Properties Of Experience Research Articles

Panexperientialism and Radical Emergence

Panexperientialists hold that experience is a fundamental feature of our universe, and that their view avoids radical emergence by providing an intelligible ground for our human experiences. This paper argues that they face a radical emergence problem of their own, and that they can avoid radical emergence only by adopting a strategy that can also be used by dualists (whose view they reject). It also argues that panexperientialists must either hold that all experiential properties they regard as simple must have been actually instantiated since the earliest days of our universe, or accept radical emergence, or avoid radical emergence by a strategy that can also be adopted by dualists.

Multiverse ethnography: A qualitative method for gaming and technology use research

This article introduces multiverse ethnography as a systematic team-based qualitative method for studying the mechanical, structural and experiential properties of video games and other technological artefacts. Instead of applying the ethnographic method to produce a single in-depth account, multiverse ethnography includes multiple researchers carrying out coordinated synergetic ethnographic work on the same research object, thus producing a multiverse of interpretations and perspectives. To test the method, 41 scholars carried out a multiverse ethnography on two video games, Cyberpunk 2077 and Among Us. Explorative thematic findings regarding both titles are reported and methodological implications of multiverse ethnography are discussed.

Touching taste: The classist intersections of materiality, textuality and tactility

Abstract Contemporary class formations increasingly exceed language and, therefore, defy the usual word-centric, text-based approaches of discourse studies. As Bourdieu famously observed, class-sustaining enactments of distinction and taste are often enacted outside language through banal “techniques of the body” such as people’s ways of walking or ways of eating. In this vein, my paper presents a social-semiotic analysis of the particular role menus play in materializing taste, both gustatory and social. However, rather than taking the obvious tack of addressing their linguistic content or typographic design, I focus on their haptic, experiential properties; for example, their shape, size, weight, density and other textural, tactile or material features. As a critical-empirical focus, my core evidence is an archive of Business Class menus from 18 international airlines; it is here that eating practices are explicitly framed as distinctive and superior. The significance of any text cannot be properly understood by simply attending to its straightforwardly representational meanings; its sensory and sensuous materialities must be addressed too. This, I propose, is where some of the most subtle but powerful status-making happens – the seemingly harmless, throw-away moments where privilege/inequality arises, invariably obscured but assuredly naturalized.

Taste, traits, and tendencies

Many experiential properties are naturally understood as dispositions such that e.g. a cake tastes good to you iff you are disposed to get gustatory pleasure when you eat it. Such dispositional analyses, however, face a challenge. It has been widely observed that one cannot properly assert “The cake tastes good to me” unless one has tried it. This acquaintance requirement is puzzling on the dispositional account because it should be possible to be disposed to like the cake even if this disposition has never been manifested. We argue that familiar response strategies on behalf of the dispositionalist fail. These include appeals to conversational implicatures, expressivism, semantic presuppositions and norms of assertion. Against this background, we propose a new analysis in terms of what we call tendencies, where a tendency is a disposition that has been manifested. The acquaintance requirement comes out as an entailment. We point out a hitherto unnoticed parallel to sentences ascribing character traits such as “Hannah is brave,” and extend our tendency-based analysis to this domain.

Spatio-visual experience of movement through the Yuyuan Garden: A computational analysis based on isovists and visibility graphs

A traditional Chinese private garden (TCPG) is a historically important spatial type of garden that is well-known for its rich experiential properties. Although several theories have been used to explain the creation of these experiential properties, little evidence exists for any of the current explanations because TCPGs are complex environments and their visual properties change as a person moves through them. This study uses computational analysis—isovists, isovist fields, and visibility graphs—to measure the spatio-visual character of movement along a path through a well-known TCPG, namely, the 16th century Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai. The measures derived from this process are used to evaluate four theories on the spatial experience of the TCPG.

Raising the alarm: Individual differences in the perceptual awareness of masked facial expressions

A theoretical concern in addressing the unconscious perception of emotion is the extent to which participants can access experiential properties of masked facial stimuli. Performance on a two alternative forced choice (2AFC) task as a measure of objective awareness was compared with a new measure developed to access experiential phenomena of the target-mask transition, the perceptual contrast-change sensitivity (PCCS) measure in a backward-masking paradigm with angry, happy and neutral facial expressions. Whilst 2AFC performance indicated that the targets were successfully masked, PCCS values were significantly higher in the happy-neutral face condition than in the angry-neutral face and the neutral-neutral face conditions (Experiment 1). Furthermore, objective measures of awareness were more readily displayed by individuals with high trait anxiety, whereas individuals with low trait anxiety showed greater access to the experiential quality of happy faces (Experiment 2). These findings provide important insights into the methodological considerations involved in the study of non-conscious processing of emotions, both with respect to individual differences in anxiety and the extent to which certain expressions can be successfully masked relative to others. Furthermore, our results may be informative to work investigating the neural correlates of conscious versus unconscious perception of emotion.

The experience property frame work: a misleading paradigm

According to the experience property framework qualia are properties of experiences the subject undergoing the experience is aware of. A phenomenological argument against this framework is developed and a few mistakes invited by the framework (concerning our understanding of consciousness, self-consciousness and the relation of the two) are described. An alternative to the framework, the framework of experiential properties (where experiential properties are properties of the experiencing subject) is presented and defended as preferable. It is argued that the choice between these two frameworks makes a substantial difference for theoretical purposes.

Audeosynth

We introduce music-driven video montage, a media format that offers a pleasant way to browse or summarize video clips collected from various occasions, including gatherings and adventures. In music-driven video montage, the music drives the composition of the video content. According to musical movement and beats, video clips are organized to form a montage that visually reflects the experiential properties of the music. Nonetheless, it takes enormous manual work and artistic expertise to create it. In this paper, we develop a framework for automatically generating music-driven video montages. The input is a set of video clips and a piece of background music. By analyzing the music and video content, our system extracts carefully designed temporal features from the input, and casts the synthesis problem as an optimization and solves the parameters through Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. The output is a video montage whose visual activities are cut and synchronized with the rhythm of the music, rendering a symphony of audio-visual resonance.

Are abstract action words embodied? An fMRI investigation at the interface between language and motor cognition

The cognitive and neural representation of abstract words is still an open question for theories of embodied cognition. Generally, it is proposed that abstract words are grounded in the activation of sensorimotor or at least experiential properties, exactly as concrete words. Further behavioral theories propose multiple representations evoked by abstract and concrete words. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to investigate the neural correlates of concrete and abstract multi-word expressions in an action context. Participants were required to read simple sentences which combined each concrete noun with an adequate concrete verb and an adequate abstract verb, as well as an adequate abstract noun with either kind of verbs previously used. Thus, our experimental design included a continuum from pure concreteness to mere abstractness. As expected, comprehension of both concrete and abstract language content activated the core areas of the sensorimotor neural network namely the left lateral (precentral gyrus) and medial (supplementary motor area) premotor cortex. While the purely concrete multi-word expressions elicited activations within the left inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis) and two foci within the left inferior parietal cortex, the purely abstract multi-word expressions were represented in the anterior part of left middle temporal gyrus that is part of the language processing system. Although the sensorimotor neural network is engaged in both concrete and abstract language contents, the present findings show that concrete multi-word processing relies more on the sensorimotor system, and abstract multi-word processing relies more on the linguistic system.

The Content and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience

The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience.

On the Neural Mechanisms Subserving Consciousness and Attention

Consciousness, as described in the experimental literature, is a multi-faceted phenomenon, that impinges on other well-studied concepts such as attention and control. Do consciousness and attention refer to different aspects of the same core phenomenon, or do they correspond to distinct functions? One possibility to address this question is to examine the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness and attention. If consciousness and attention pertain to the same concept, they should rely on shared neural mechanisms. Conversely, if their underlying mechanisms are distinct, then consciousness and attention should be considered as distinct entities. This paper therefore reviews neurophysiological facts arguing in favor or against a tight relationship between consciousness and attention. Three neural mechanisms that have been associated with both attention and consciousness are examined (neural amplification, involvement of the fronto-parietal network, and oscillatory synchrony), to conclude that the commonalities between attention and consciousness at the neural level may have been overestimated. Last but not least, experiments in which both attention and consciousness were probed at the neural level point toward a dissociation between the two concepts. It therefore appears from this review that consciousness and attention rely on distinct neural properties, although they can interact at the behavioral level. It is proposed that a “cumulative influence model,” in which attention and consciousness correspond to distinct neural mechanisms feeding a single decisional process leading to behavior, fits best with available neural and behavioral data. In this view, consciousness should not be considered as a top-level executive function but should rather be defined by its experiential properties.

Buyer's remorse or missed opportunity? Differential regrets for material and experiential purchases.

Previous research has established that experiential purchases tend to yield greater enduring satisfaction than material purchases. The present work suggests that this difference in satisfaction is paralleled by a tendency for material and experiential purchases to differ in the types of regrets they elicit. In 5 studies, we find that people's material purchase decisions are more likely to generate regrets of action (buyer's remorse) and their experiential purchase decisions are more likely to lead to regrets of inaction (missed opportunities). These results were not attributable to differences in the desirability of or satisfaction provided by the two purchase types. Demonstrating the robustness of this effect, we found that focusing participants on the material versus experiential properties of the very same purchase was enough to shift its dominant type of regret. This pattern of regret is driven by the tendency for experiences to be seen as more singular--less interchangeable--than material purchases; interchangeable goods tend to yield regrets of action, whereas singular goods tend to yield regrets of inaction.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Aesthetics of Fun

New York's Nature Theater of Oklahoma stages devised work that explores the experiential and aesthetic properties of fun. Their particular presentation of everyday source material resists idealism while irreverently yet sincerely proposing ways of living: attentively, and with pleasure.

The Perspectivity of Feeling

For mainstream analytic philosophy of mind, the explanatory gap between first- and third-person accounts of consciousness derives from the inaccessibility of special, experiential properties of conscious minds. Within this framework, panpsychism is simply the claim that these special properties are everywhere. In contrast, process panpsychism understands the explanatory gap in terms of the particularity of feeling. While the particularity of feeling cannot be captured by third-person accounts, for this very reason it is amenable to understanding consciousness as an evolutionary process. Thus it may turn out that the elusiveness of feeling is essential to its functionality.

The Effect of Interactivity on Initial Interactions: The Influence of Information Seeking Role on Computer-Mediated Interaction

Predictions based on the principle of interactivity regarding the influence of structural affordances (information seeking role, information valence, communication format [study 2 only]) on experiences of interactivity (involvement, mutuality) and interaction outcomes (postinteraction uncertainty, predictions of future relational outcomes) were tested in 2 experimental studies. The overall results indicate that information seeking role and information valence significantly influenced the degree of interactivity experienced and positivity of relational outcomes forecasted. The communication format moderated the effect of information seeking role on uncertainty. Regression analyses indicated that the effect of the structural affordances on initial interaction outcomes was partially mediated by the experiential properties.

The Perspectivity of Feeling

For mainstream analytic philosophy of mind, the explanatory gap between first- and third-person accounts of consciousness derives from the inaccessibility of special, experiential properties of conscious minds. Within this framework, panpsychism is simply the claim that these special properties are everywhere. In contrast, process panpsychism understands the explanatory gap in terms of the particularity of feeling. While the particularity of feeling cannot be captured by third-person accounts, for this very reason it is amenable to understanding consciousness as an evolutionary process. Thus it may turn out that the elusiveness of feeling is essential to its functionality.

Phenomenological and Quantitative Analyses of Absorption in Literary Passages

The phenomenology of reader absorption was investigated using quantitative and qualitative measures. The 12 male and 12 female participants ranged in age between 19 and 53. There were two parts to the study that were counterbalanced across participants. In one part, they read two excerpted literary passages contrasting emotional and descriptive styles of writing and rated them on an 11-item questionnaire. In another part, they were interviewed regarding the general experience of being absorbed in a book and about a specific absorbing text of their choice. Phenomenological analysis of interview data revealed experiential properties (corporeality, sensory perceptions, spatiality, temporality, and agency) and underlying processes (e.g., reader's perspective, attention, familiarity with situation) that shaped the reading activity. Factor analyses of the verbal rating scales and of the frequency tables for properties and processes both contrasted empathetic and sympathetic reading modes. These were also revealed in close (i.e., spontaneous and experiential) and far (i.e., purposeful and inferential) reader orientations which appear to have reflected individual differences in reading styles. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.

A Case where Access Implies Qualia

Block (1995) famously warns against the confusion of ‘access-conscious-ness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. Access consciousness occurs whenthe content of a mental state is poised for the control of rational action, forverbal report and for use in reasoning. Phenomenal consciousness, bycontrast, involves the harder-to-define presence of experiential properties,of there being ‘something it is like’ to see red, to hear a distant bell, and soon. It is the explanation of phenomenal consciousness that constitutes the‘hard problem’ of consciousness highlighted in Chalmers 1996. Block, likeChalmers, believes that many attempted explanations of phenomenalconsciousness are really just explanations of (various forms of) access-consciousness, and that the two notions are conceptually quite distinct(Block 1995: §3, Chalmers 1996: ch. 1). I shall argue, however, that thereis at least one kind of case in which facts about access seem to imply thepresence of full-blown phenomenal consciousness – a kind of case, that is,in which given the facts about access it is impossible to conceive of theabsence of phenomenal consciousness.Consider a system (being, organism, whatever) capable of perceptuallydetecting a variety of differences between stimuli. And suppose also thatthis system can be interrogated about its own acts of perceptual difference-detection. Take a particular incident in which the system detects, for exam-ple, the colour difference between two visually presented stimuli.Interrogated about this act of detection, the system must (I suggest) say oneof two things. It must say