naturalized account of phenomenal experience. At the heart of the hard problem is an often-overlooked argument, which is at the core of the hard problem, and that is the structure and dynamics (S&D) argument. In this essay, I will argue that we have good...