Music in the Space of All Possible Conscious Experiences

Although subjective conscious experience and introspection have long been considered unscientific and banned from psychology, they are indispensable in scientific practice. These terms are used in scientific contexts today; however, their meaning remains vague, and earlier objections to the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing, remain valid. This also applies to the distinction between conscious visual perception and unconscious visual processing. Damage to the geniculo-striate pathway or the visual cortex results in a perimetrically blind visual hemifield contralateral to the damaged hemisphere. In some cases, cerebral blindness is not absolute. Patients may still be able to guess the presence, location, shape or direction of movement of a stimulus even though they report no conscious visual experience. This “unconscious” ability was termed “blindsight”. The present paper demonstrates how the term conscious visual experience can be introduced in a logically precise and methodologically correct way and becomes amenable to scientific examination. The distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing is demonstrated in the cases of conscious vision and blindsight. The literature on “blindsight” and its neurobiological basis is reviewed. It is shown that blindsight can be caused by residual functions of neural networks of the visual cortex that have survived cerebral damage, and may also be due to an extrastriate pathway via the midbrain to cortical areas such as areas V4 and MT/V5.

The understanding of human consciousness based on brain connectivity is considered important for brain- machine interfacing. In this study, we investigated changes in causal connectivity in electroencephalography data related to conscious and unconscious experiences during non-rapid eye movement sleep after parietal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A serial awakening paradigm was used to determine whether subjects had had a conscious experience or not. We calculated direct transfer function (DTF) as a measure of effective connectivity in five frequency bands focusing on frontal and parietal-occipital regions. The DTF showed significant differences in frontal-to-parietal flow between reported unconsciousness and consciousness. During the first 100 ms after TMS, the outward links of the parietal region at low frequencies were higher in no conscious experience than in conscious experience. During the next 100 ms, however, the outward links of the frontal region were higher in the conscious experience than the no conscious experience at low frequencies. Changes with causal connectivity over time after TMS indicate that the spatial roles in brain regions associated with consciousness are different. These findings may help clarify the cortical mechanisms related to conscious experience.

In every country in the world we teach our children that they belong to a certain nation and religion. The fact that we all live on the same planet Earth is not taken into consideration. The result is that we raise people with narrow personal identification, which can always be manipulated and used for violence and war with people of other nations and religions. In order to stop this centuries-long destruction we have to raise new generations that will first belong to the planetary society and second to a certain nation or religion. In the today’s educational system worldwide we mostly develop the rational analytic experience of the world, while the conscious synthetic experience if left aside. In order to strengthen the integration forces between people of this planet the scientific analytic experience needs to be enriched with conscious synthetic experience of the world. Conscious experience has a dimension of “sacredness”; one discovers his/her deep connectedness with other human beings, the nature and the universe. This experience of oneness is the basis for a peaceful planetary society living in cohabitation with nature. Key words: Perception, experience, observer, observing, rational mind, consciousness, watching, witnessing, self-experience, mind, time, timeless, oneness, planetary society, dual-aspect-dual-mode PE-SE framework, proto-experience, subjective experience, peace, happiness, war, suffering.

The nature, causes, and effects of immediate conscious leisure experiences have long been central interests of scholars. Significant contributions to the field include Abraham Maslow’s studies of ecstasy and peak experience, Sigmund Koch’s descriptions of two forms of consciousness, John Neulinger’s classification of immediate conscious experiences based on their motivational contexts, Michael J. Ellis’ application of arousal theory to play, Howard and Diane Tinsley’s theory of the leisure experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s career of inquiry into the “flow” phenomenon, and recently, the theory of structured experience (TSE). This paper reviews research on leisure as immediate conscious experience relating to development of TSE and informs new propositions strengthening the original theory (TSE 2.0) by (a) interpreting TSE in the context of previous research on leisure as immediate conscious experience of leisure, (b) summarizing, integrating, and critiquing research conducted to test propositions of TSE, and (c) proposing revisions to TSE based on completed research.

The relation between three aspects of memory—behaviour, knowledge, and conscious experience—is discussed. Memory research of the past has tended to concentrate on memory performance, and to neglect memory as conscious experience. This neglect may reflect the acceptance of a tacit assumption that behaviour, knowledge, and experience are closely correlated, an assumption designated here as the doctrine of concordance. Some recent research, explicitly concerned with conscious experience in remembering, has thrown doubt on concordance as a general rule. Four examples of this research are briefly reviewed: repetition priming, source amnesia, remembering vs knowing, and neural correlates of episodic and semantic memory as revealed by regional cerebral blood flow. This research suggests that there is no general correlation between memory performance, retrieved knowledge, and conscious recollective experience, and that these relations in different situations must be discovered rather than just postulated under the aegis of some tacitly accepted doctrine.

Our reasoning thus far has applied the basic thesis that any interpretation of ourselves and of other beings should not neglect, distort, or render unintelligible what is undergone in conscious and self-conscious experience. As C. I. Lewis has said: “That which explains experience is always something which the experience in question gives us some reason (some partial ground) for assuming.”1 The method of beginning with the data in conscious experience does not entail the conclusion that the person is no more than his conscious experience. For example, in chapter 2 we inferred, from what is given in conscious experience, that a person’s unconscious processes are more understandable as “extensions” of the dynamics of the self-identifying person. Our task now is to see what we can reasonably say about the person in the light of his conscious experience of his body.

The Equations for Consciousness: A Reply to “Tracking the Travels,” a Review of <i>Journey of the Mind</i>

How does the non-conscious become conscious?

It is now well established that people can display emotional behavior in the absence of concomitant conscious emotional experience (Öhman et al., this volume). This is one example of the known dissociations that have been observed among the experiential, expressive, and evaluative components of emotion (Lang, 1993b). These dissociations raise fundamental questions about what emotion is and why such dissociations occur. One of the key fundamental questions is whether conscious experience is a necessary component of emotion.

What is reality?

In humans, knowing the world occurs through spatial-temporal experiences and interpretations. Conscious experience is the direct observation of conscious events. It makes up the content of consciousness. Conscious experience is organized in four dimensions. It is an orientation in space and time and an understanding of the position of the observer in space and time. A neural correlate for four-dimensional conscious experience has been found in the human brain which is modeled by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Spacetime intervals are fundamentally involved in the organization of coherent conscious experiences. They account for why conscious experience appears to us the way it does. They also account for assessment of causality and past-future relationships, the integration of higher cognitive functions, and the implementation of goal-directed behaviors. Spacetime intervals in effect compose and direct our conscious life. The relativistic concept closes the explanatory gap and solves the hard problem of consciousness (how something subjective like conscious experience can arise in something physical like the brain). There is a place in physics for consciousness. We describe all physical phenomena through conscious experience, whether they be described at the quantum level or classical level. Since spacetime intervals direct the formation of all conscious experiences and all physical phenomena are described through conscious experience, the equation formulating spacetime intervals contains the information from which all observable phenomena may be deduced. It might therefore be considered expression of a theory of everything.

This chapter describes the mechanisms behind conscious experiences, emphasizing the Neural Binding and Coherence (NBC) theory. It explores how neural representation, binding, coherence, and competition interact to create conscious phenomena. Using smell, hunger, loneliness, and self-awareness as examples, the chapter illustrates how these mechanisms contribute to component consciousness and compound experiences. The concept of ‘recurring emergence’ is central, highlighting how interactions within neural systems produce qualitative novelties like conscious states. The chapter also examines evolutionary functions, explaining how conscious experiences, such as smell aiding survival or hunger driving action, enhance biological fitness. Through detailed analyses, it connects abstract concepts like self-awareness to neural processes, arguing for consciousness as a product of neural mechanisms, in contrast to mystical, dualist, or panpsychist explanations.

This chapter addresses the “Hard Problem” of consciousness in the context of robot emotions. The Hard Problem, as defined by Chalmers, refers to the task of explaining the relation between conscious experience and the physical processes associated with it. For example, a robot can act afraid, but could it feel fear? Using protophenomenal analysis, which reduces conscious experience to its smallest units and investigates their physical correlates, we consider whether robots could feel their emotions, and the conditions under which they might do so. We find that the conclusion depends on unanswered but empirical questions in the neuropsychology of human consciousness. However, we do conclude that conscious emotional experience will require a robot to have a rich representation of its body and the physical state of its internal processes, which is important even in the absence of conscious experience.

EDITORIAL article Front. Psychol., 18 February 2015Sec. Consciousness Research https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00166

Consciousness or conscious experience is a mental phenomenon that is familiar to all of us, but the way in which it is produced escapes us to a large extent. Each person has a vague idea of what it means to be conscious, but consciousness is rather hard to define, albeit easy to identify. It is that function of the brain that makes us conscious of external or internal stimuli and of our thoughts regarding these subjective experiences. Conscious experience is a first-person perspective of mental states and events tracking as they unfold. It includes mental phenomena such as a perception, emotion, memory, idea, continuous temporal sequence of events. A mental process and its adjoining neurophysiological phenomena represent two aspects of the same event. We have direct access to the mental aspect, while we can observe the neurophysiological aspect only when we study the event as a biological process. The psychological study of consciousness describes the special properties of this brain function, its origin and utility in the global economy of an animal organism. The neurobiological study aims to find the neural correlates of consciousness, aims to establish causal relations between the neural phenomena and the different conscious states. Lastly, the formulation of an explanatory theory can provide a satisfactory understanding of the phenomenon. This review aims to bring some clarification in the field of consciousness, selecting the hypotheses which mostly fulfill the requirements, in order to be confirmed as explanatory theories. A valuable test for confirming an explanatory hypothesis is its predictive power. Using this criterion we have evaluated comparatively, some of the proposed explaining hypotheses.