Conscious Agency Research Articles

The Body Knows Better: Sensorimotor signals reveal the interplay between implicit and explicit Sense of Agency in the human mind

Sense of Agency (SoA) is the feeling of control over our actions. SoA has been suggested to arise from both implicit sensorimotor integration as well as higher-level decision processes. SoA is typically measured by collecting participants' subjective judgments, conflating both implicit and explicit processing. Consequently, the interplay between implicit sensorimotor processing and explicit agency judgments is not well understood. Here, we evaluated in one exploratory and one preregistered experiment (N = 60), using a machine learning approach, the relation between a well-known mechanism of implicit sensorimotor adaptation and explicit SoA judgments. Specifically, we examined whether subjective judgments of SoA and sensorimotor conflicts could be inferred from hand kinematics in a sensorimotor task using a virtual hand (VH). In both experiments participants performed a hand movement and viewed a virtual hand making a movement that could either be synchronous with their action or include a parametric temporal delay. After each movement, participants judged whether their actual movement was congruent with the movement they observed. Our results demonstrated that sensorimotor conflicts could be inferred from implicit motor kinematics on a trial by trial basis. Moreover, detection of sensorimotor conflicts from machine learning models of kinematic data provided more accurate classification of sensorimotor congruence than participants' explicit judgments. These results were replicated in a second, preregistered, experiment. These findings show evidence of diverging implicit and explicit processing for SoA and suggest that the brain holds high-quality information on sensorimotor conflicts that is not fully utilized in the inference of conscious agency.

Marxism and Witchcraft By DavidKubrin, Brooklyn, NY: Autonmedia. 2020. pp. 704. USD 24.95

Anthropology of ConsciousnessEarly View BOOK REVIEW Marxism and Witchcraft By David Kubrin, Brooklyn, NY: Autonmedia. 2020. pp. 704. USD 24.95 Mark A. Schroll, Corresponding Author Mark A. Schroll [email protected] Sofia University, Palo Alto, CaliforniaE-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Mark A. Schroll, Corresponding Author Mark A. Schroll [email protected] Sofia University, Palo Alto, CaliforniaE-mail: [email protected]il.comSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12180Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Berman, M. 1981. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Berman, M. 1989. Coming to our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York: Simon and Schuster. Capra, B. A., dir. 1991. Mindwalk. Hollywood, CA.: Triton Pictures/Paramount. Capra, F. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books. Capra, F., and Toms, M. (1992). Mindwalk: The New Paradigm. New Dimensions Radio Interview with Capra, F. San Francisco: New Dimensions Foundation. Merchant, C. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Metzner, R. 1999. Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Pink Floyd. 1979. The Wall. London/Britannia Row: Harvest EMI (UK), Columbia/CBS (USA). Prattis, I. 1997. Anthropology at the Edge: Essays on Culture, Symbol, and Consciousness. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Schroll, M. A. 1997. “ The Philosophical Legacy of David Bohm, Its Relationship to Transpersonal Psychology, and the Emergence of Ecopsychology: Searching for a Coherent, Co-evolutionary, Sustainable Culture.” PhD diss., The Union Institute and University. Schroll, M. A. 2001. “Hypotheses in Search of a Paradigm: A Conversation Forum.” Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference, Bastyr University, Seattle, Washington, April 6, 2001. Schroll, M. A. 2010a. “Toward a New Kind of Science and Its Methods of Inquiry.” Anthropology of Consciousness 21 (1): 1– 29. Schroll, M. A. 2010b. “The Physics of Psi: An Interview with Stanley Krippner.” Transpersonal Psychology Review 14 (1): 3– 15. M. A. Schroll, ed. 2014. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal 5 (4). Special issue: Hypotheses in Search of a Paradigm. Schroll, M. A. 2016. Transpersonal Ecosophy, vol. 1: Theory, Methods, and Clinical Assessments. Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, UK: Psychoid Books. Schroll, M. A., and S. Greenwood. 2011. “Worldviews in Collision/Worldviews in Metamorphosis: Toward a Multistate Paradigm.” Anthropology of Consciousness 22 (1): 49– 60. Schroll, M. A., and H. Walker. 2011. “Diagnosing the Human Superiority Complex: Providing Evidence the Eco-crisis is Born of Conscious Agency.” Anthropology of Consciousness 22 (1): 30– 48. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Іконічно-конвенційні координати постмодерну: Юрій Іздрик «Воццек»

The article explores the iconic-conventional interactions of scientific and artistic ascertainment of postmodern aesthetics and philosophy. Based on cultural and literary studies devoted to postmodernism, the author tracks the most frequently used conceptual nominations. These categories determine the expression of interpretations of his aesthetics and philosophy as a new contemplative and metaphysical focus, which has a decentralized, fluid cognitive focus and presents a meaningful discrete systematicity. The leading categories that are used to delineate the worldview and stylistic parameters of postmodernism and show a special form of iconicconventional constraints for their expression are “rhizome”, “fold”, “fractal”, “labyrinth”, “figures of similitude”, “simulacrum”, “post-Chornobyl library”. They are interpreted as a new type of linguistic-philosophical concepts that allow us to visualize the “chaos” of cultural artifacts and phenomena. Postmodernism promotes new outlines of hybrid visuality, which becomes a simulated background for textual commenting and deployment of semantic constructions. The configuration of such expressions demonstrates the need for visual representation, optical focusing for the proclamation of abstract generalizations, and their relevance for descriptions of cognitive "liminality". The article notes such trends in Y. Izdryk's “Wozzeсk”, the interpretation of Wozzeck's conscious agency. One can see the intention of focusing on the representative “conflict”, which turns into an extreme and final representative simulation. It is reminiscent of visual-verbal crossings, which state-specific thinking emblematic, whimsical action figurative-verbal connectivity, which reflects postmodern looseness and chaotic meaning-making. The text systematically promotes semantic, expressive, subjective ambivalence, and from the position of the author-hero, "impersonal personality". Postmodernism offers a new optical perceptibility, characterized by deepened and “rhizome” focusing, overlapping, and transforming various spectra of visibility and irregular structural similarity that transforms multi-dimensional homogeneity. Keywords: postmodern, iconic, conventional, Y. Izdryk, rhizome, fractal, labyrinth, simulacrum, meaning.

Conscious agency vs. pre-conscious sensory filtering: Disparate suppression of trigeminal blink reflex by self-stimulation and by prepulses.

Modulation of the blink reflex (BR) to supraorbital nerve (SON) stimulation by a weak somatosensory prepulse (sPP) consists of inhibition of R2 and facilitation of R1. Similar BR changes occur with self-stimulation. Our aim was to compare neurophysiological processes underlying both effects. We assessed BR parameters in 18 healthy participants following right SON stimulation either performed by an experimenter (experiment 1A) or following self-stimulation (experiments 1B, 1C). In experiments 1A and 1C, sPPs to digit 2 preceded SON stimuli by 40, 100, 200 and 500 ms. In experiment 1B: self-stimulation was delayed by 40, 100, 200, and 500 ms. In experiment 2, BRs were elicited by an experimenter randomly during a 2-s period before participants applied self-stimulation. In experiment 1, as expected, sPPs caused facilitation of R1 and inhibition of R2, which peaked at 100 ms ISI, similarly in experiments 1A and 1C. Self-stimulation caused a decrease of R2, which was evident in a broad range of time intervals. In experiment 2, R2 was already inhibited at the onset of the 2-s period, while R1 began to rise significantly 1.4s before self-stimulation. Both effects progressively increased until self-triggering. The results concur with a time-locked gating mechanism of prepulses at brainstem level, whereas self-stimulation modulates BR in a tonic manner, reflecting a cognitive influence due to self-agency.

Pleasure, Polyphony, and Networking in Agents of Ishq


 
 
 
 Contemporary media ecologies offer online interactive practices opportunities to focus on social engagement with users by increasingly operating in collaborative and co-creative modes of production and circulation. This article focuses on an online multimedia bilingual (Hindi and English) project in the Indian context Agents of Ishq (2016) conceptualized by the documentary practitioner and artist, Paromita Vohra. In a country where the dominant narratives in mainstream media have primarily centred around sexual violence, the interactive audio-visual website features creative graphics, audio podcasts, first-person accounts with creative illustrations, Bollywood memes, GIFs-driven stories, photo essays, mixed media art, videos, poetry, prose around the themes of sex, love, choice, desire, gender, and freedom. The interface invites the user to explore, open up and listen to conversations around sex education, histories of desire, pleasure, sexual experiences, social and legal discussions on conscious agency and intimacy. The database-driven project draws on Indian popular culture, art and socio-cultural context to promote amongst its users and audience the ability to listen to and respect others’ complex lived sexualities. Vohra’s work acts as a context provider to the varied intimate and personal voices, authors, collective and performative, artistic forms engaging with each other towards a common objective of opening enabling, inclusive conversations between young Indians around diverse sexual cultures which are not solely instructive and normative. The non-linear echoes of these discussions can also be heard (and continue) over social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. The project also intervenes in the real world through workshops on gender, sexuality and consent with different practitioners (researchers, doctors, educators, students) and organizations. Drawing on Wiehl’s proposal of Interventionist Networking Methodology, the article analyzes how the interactive project features a multiplicity of forms, representation and circulation which encompass personal accounts by the users, strategies of the practitioner and her collaborators, and challenges of engaging the target audience who belong to a multitude of heterogeneous cultural backgrounds and socio-economic classes. The digital world has offered people the chance and various ways to privately connect outside their immediate social spheres, in a way the everyday life may not. However, it has also gradually changed from a space of experimentation and plays to a space that reflects the normativity and pressures of the offline world. The article also calls attention to the dynamism between digital and physical spaces through this case study. It suggests how the polyphonic attributes of online interactive media can tap into it – creating art that respects the individuality of the human experience while acknowledging the multiple ways it may articulate itself. 
 
 
 

What Sort of Kinetic Materialism Did Marx Find in Epicurus?

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx suggests that the main flaw of all previous materialism has been to uncritically accept and champion a notion of matter that has its proper place in a dualistic framework, where matter is passive and the mind is active. If this is so, true materialism will conceive of matter as an active principle, and of material beings as perfectly capable of conscious sensation and agency.

Dr Goff, Tear Down This Wall! The Interface Theory of Perception and the Science of ConscDr Goff, Tear Down This Wall! The Interface Theory of Perception and the Science of Consciousnessiousness

Here I outline an alternative to panpsychism, premised on the interface theory of perception, that too subscribes to a 'post- Galilean' research programme. However, interface theorists disagree along several lines. (1) They note that Galileo's distinction should be replaced by a truly non-dual account, referring to a difference of degree only. (2) They highly appreciate the role of mathematics, in particular when it comes to actually engaging scientifically with consciousness. Some notable features of the interface theory are its scepticism towards our epistemic capacities and its rejection of the existence of a public, physical reality. In addition, some interface theorists further employ a thin concept of 'conscious agency' to ground their theory. The interface theory leaves open many of the problems of consciousness science (e.g. what is a 'self'?) as questions for further (scientific, mathematical) research.

The Hope of Meaningful Immortality

Ever since Bernard Williams (1993) made the character Elina Makropulos central to his case against the desirability of immortality, a debate has raged on between philosophers who join him in arguing that immortal life would lack meaning, and those who defend the prospects of meaningful everlasting existence. I will argue that a never-ending existence offers more hope for personal meaning and value than ordinary finite existence does. To illustrate the idea that having a necessary ending spoils life’s meaning, I introduce a new literary example—Leonid Andreyev’s Lazarus—to juxtapose with Elina Makropulos. Lazarus personifies the notion that the transient significance of life simply evaporates in comparison with the infinite nothingness of death. Among other things, dying means the destruction of the first-personal sense of value we build up and attribute to our lives through conscious experience, memories, and agency.

How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities

The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual’s role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer’s life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual’s conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the “how-to” books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable—albeit dangerous—to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism’s modern legacies.

Beyond free will: The embodied emergence of conscious agency

ABSTRACTIs it possible to reconcile the concept of conscious agency with the view that humans are biological creatures subject to material causality? The problem of conscious agency is complicated by the tendency to attribute autonomous powers of control to conscious processes. In this paper, we offer an embodied process model of conscious agency. We begin with the concept of embodied emergence – the idea that psychological processes are higher-order biological processes, albeit ones that exhibit emergent properties. Although consciousness, experience, and representation are emergent properties of higher-order biological organisms, the capacity for hierarchical regulation is a property of all living systems. Thus, while the capacity for consciousness transforms the process of hierarchical regulation, consciousness is not an autonomous center of control. Instead, consciousness functions as a system for coordinating novel representations of the most pressing demands placed on the organism at any given time. While it does not regulate action directly, consciousness orients and activates preconscious control systems that mediate the construction of genuinely novel action. Far from being an epiphenomenon, consciousness plays a central albeit non-autonomous role in psychological functioning.

The Illusion of Agency as a Mark of Ultimacy

Abstract This essay proposes that action unaccompanied by the usual feeling of conscious agency constitutes a “mark of ultimacy.” Characteristically religious statements of “agentless action” find support in social psychological and cognitive scientific research that calls into question the intuitive belief that conscious thought causes action. An awareness of the limits of our powers of will lies at the the core of those limit experiences that provide the context for the meaningfulness of religious language.

Human Consciousness: Where Is It From and What Is It for.

Consciousness is not a process in the brain but a kind of behavior that, of course, is controlled by the brain like any other behavior. Human consciousness emerges on the interface between three components of animal behavior: communication, play, and the use of tools. These three components interact on the basis of anticipatory behavioral control, which is common for all complex forms of animal life. All three do not exclusively distinguish our close relatives, i.e., primates, but are broadly presented among various species of mammals, birds, and even cephalopods; however, their particular combination in humans is unique. The interaction between communication and play yields symbolic games, most importantly language; the interaction between symbols and tools results in human praxis. Taken together, this gives rise to a mechanism that allows a creature, instead of performing controlling actions overtly, to play forward the corresponding behavioral options in a “second reality” of objectively (by means of tools) grounded symbolic systems. The theory possesses the following properties: (1) It is anti-reductionist and anti-eliminativist, and yet, human consciousness is considered as a purely natural (biological) phenomenon. (2) It avoids epiphenomenalism and indicates in which conditions human consciousness has evolutionary advantages, and in which it may even be disadvantageous. (3) It allows to easily explain the most typical features of consciousness, such as objectivity, seriality and limited resources, the relationship between consciousness and explicit memory, the feeling of conscious agency, etc.

Lithium Quantum Consciousness

Conscious agency is considered to be founded upon a quantum state of mind . An original synthesis, called “Lithium Quantum Consciousness” (LQC), proposes that this quantum state utilises lithium-6 (spin-1) qutrit nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum information processing (QIP) in the connectome (brain-graph). In parallel to the connectome’s processing of physiological controls, perception, cognition and intelligence via quantum electrodynamics (QED), the connectome also functions via its dynamic algebraic topology as a unitary transceiver antenna laced with lithium-6 nuclei which are spin-entangled with each other and with the environmental vortical gluon field via quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This unitary antenna (connectome) bestows the self its unity of consciousness within an intertwined-history multi-agent environment. An equivalence is proposed between Whitehead’s occasions of experience and topological spacetime instantons in the vortical gluon field. Topological spacetime instantons pervade the vortical gluon field in a quantum information network of vortex interactions, herein termed the “instanton-net”, or “Instanet” [sic]. The fermionic isotope lithium-6 has a very low nuclear binding energy and the smallest non-zero nuclear electric quadrupole moment of any stable nucleus making it susceptible to quantum chromodynamic (QCD) interaction with the vortical gluon field and ideal for spin-1 qutrit NMR-QIP. The compact spherical atomic orbital of lithium provides ideal rotational freedom inside tetrahedral water cages in organo6Li+(H2O)4 within which the lithium nucleus rapidly tumbles for NMR motional narrowing and long decoherence times. Nuclear spin-entanglement, among water-caged lithium-6 nuclei in the connectome, is a spin-1 qutrit NMR-QIP resource for conscious agency. By contrast, similar tetrahedral xenon cages in organo6Li+Xe4 excimers are postulated to decohere the connectome’s NMR-QIP due to xenon’s NMR signal being extremely sensitive to its molecular environment. By way of this quantum neurochemistry, lithium is an effective psychiatric medication for enhancing mood and xenon is an effective anaesthetic.

Media research and psychoanalysis: A suggestion

This short commentary outlines psychoanalysis as a theory and method and its potential value to media research. Following Dahlgren , it is suggested that psychoanalysis may enrich the field because it may offer a complex theory of the human subject, as well as methodological means of doing justice to the richness, ambivalence and contradictions of human experience in relation to media. The psychoanalytic technique of free association and how it has been adapted in social research is suggested as a means to open up subjective modes of expression and thinking –- in researchers and research participants alike – that lie beyond rationality and conscious agency.

The neuroscience of free will: implications for psychiatry

Belief in free will has been a mainstay in philosophy throughout history, grounded in large part in our intuitive sense that we consciously control our actions and could have done otherwise. However, psychology and psychiatry have long sought to uncover mechanistic explanations for human behavior that challenge the notion of free will. In recent years, neuroscientific discoveries have produced a model of volitional behavior that is at odds with the notion of contra-causal free will and our sense of conscious agency. Volitional behavior instead appears to have antecedents in unconscious brain activity that is localizable to specific neuroanatomical structures. Updating notions of free will in favor of a continuous model of volitional self-control provides a useful paradigm to conceptualize and study some forms of psychopathology such as addiction and impulse control disorders. Similarly, thinking of specific symptoms of schizophrenia as disorders of agency may help to elucidate mechanisms of psychosis. Beyond clinical understanding and etiological research, a neuroscientific model of volitional behavior has the potential to modernize forensic notions of responsibility and criminal punishment in order to inform public policy. Ultimately, moving away from the language of free will towards the language of volitional control may result in an enhanced understanding of the very nature of ourselves.

Going to School with Friedrich Nietzsche: The Self in Service of Noble Culture

To understand Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming and to determine its true import for contemporary education, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche’s view of the self that is to be overcome. Nevertheless, previous interpretations of self-overcoming in the journals of the philosophy of education have lacked serious engagement with the Nietzschean self. I devote the first part of this paper to redressing this neglect and arguing for a view of the Nietzschean self as an assemblage of ontologically basic affects which have been guided and modulated by the incorporation of perspectives. This interpretation has important consequences for self-overcoming, for it constrains the individual’s conscious agency to operations on perspectives. In light of this view I then advance a competing conception of self-overcoming and discuss some of the shortcomings of antecedent interpretations. Although previous interpreters have done their part to exhaust the characteristic actions of self-overcoming, I argue that they have either exaggerated the deleteriousness of social influence in the formation of the authentic individual, or else ignore it altogether. In the final part I reconsider the debate over the democratic or aristocratic nature of Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming. Interestingly, self-overcoming cannot be labeled strictly as either, and out of this ambiguity grows the role of the school as an agent of cultural transformation.

Consistency in the Sartrean analysis of emotion

In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre analyses emotions in terms of their role in conscious agency. What is rarely noted is that Sartre gives a counterexample to his own theory: ‘the immediate reactions of horror and wonder that sometimes possess us when certain objects suddenly appear to us’ is not explained by the theory developed in the main body of the monograph.1 That critical remark is followed by a diagnosis for the apparent failure of the theory to account for those cases, and a proposal as to how they could be accommodated in a phenomenological account of emotions. Sartre’s proposal, though, might be found unsatisfactory. Sarah Richmond has claimed that there are two lines of reasoning in the Sketch, which are in clear conflict with each other.2 I will argue that the Sketch is open to a different reading, which avoids attributing an inconsistency to Sartre's theory. Let me first explicate how the …

Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?

This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investigation and yielded results that challenge the received wisdom. Most famously, the results of Libet’s studies on the ‘readiness potential’ have been interpreted by many as evidence in favor of a skeptical attitude towards conscious agency. It is questionable, however, whether action initiation should be regarded as the touchstone of conscious agency. I shall argue that the traditional folk-psychological view, but also some of the objections leveled against it, rest in part on an over-simplified conception of the structure of agency, that neglects both the role of control processes after action initiation and the role of planning processes before action initiation. Taking these processes into account can lead to a reassessment of the relation between intentions and action and of the role of conscious agency in action production.

Mental states, processes, and conscious intent in Libet's experiments

The meaning and significance of Benjamin Libet's studies on the timing of conscious will have been widely discussed, especially by those wishing to draw sceptical conclusions about conscious agency and free will. However, certain important correctives for thinking about mental states and processes undermine the apparent simplicity and logic of Libet's data. The appropriateness, relevance and ecological validity of Libet's methods are further undermined by considerations of how we ought to characterise intentional actions, conscious intention, and what it means to act with conscious intent. Recent extensions of Libet's paradigm using fMRI and decision-based tasks suffer from similar limitations. The result is that these sorts of laboratory studies of isolated, trivial, decontextualized bodily movements, in a context of extended (conscious) intentional experimental participation and cooperation, are of dubious and potentially misleading relevance to the study of agency.

Reliability of sensory predictions determines the experience of self-agency

This study examines the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the sense of agency, that is, the experience of causing and controlling events in our environment. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that the sense of agency depends on an optimal integration of different anticipatory signals, generated by motor and nonmotor systems. An established marker of pre-reflective agency experience is the suppression of cortical responses to actively generated feedback as compared to passively observed feedback, which was measured here by event-related potentials (ERPs). Sensory expectations based on motor-related and unrelated signals were induced by varying the probabilistic contingency between action and feedback, and by priming the feedback prior to the action. Moreover, simultaneous conscious agency judgments were assessed. A reduction of visual N1 response was found to self- as compared to externally generated feedback. In addition, the N1 was modulated by accurate anticipations based on prime stimuli, independent of the precision of motor predictions. Conscious agency judgments, in contrast, were enhanced by prime stimuli only in situations where no precise motor predictions of the action feedback were available. These results indicate that anticipatory signals arising from motor and nonmotor systems are integrated differently depending on the level of agency processing. Our findings suggest that, at a pre-reflective level, the brain's agency system relies on both embodied signals and nonmotor sensory expectations. At higher cognitive levels, motor and nonmotor cues are weighted differently depending on their relative reliability in a given context, thereby providing a basis for robust agentive self-awareness.