Phenomenal Experience Research Articles

Cognitive Neuroscience and the Hard Problems

This paper argues that the fundamental problem of cognitive neuroscience arises from the neuronal description of the brain and the phenomenal description of the conscious mind. In general philosophers agree that no functional approach can explain phenomenal consciousness; some even think that science is forever unable to explain the qualitative character of our experiences. In order to overcome these challenges, I propose a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the brain according to which brain states are characterized by intrinsic properties, whereas the brain under the causal influence of an organism’s environment acquires extrinsic properties. These extrinsic properties may account for both phenomenal experiences as well as our thoughts about these experiences. At the end I discuss this proposal viability in relation to higher-order theories.

Correction to: Qualitative Attribution, Phenomenal Experience and Being

In the article Qualitative Attribution, Phenomenal Experience and Being, by Mark Pharoah, the following corrections have been made.

“He Who Sees Does Not Desire to Imagine”: The Shifting Role of Art and Aesthetic Observation in Medieval Franciscan Theological Discourse in the Fourteenth Century

In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it. However, in the early fourteenth century, attitudes to concrete sensory/aesthetic experience begin to shift and theologians adopted the model of concrete phenomenal observation of sensory experience. Concrete sensory-aesthetic experience is endowed with a much higher value: seeing something is not the same as imagining it, recalling it, or thinking about it. This new approach results in some heterodox views about our phenomenal experience and debates about the exact status of “intentional” (phenomenal) appearance. These debates lead to profound observations about the nature of aesthetic-sensory experience of art objects and a re-evaluation of the status of the artistic image, which is now seen as much more than the platonic “copy of a copy”. In other words, starting with the fourteenth century, theologians start to pay attention to concrete aesthetic (sensory) experience and use their observations to make conclusions about various cognitive and perceptual issues that could be relevant to a discussion of the divine. That is, quite separately from theoretical theological observations, art and aesthetic experience now provide independent approaches to the divine or spiritual via the experience of aesthetic wonder as a starting point. It is now our concrete experience of sensory and aesthetic objects that starts the train of thought, at times leading to some unorthodox conclusions that contradict the doctrine (such as the skeptical point of view). The intellectual shift in treating sensory and artistic objects in the fourteenth century invites some parallels with the current discussions of the experience of aesthetic wonder in “post-secular” thought.

What Gary Couldn’t Imagine

In this paper, I propose and defend an antiphysicalist argument, namely, the imagination argument, which draws inspiration from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, or rather its misinterpretation by Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland. They interpret the knowledge argument to be about the ability to imagine a novel experience, which Jackson explicitly denies. The imagination argument is the following. Let Q be a visual phenomenal quality that is imaginable based on one’s phenomenal experience. (1) It is not possible to imagine Q solely based on complete physical knowledge. (2) If it is not possible to imagine Q solely based on complete physical knowledge, then physicalism is false. (3) Therefore, physicalism is false. Even though objections have been raised to this argument in the literature, there is, as far as I know, no explicit defense of it. I argue that the imagination argument is more plausible than the knowledge argument in some respects and less plausible in others. All things considered, it is at least as interesting and serious a challenge to physicalism as the knowledge argument is.

Family Caregivers for Cancer Patients

Non formal, especially family caregivers are the most vital support for cancer patients in their healing process. However, caregivers are the least known, informed, and researched of all groups of people surrounding cancer patients. Tenfamily members are individually interviewed on their phenomenal experience in caring for cancer patients. Common themes that emerged from the interviews include financial, socialemotions, and physical challenges. Financial problems rooted from unemployment as caregivers have to spent time looking after their sick family members. Social emotional problems included perception from society on their unemployment and family relationship issues. Caregivers also experienced physical strains as they put aside their well being in caring for others. However, caregivers have their own coping skills which included positive outlook and family support. Understanding of caregivers experiences is important for mental health professionals, medical team attending to the patients, and the public at large. Results of this study suggests further assistance and guidance for caregivers in carrying theirresponsibilities.

Qualitative Attribution, Phenomenal Experience and Being

I argue that the physiological, phenomenal and conceptual constitute a trichotomous hierarchy of emergent categories. I claim that each category employs a distinctive type of interactive mechanism that facilitates a meaningful kind of environmental discourse. I advocate, therefore, that each have a causal relation with the environment but that their specific class of mechanism qualifies distinctively the meaningfulness of that interaction and subsequent responses. Consequently, I argue that the causal chain of physical interaction feeds distinctive value-laden constructions that are ontologically distinct for each category. Within the limitations of the interactive mechanisms of each category, increasingly sophisticated forms tend to evolve. The increase in sophistication in each category inevitably leads to the emergence of the novel mechanism particular to the next in the hierarchy. In essence, there is an emergent hierarchy of evolving categories delineated by the nature of their mechanism of environmental engagement. I argue that biochemical mechanisms have a tendency to evolve meaningfully, specifically in a way that is both qualitatively relevant and responsive to environmental particulars. I explain that these mechanisms set in play an organisational imperative that leads to the emergence of the capacity to evaluate and prioritise qualitative biochemical assimilations which, inevitably, generates a subjectively individuated experience phenomenon. I then relate this to the novel characteristics of the human perspective.

The Natural Philosophy of Experiencing

A new philosophy of nature is urgently needed. The received ontological view, physicalism, is unable to account for experiential phenomena and in particular for consciousness in all its varieties. We shall outline the concept of experiencing which should figure as a new conceptual primitive in natural philosophy. Experiencing refers to a process which comprises the interaction of an agent with its world through action based on phenomenal experience. This process can be viewed under two different aspects. One regards the subjective aspect of experiencing, the other one regards it in terms of physical objects. The first case illustrates the “what-it-is-likeness” of experiencing, the second illustrates how experiencing gets “objectified” in nature. We furthermore wish to delineate our concept of experiencing from the concept of (meta-cognitive) awareness. Scientific theories that explain how awareness comes about in sufficiently organized brains should respect the distinction between experiencing and awareness. We also sketch how experiencing could be related to theoretical biology in terms of information processing by organisms. Experiencing is non-exclusive; it refers to a primitive and a-personal natural process and not to a property possessed only by humans or other persons.

Temporality and metaplasticity. Facing extension and incorporation through material engagement theory

In our everyday life, we have the genuine feeling that when something we use works very well, we forget that we are doing something that is mediated by something else. It happens when we read through our glasses, or when we drive home, or when we play guitar. In all those cases, it can be said that the device becomes an extension of our body, or that we have incorporated it. In this paper I want to discuss the extension/incorporation dichotomy as presented in contemporary cognitive sciences. I will present the state of the art in the debate in order to promote a methodological shift, namely to adopt two concept borrowed from Material Engagement Theory (MET) developed by Lambros Malafouris (2013). By advocating the concepts of temporality and metaplasticity, I will argue for two different but related things: 1) extension and incorporation don’t have to be conceived only spatially, but temporally. This shift leads to two distinctive implications: first, the sooner two entities establish a prosthetic contact, the higher the chances to reach incorporation; second, extension temporally precedes incorporation; the former being an early-staged phenomenon of – a condition of possibility for – the latter. 2) Such a temporal perspective is at the base of metaplasticity, which describes, in the context of MET, the constant, co-constitutive loop between humans and things: metaplasticity deflates the privileged role traditionally attributed to the subject in the making of phenomenal experience. Finally, I will discuss extension and incorporation in media theory, relying on the concept of radical mediation.

Selfless Activity and Experience: Radicalizing Minimal Self-Awareness

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of aspects of themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time.

Enactive or inactive? Cranially envatted dream experience and the extended conscious mind

When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst replicating the experience of being awake, this would be problematic for certain extended conscious mind theories. Focusing specifically on Alva Noë’s enactive view, according to which the vehicles of perceptual experience extend beyond the brain, I argue that dreams are a quandary. Noë’s view is that dreaming is consistent with enactivism because even if dreams are inactive and shut off from the external environment, they are not “full-blown” perceptual consciousness, and also, there is some reason to reject the inactive claim. However, this view rests on an unjustified and reductive account of dreams which is not supported by empirical evidence. Dreams can indeed replicate waking phenomenal experience during inactive periods of sleep, and we have no reason to suspect that dreams which are more inactive are less “full-blown”. Taken together, this shows that dreams are indeed relevant to extended conscious mind theories and need to be taken into account by enactivists.

Action blindsight and antipointing in a hemianopic patient

Blindsight refers to the observation of residual visual abilities in the hemianopic field of patients without a functional V1. Given the within- and between-subject variability in the preserved abilities and the phenomenal experience of blindsight patients, the fine-grained description of the phenomenon is still debated. Here we tested a patient with established “perceptual” and “attentional” blindsight (c.f. Danckert and Rossetti, 2005). Using a pointing paradigm patient MS, who suffers from a complete left homonymous hemianopia, showed clear above chance manual localisation of ‘unseen’ targets. In addition, target presentations in his blind field led MS, on occasion, to spontaneous responses towards his sighted field. Structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted to evaluate the magnitude of V1 damage. Results revealed the presence of a calcarine sulcus in both hemispheres, yet his right V1 is reduced, structurally disconnected and shows no fMRI response to visual stimuli. Thus, visual stimulation of his blind field can lead to “action blindsight” and spontaneous antipointing, in absence of a functional right V1. With respect to the antipointing, we suggest that MS may have registered the stimulation and subsequently presumes it must have been in his intact half field.

Real-time? Reframing temporal consciousness in time-based and interactive media

Abstract The experience of time and temporally extended events is a fundamental property of mind, and of time-based media arts. In dealing with properties of time, does the operational logic of contemporary media production tools cohere with philosophical views on the experience of time? This article considers a range of views on the phenomenal experience of time as they relate to the production of time-based media. Embedded within our production technologies, the artist is faced with a new philosophical instrument: the production timeline. The timeline utility in most time-based media software (and non-digital precursors) adopts the cinematic model as its operating metaphor; a series of frames, assembled one after the other in sequence. But the timeline brings new temporal complications such as reversibility, hierarchy and modifiability. The timeline also contorts time into a spatialized dimension, represented as a linear vector within the software interface. Automatic adoption of the linear timeline and the frame as the base unit of temporal thinking is problematic. J. M. E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time based on contradictions within a range of possible temporal modal logics is compared with approaches to animation and editing software, and also interactive media software and their unique approach to time as potential events is considered.

Introspection of subjective feelings is sensitive and specific.

Conversely to behaviorist ideas, recent studies suggest that introspection can be accurate and reliable. However, an unresolved question is whether people are able to report specific aspects of their phenomenal experience, or whether they report more general nonspecific experiences. To address this question, we investigated the sensitivity and validity of our introspection for different types of conflict. Taking advantage of the congruency sequence effect, we dissociated response conflict while keeping visual conflict unchanged in a Stroop and in a priming task. Participants were subsequently asked to report on either their experience of urge to err or on their feeling of visual conflict. Depending on the focus of the introspection, subjective reports specifically followed either the response conflict or the visual conflict. These results demonstrate that our introspective reports can be sensitive and that we are able to dissociate specific aspects of our phenomenal experiences in a valid manner. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Origin of Morality: Freedom of Will and Morality

The article deals with the specificity of formation of common moral concepts. It is noted that this process involves consciousness, sub-consciousness and intuition. At the same time, intuition brings moral ideas to such an extent of abstraction to which consciousness, due to the selfish interest represented in it, can not bring them. Sub consciousness provides for automatic behavior and, at the same time, completes our ideas to systemic integrity. Moral thinking, awareness of the relationship with others constitute an important aspect of the formation of human consciousness as a whole. The article also deals with the problem of freedom of will and moral responsibility. The author criticizes the views of analytical philosophers who believe that free will is an illusion. It is demonstrated that freedom of will is already included into the mental mechanisms associated with the orientation ability on the basis of ideal images. It arises because the brain works through all possible action situations in a hypothetical reality, the state of which refers to a certain moment in the future. It makes you put yourself in the place of another, and, thus, a primary moral attitude arises. To some extent, higher animals are also capable of this, but a human being can analyze the action situation more deeply, and refer his ideas to a distant future, because the language allows him to overcome immediate emotional reactions to the situation. In resolving the problem of free will, we accept the theory of emergent causation, i.e. the idea that some neural networks can control others, and this allows us to interpret the Ideal on the basis of the Material. The Ideal in this interpretation turns out to represent a sense generated by complex interactions of brain networks. At the same time, the senses generated by the work of the brain take into account the phenomenal experience of the participant, his past emotional reactions to various events of his individual life. This makes it possible to classify events, to separate the important from the unimportant when planning future actions.

On the Varieties of the Nonhuman

On the Varieties of the Nonhuman Todd Hoffman (bio) Review of Ed. Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. xxii + 255 pp. The Nonhuman Turn is a collection of papers originally presented for the Nonhuman Turn Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) in 2012. Among the contributors to the collection are such reputable figures as Brian Massumi, Jane Bennett, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Timothy Morton, Steven Shaviro and Ian Bogost. The purpose of the collection, as Richard Grusin, the editor and director of C21, tells us, is to trace the recent development of "nonhumanist" thought with the hopes for "an intensified concern for the nonhuman that might catalyze a change in our circumstances…in which everyone who wants to participate, human and nonhuman alike, will get their turn" (xxi). Grusin's fine introduction provides a general overview of the nonhuman—which can be defined broadly as a "a decentering [of] the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies" (vii)—including its historical roots, its prominent champions, and its various manifestations across disciplines. In particular, Grusin lays out how various disciplines have come together in their common interest of "argu[ing]…against human exceptionalism" (x). Each, Grusin points out, disputes the poststructuralist emphasis on epistemology and cultural meaning-formation at the expense of ontology and nonhuman agency. While a variety of fields have posed this challenge, Grusin organizes the book into three major categories: affect theory, new media theory and speculative realism (particularly its feminist variant). The result is an excellent demonstration of the diverse and intriguing directions of the nonhuman turn, not only establishing major new ideas and approaches, but also not shying away from the internal debates that have arisen across these disciplines, thereby illustrating the ways in which these fields are imbricated within each other, defining an assemblage of ideas that mutually reinforces the importance of the nonhuman and displays its complexity across disciplines. The first grouping of essays by Massumi, Shaviro, and Erin Manning are elaborations of the nonhuman through affect theory. Massumi, for instance, [End Page 457] offers a characteristically erudite look at the idea of evolutionary becoming, or emergence, as expression. Massumi examines the way an intensification effect is produced through relations of contrast. By considering imprinting in the herring gull, Massumi describes the way a proximity of differences yields a flexible "transformational movement naturally pushing animal experience to artificially exceed its normal bounds" (4). He calls this "plasticity of natural limits," supernormal: that is, a kind of improvisational stretching of behavioral response and interaction upon an accident-rich environment. Supernormality shows the affective propulsion that forces emergent evolution and behavior. In other words, there is an inducement of an effect and not an automatic response: "[Instinct] answers external constraint with creative self-variation, pushing beyond the bounds of common measure" (9). Massumi ends by noting that supernormality occurs within the human animal, but, in our arrogance, we call it culture and not nature. But, he concludes, it is through our immanent excess of animality that humans become more themselves. Where Massumi emphasizes the neutral operation of emergent instinctual behaviors through supernormality, Steven Shaviro considers the merits of panpsychism, the view that all things, whether conscious or not, possess mentality or "a certain degree of sentience, cognition, decision making, and will" (22). Panpsychism insists that substances value themselves and don't merely acquire value by virtue of human bestowal. They exhibit not only persistence through time, but operate through choice and desire in their becoming-other and self-transformation. "Panpsychism," he says, "is the necessary consequence of respecting the self-evidence of phenomenal experience, without trying either to hypostasize it or to extirpate it" (Shaviro's italics) (34). If, he concludes, it is true that humans are inwardly isolated, while outwardly capable of establishing enlivening relations, it is no less true of all entities, demonstrating a non-anthropocentric field of value in things themselves. These essays give way to those loosely representing the field of new media studies. Bogost, Mark B.N...

Knowledge about our experience and distinguishing between possibilities

In my article I reconstruct the main threads of Robert Stalnaker’s book Our Knowledge of the Internal World, which focuses on the problem of our epistemic relation to our experience and the relation between experience and knowledge. First, the book proposes an interesting view of externalism, which combines classical externalist claims with a contextualist approach to content ascriptions. The approach accommodates some important internalist intuitions by showing how content ascriptions can be sensitive to the perspective from which a subject perceives the world. Second, Stalnaker proposes a theory of self-locating and phenomenal knowledge, which should be understood in terms of differentiating between real possibilities. The puzzling upshot of this elegant solution is that it commits one to the existence of possibilities accessible only from the first-person perspective. Finally, Stalnaker presents an argument which shows that our knowledge about our phenomenal experience is no more direct than the knowledge about external objects. Stalnaker’s claim that by merely having an experience we don’t learn any new information seems, however, too strict in light of his contextualist approach to content ascriptions.

The Consciousness of Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the Brain

Tony Chemero advances the radical thesis that cognition and consciousness are actually the same thing. I question this conclusion. Even if we are the brain–body environmental synergies that Chemero and others claim, we will not be able to conclude that consciousness is just cognition because this view actually expands cognition beyond being the sort of natural kind upon which to hook phenomenal experience. Identifying consciousness with cognition either means consciousness exists at multiple levels of organization in the universe, or more work needs to be done to delineate conscious cognition from other synergies. Still, while radical embodied cognition does not solve any of the hard problems associated with consciousness, this perspective allows useful insights concerning phenomenal experience. Moreover, recent neuropsychological research in action selection and projection can help us refine notions of consciousness from this embodied perspective.

A Study or Analysis of the Phenomenal Experiences with Human Book - Focusing on the Human Book Program at the Geonggi Provincial Office of Education -

A Study or Analysis of the Phenomenal Experiences with Human Book - Focusing on the Human Book Program at the Geonggi Provincial Office of Education -

Different Electrophysiological Correlates of Visual Awareness for Detection and Identification.

Detecting the presence of an object is a different process than identifying the object as a particular object. This difference has not been taken into account in designing experiments on the neural correlates of consciousness. We compared the electrophysiological correlates of conscious detection and identification directly by measuring ERPs while participants performed either a task only requiring the conscious detection of the stimulus or a higher-level task requiring its conscious identification. Behavioral results showed that, even if the stimulus was consciously detected, it was not necessarily identified. A posterior electrophysiological signature 200-300 msec after stimulus onset was sensitive for conscious detection but not for conscious identification, which correlated with a later widespread activity. Thus, we found behavioral and neural evidence for elementary visual experiences, which are not yet enriched with higher-level knowledge. The search for the mechanisms of consciousness should focus on the early elementary phenomenal experiences to avoid the confounding effects of higher-level processes.

Predictive brains, dreaming selves, sleeping bodies: how the analysis of dream movement can inform a theory of self- and world-simulation in dreams

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between bodily experiences in dreams and the sleeping, physical body. I question the popular view that dreaming is a naturally and frequently occurring real-world example of cranial envatment. This view states that dreams are functionally disembodied states: in a majority of dreams, phenomenal experience, including the phenomenology of embodied selfhood, unfolds completely independently of external and peripheral stimuli and outward movement. I advance an alternative and more empirically plausible view of dreams as weakly phenomenally-functionally embodied states. The view predicts that bodily experiences in dreams can be placed on a continuum with bodily illusions in wakefulness. It also acknowledges that there is a high degree of variation across dreams and different sleep stages in the degree of causal coupling between dream imagery, sensory input, and outward motor activity. Furthermore, I use the example of movement sensations in dreams and their relation to outward muscular activity to develop a predictive processing account. I propose that movement sensations in dreams are associated with a basic and developmentally early kind of bodily self-sampling. This account, which affords a central role to active inference, can then be broadened to explain other aspects of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Dreams are world-simulations centered on the self, and important aspects of both self- and world-simulation in dreams are closely linked to bodily self-sampling, including muscular activity, illusory own-body perception, and vestibular orienting in sleep. This is consistent with cognitive accounts of dream generation, in which long-term beliefs and expectations, as well as waking concerns and memories play an important role. What I add to this picture is an emphasis on the real-body basis of dream imagery. This offers a novel perspective on the formation of dream imagery and suggests new lines of research.