This thesis is concerned with three fundamental questions. First, why does North American higher education minimally engage with the existential dimensions of its students (their interests and inquiries regarding the formation of their personal narratives of meaning, moral directions, and a sense of stable identity)? Second, what are the potential psychological and social consequences of such...
Since palaeolithic times, shamans involved animal depictions in cave ceremonies and adopted animals as helping spirits during their trance journeys. This study aims at explaining the rituals with new evidence: the shamans were acting rationally to deal with an inverted otherworld, still rooted in many traditional beliefs, and seen as an impressive natural phenomenon in superior mirages. After...
The aim of the present clinical review was to illustrate the diagnostic difficulty associated with psychotic experiences during adolescence, in the light of the multiplicity of circumstances interplaying during this period. It was also intended to illustrate the observation that not all hallucinations occur in the context of a declared psychotic disorder. The patient was a 16-year-old...
From Descartes and Cartesian mind-body dualism in the 17th century though to 21st-century concerns about artificial intelligence programming, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness presents a compelling history and up-to-date overview of this burgeoning subject area. Acknowledging that many of the original concepts of consciousness studies are found in writings of past...
According to Thomas Metzinger, many human cognitive processes in the waking state are spontaneous and are deprived of the experience of epistemic agency. He considers mind wandering as a paradigm example of our recurring loss of epistemic agency. I will enrich this view by extending the scope of the concept of epistemic agency to include cases of depressive rumination and creative cognition,...
I investigate the status of subjectivity in Integrated Information Theory. This leads me to examine if Integrated Information Theory can answer the hard problem of consciousness. On itself, Integrated Information Theory does not seem to constitute an answer to the hard problem, but could be combined with panpsychism to yield a more satisfying theory of consciousness. I will show, that even if...
As a child, I often imagined that I was a space astronaut. Today I imagined what I could have for lunch and what I could wear for a concert. Pilots imagine performing water landings in an emergency. We might imagine full grown trees, while planting tree seeds. We use imagination to plan daily activities, prepare for important events, evaluate past choices and actions, predict other people’s...
I argue that, contra Dreyfus's theory of expert performance and behaviorist interpretations of enactivism, action is not mindless. Rather, empirical and phenomenological studies of athletics, dance and musical performance provide evidence that performance involves specific forms of mindfulness. Philosophically, these issues are addressed in the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about the very...
Both mainstream cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind remain wedded to the Cartesian picture of the mind as an isolated, self-sufficient, and constitutively individual phenomenon. However, recently approaches to the mind (e.g. extended mind thesis, enactivism) that depart from the standard view have emerged. Aunifying thread that runs through these approaches can be summed up in the...
Bibliografía Auvrey, M., C. Lenay y J. Stewart (2009), “Perceptual interactions in a minimalist virtual environment”, New Ideas in Psychology, 27(1), pp. 32-47. Balmaceda, T. (2014), Psicología de sentido común. Pasado, presente y futuros, Buenos Aires: Título. Balmaceda, T. y F. Burdman (en prensa), “Precisiones en torno al debate entre las posiciones tradicionales y los nuevos enfoques por la...