How the Effect of Emotion on the Selectivity of Attention Supports Self-Organizing Dynamical Systems as an Explanation of Consciousness

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a systematic argument, on both philosophical and neuropsychological grounds, for an “enactive” and self-organizational explanation for consciousness. The self-organizational approach offers solutions to problems that have stumped philosophers for centuries, including the problem of mental causation. Mental causation is a mystery because it seems that the unified being, the conscious person or animal, is able to make its own parts combine in certain ways to serve the purposes of the whole, rather than having its form merely dictated by the accidental ways in which the constituents come together. The theory of self-organization explicitly addresses this problem as its basic starting point. Also, many psychological puzzles about consciousness can be addressed by means of a self-organizational approach. In this paper, we consider the Mack and Rock inattentional blindness phenomena; and the micro-genesis of perceptual experience, which presents the paradox that perceptual consciousness does not accompany virtually complete occipital activation, yet does accompany the parietal P300 event related potential, which however does not seem to be caused by the occipital activation at all. We also explore the way the enactive, dynamical systems account of emotional consciousness maps onto the relatively independent, unconditioned instinctual systems studied by Panksepp and associates, as discussed in the target article of this issue.