Robots React, but Can They Feel?

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.

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

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.

Subjective feeling, defined as the conscious experience of emotion and measured by self-report, is generally used as a manipulation check in studying emotional processes, rather than being the primary focus of research. In this paper, we report a first investigation into the processes involved in the emergence of a subjective feeling. We hypothesized that the oscillatory brain activity presumed to underlie the emergence of a subjective feeling can be measured by electroencephalographic (EEG) frequency band activity, similar to what has been shown in the literature for the conscious representation of objects. Emotional reactions were induced in participants using static visual stimuli. Episodes for which participants reported a subjective feeling were compared to those that did not lead to a conscious emotional experience, in order to identify potential differences between these two kinds of reactions at the oscillatory level. Discrete wavelet transforms of the EEG signal in gamma (31-63 Hz) and beta (15-31 Hz) bands showed significant differences between these two types of reactions. In addition, whereas beta band activities were widely distributed, differences in gamma band activity were predominantly observed in the frontal and prefrontal regions. The results are interpreted and discussed in terms of the complexity of the processes required to perform the affective monitoring task. It is suggested that future work on coherent mental representation of multimodal reaction patterns leading to the emergence of conscious emotional experience should include modifications in the time window examined and an extension of the frequency range to be considered.

How does conscious experience arise out of the functioning of the human brain? How is it related to the behaviour that it accompanies? How does the perceived world relate to the real world? Between them, these three questions constitute what is commonly known as the Hard Problem of consciousness. Despite vast knowledge of the relationship between brain and behaviour, and rapid advances in our knowledge of how brain activity correlates with conscious experience, the answers to all three questions remain controversial, even mysterious. This book analyses these core issues and reviews the evidence from both introspection and experiment. To many its conclusions will be surprising and even unsettling: (1) The entire perceived world is constructed by the brain. The relationship between the world we perceive and the underlying physical reality is not as close as we might think. (2) Much of our behaviour is accomplished with little or no participation from conscious experience. (3) Our conscious experience of our behaviour lags the behaviour itself by around a fifth of a second: we become aware of what we do only after we have done it. (4) The lag in conscious experience applies also to the decision to act: we only become aware of our decisions after they have been formed. (5) The self is as much a creation of the brain as is the rest of the perceived world.

The mind-body problem – how conscious experience can arise from a physical system – is commonly taken to be the problem of how phenomenal properties could come to accompany psychological or behavioural functions, which, being functional and attainable by non-conscious entities in virtue of their physical features, are not viewed as part of the ‘hard problem’. This implies that there is a relation between the system constituted by the physical body negotiating the external world on the one hand, and conscious experience on the other, in which psychological features, such as beliefs and desires leading to action, are situated, conceptually and functionally, somewhere between these two realms. The alternative approach I will discuss takes the view that conscious experience, rather than being conceptualised as one step beyond psychological functions, in relation to the physical self, should be situated at the interface between the physical body and cognitive processes. Work in the field of experimental psychology, by Balleine and Dickinson (1998), provides empirical evidence consistent with this view. Dickinson and Balleine’s hypothesis is that the function of consciousness is to act as an interface, providing a means of interaction between bodily states and affordances in the external world, enabling rational, goal-directed action. My philosophical work on grounding rationality draws the same conclusion, providing support for Dickinson’s interface theory, Hedonic Interface Theory (HIT). Keywords: interface theory; consciousness; goal-directed action

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.

The problem of consciousness is mostly regarded as identical to the mind-body problem. According to Chalmers’ philosophical arguments, the hard problem of consciousness lies in establishing and explaining the link between physical processes and conscious experiences, via psychological processes. A brief history of various theories of consciousness is given and a selection of theories are tested against Zeman’s three fundamental intuitions and Chalmers’ controversial zombie argument. The hard problem of consciousness is further described using Levine’s notion of an explanatory gap between physical matter and conscious experience, through the first and third persons. Various states, contents, levels and processes of consciousness are summarised, including Damasio and Meyer’s dual perspective for defining consciousness. Tart’s three definitions do not entirely describe altered states of consciousness. While the challenge of finding the core function of human and animal sleep remains unknown when tested under the null hypothesis, studies on the neural correlates of consciousness during meditation have revealed neuroplasticity effects. The synchrony of gamma brain oscillations reflecting various styles of meditation or attention, also known as the binding problem, may be related to conscious experiences. This binding problem with gamma brain oscillatory synchronization also arises in relation to sensory awareness or perception, affecting the perception of time and hallucinatory experiences in various disorders of consciousness such as severe schizophrenic and deja vu (in healthy or epileptic) patients. In conjunction with medication treatments, music therapy is often useful in accelerating the healing process in most such disorders of consciousness. It is still unknown how this sensory awareness to music is perceived in medicated patients suffering from disorders of consciousness. More clinically elusive are near death experiences, in which consciousness persists independently of brain function, where there is no scientific basis for such consciousness to exist and no physiological or psychological model that can explain it. Near death experiences can be regarded as a special state of consciousness, which provides further evidence that the consciousness problem may be very close to the mind-body problem that originates in Descartes’ classic theory of dualism and is transformed into Chalmers’ contemporary theory of natural dualism. The final section of this chapter offers an overview of all invited chapters.

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programmed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. In this view, what differs in emotional and nonemotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide nonconscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness.

Human emotions are characterized by a complex interaction between conscious experience, physiological arousal, and social dimension. Although the importance of considering emotion response as a nonlinear dynamical system is widely recognized, mathematical models able to describe the time-varying conscious emotional states are still lacking. In recent literature on Affective Computing, novel annotating tools have been introduced to record continuous self-assessed emotion ratings. These data represent a valuable source to describe the dynamics arising during the conscious experience of emotions. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the trajectories traced in the reconstructed phase space of continuously annotated arousal signals acquired during an experimental protocol of emotion elicitation. We use a subset of the Continuously Anno-tated Signals of Emotions (CASE) dataset, including self-assessed ratings from thirty healthy subjects while watching two video clips: one fear-inducing and one relaxing. We analyse intrinsic irregularity and complexity of arousal time-series, performing Sample Entropy and Distribution Entropy algorithms. Results show a significantly higher complexity of time-varying emotion perception during the scary video compared to the relaxing video. Our findings, although preliminary, highlight a promising field of application of chaos theory methodologies to continuous emotion ratings, which can be exploited for the prediction of pathological moods in ecological settings.

Measuring emotional processes in animals: the utility of a cognitive approach

Towards solving the hard problem of consciousness: The varieties of brain resonances and the conscious experiences that they support

Emotional consciousness: A neural model of how cognitive appraisal and somatic perception interact to produce qualitative experience

Progress is being made in understanding how brain mechanisms generate conscious experience. Simple conscious experiences such as sensations of colors, shapes, and sounds require only neural representations as patterns of firing that result from sensory inputs and internal processing. More complicated conscious experiences, such as awareness of reading in a chair in a room, require the amalgamation of sensations and images into more complex representations through binding into semantic pointers. Recursive binding—bindings of bindings of bindings—can produce the most complicated kinds of conscious experience of which humans are capable, taking people from feelings to awareness to self-awareness. Consciousness is limited because recursive binding and competition among the resulting semantic pointers depend on processing by many neurons.

This paper discusses the possible inspirations that might be derived from the viewpoints of Eastern Philosophy in contemporary studies of consciousness. First of all, two notions of consciousness are introduced, one of which can be explained by science. The other however cannot, and as such is also called the ‘Hard Problem’. Secondly, the special features shared by morality and the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ are discussed. Thirdly, I discuss the conventional routes Oriental philosophy takes toward an exploration of the human mind, and consequently point out that Oriental philosophy views consciousness as the fundamental feature of moral beings. One of the reasons that human beings can pursue meaningful life is because of the necessary existence of conscious experience. It is our conscious experience that makes a life of value possible. Therefore, in Oriental philosophy matters of consciousness revolve around aspects of morality and spirituality, and the training of the abilities of consciousness is emphasized over knowledge. Finally, this paper concludes with a comparison of the different approaches Oriental philosophy and current Western academics take in their study of consciousness. Hopefully, one day consciousness can be fully explored from more diverse viewpoints to gain a more comprehensive understanding and so further the happiness of humanity.