View Of Consciousness Research Articles

Integrating Neuroscience and Phenomenology in the Study of Consciousness

AbstractPhenomenology and physiology become commensurable through a self-organizational physiology and an "enactive" view of consciousness. Self-organizing processes appropriate and replace their own needed substrata, rather than merely being caused by interacting components. Biochemists apply this notion to the living/nonliving distinction. An enactive approach sees consciousness as actively executed by an agent rather than passively reacting to stimuli. Perception does not result from mere stimulation of brain areas by sensory impulses; unless motivated organismic purposes first anticipate and "look for" emotionally relevant .stimuli, brain-sensory processing is not accompanied by perceptual consciousness. To see a soccer ball requires looking for it in the right place. The sell-organizing, emotionally motivated agent instigates this looking-for activity.

Discoveries in the human brain: neuroscience prehistory, brain structure, and function

I. Introduction: The Basic Postulates. Nature of the Continuum. Charles Darwin. Galen of Pergamum. Overview of the Base. II. Evolution of the Mammalian Brain. Phylogeny Leads the Way. Otogeny 'Recapitulates'. Paleoneurology Is Introduced. Early Evidence of Handedness. Modern Theories of Evolutionary Neurology. Overview of Early Humans. III. The Ventricles and Their Functions. Ancient and Early Modern Beliefs. The Cerebrospinal Fluid. Two 'Barrier' Systems: The Blood-Brain Barrier. Quantitative Physiologic Data. Overview of Ventricular 'Cells'. IV. Surface Contours: Order or Chaos? The Convolutions or Gyri. The Fissures or Sulci. Overview of the 'Coils'. V. Lobes and Functional Localization. Frontal Lobe Pathology and Speech: Observations. Frontal Lobe Stimulation: Experiments. Frontal Lobe: Experiments by Ablation. The Parietal Lobes and Evoked Potentials. The Temporal Lobes. Occipital Lobes and Vision. Overview of the Cortical Hemispheres. VI. Cerebral Asymmetry and Behavioral Laterality. Hemispheric Differences. Handedness and Speech and Other Asymmetries. Growth of Knowledge of the Corpus Callosum. Overview of Cerebral Differences. VII. The Anatomic Substrate: Cerebral Fine Structure. Connectedness of Cell Body and Fiber. Cellular Elements. The Independent Neuron. Multiple Approaches to the Substrates of Vision. Nonneuronal Cells of the Cerebrum. Overview of Neural Fine Structure. VIII. Landmarks in Cerebral Neurochemistry. The Early Chemists. Animal Electricity. Tissue Excitability. Chemical Transmission. Vascularity of the Brain. Overview of Neurochemical Discoveries. IX. The Cerebellum. Ancient Views and Early Experiments. The Ridiculous and the Sublime. Insights from Phylogeny and Embryology. Cerebellar Mapping. Inhibitory Influence of the Cerebellum. From Old to New Techniques. Overview of the 'Little Brain'. X. Thalamocortical Pathways and Consciousness. In Early History. Modern Views of Consciousness. Thalamic Functions and Efferent Connections. The Diffuse Projections. Overview of Some Thalamic Projections. XI. The Pituitary-Hypothalamic Axis. Pituitary Posterior Lobe: The Neurohypophysis. Pituitary Anterior Lobe: The Adenohypophysis. The Hypothalamus. Overview of the Axix. XII. Three Major Integrative Systems. The Limbic System and Memory. Corticothalamic Connections and Cybernetics. The Brain-Stem Reticular Formation and Arousal. Overview of the Three Major Integrators. Postscript. References. Credits. Index.

Conceptual Competence and Inadequate Conceptions

In his stimulating paper, Professor Higginbotham argues for a threefold distinction between (i) having a concept, (ii) having a (possibly tacit) conception involving that concept, and (iii) having a conscious view involving that concept. This threefold distinction in the theory of concepts is supposed to mirror a parallel threefold distinction in semantics between (i) having a word in one's lexicon and being able to use it with its meaning; (ii) knowing the meaning of the word; and (iii) having a conscious view of the meaning of the word. In my brief remarks, I will concentrate on one of the distinctions recommended by Jim: I will restrict myself to the distinction between having a concept and having a (possibly tacit) conception involving that concept at the expense of the distinction between either having a concept or having an adequate conception and having a conscious view. As I understand it, Jim's distinction between having a concept and having an adequate conception involving that concept can serve what seem prima facie to be two quite different projects: one is to account for the possibility of partial or incomplete mastery of a concept; the other is to try to reconcile a non-epistemic account of concept individuation or concept possession with an account of

The Concept-Conception Distinction

1. Higginbotham1 argues in favour of a threefold distinction between possessing a concept, having a conception of the concept and having a conscious view of it. But in speaking of having a conception, one must take care to distinguish having a conception of a concept from having a conception associated with the concept which one takes to be analytic to or constitutive of that concept. In terms of Fodor's account of concepts: one thing is to have a conception of a mental representation M which is a concept and has as its content the property P, and another to have a conception of P which one takes to be analytic to or constitutive of the concept M.2 In speaking of conceptions, I take Higginbotham to be meaning something like the latter. Similarly, in speaking of a view I take him to mean a view of P, not of the concept M or of a tacit conception of P. As I see it, the distinction between a view and what he calls 'a conception' is

FREUD'S CONSULTING ROOM ARCHAEOLOGY AND VICO'S PRINCIPLES OF HUMANITY: A COMMUNICATION

ABSTRACT Giambattista Vico (1668‐1744) and Freud both claim to have discovered a‘new science’of the human. This essay considers some intellectual connections between their two views of man, consciousness and history. Both Vico and Freud find burial and origin to be keys to an understanding of the psyche and culture. Although some attention has been given to a connection between these two thinkers, this is the first time the fundamentals of their views have been explored in philosophical terms.

Feminist Consciousness: Perspectives on Women's Experience

Research on feminist consciousness has often relied on feminist self-identification as an indicator of women's group consciousness. In this study, several measures of group consciousness including group evaluations, political beliefs about gender relations, and sensitivity to sexism were used to predict women's self-identification as feminist. This set of variables was also used to predict four stages of feminist identity: passive acceptance, revelation, embeddedness/emanation, and synthesis. Findings emphasize the importance of not relying simply on self-identification in research on feminist consciousness. A view of feminist consciousness that goes beyond a dichotomous approach is recommended, as is further work on assessments of the phenomenology of consciousness.

Consciousness, culture and curriculum

Contemporary views of human consciousness illuminate many aspects of music education. In this paper the cultural nature of consciousness is linked to issues of music curriculum development, multiculturalism, and musical values. In doing so, the claims made by David Aspin in the International Journal of Music Education, 27, 1996 are also engaged.

Rethinking Conscientisation

Paulo Freire's concept of conscientisation has been the subject of considerable debate since the early 1970s. The interpretation of conscientisation as a process of ‘consciousness raising’, whereby individuals move through a sequence of distinct stages, is widespread. This article critiques the ‘stages’ model and advances an alternative perspective on conscientisation. Rejecting an individualist view of critical consciousness, the author concentrates on the link between conscientisation and praxis, and reassesses Freire's ideal in light of the postmodernist notion of multiple subjectivities.

Learning as a Prosaic Act

The role of discourse as a social semiotic mediator of knowledge construction has in recent years become an important topic in the fields of psychology and education. Along with the writings of L.S. Vygotsky on relations between thinking and speech, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has become critical to current theorizing about the mediational role of social discourses. Bakhtin's writings on the discourse of the novel have become particularly important, in that they provide a framework for understanding how social discourses are constitutive of individual consciousness. In this paper, although I acknowledge the importance of Bakhtin' s writings on novelistic discourse for studies of social semiotic knowledge construction, I suggest that Bakhtin' s work has even wider implications for studies of learning. Drawing in particular from Bakhtin's early writings on the conscious self, I argue that 'dotted lines' drawn from his writings to contemporary studies of learning would entail a theoretical focus on acting/thinking/feeling persons in relationship, engaged in prosaic acts reflective of distinctions of value. I suggest that it is through considering Bakhtin' s work in its breadth that educators and psychologists can gain the unique view of human consciousness entailed by his theories of discourse and the self. My theoretical arguments are illustrated through reference to my current research on relations between children's classroom learning and their development as biographical persons.

How Things Change: The History of Sociotechnical Structures

How Things Change: The History of Sociotechnical Structures

Ray Jackendoff's phenomenology of language as a refutation of the 'appendage' theory of consciousness

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes.

Consciousness

A brief review of some current views of consciousness is provided. Edelman's view of there being both ‘primary consciousness’ and ‘higher order consciousness’ is supported. The basis for the clinical view that primary consciousness is the result of the dynamic interaction between the cerebral cortex and the brainstem reticular activating system is presented. It is suggested that an audacious theoretical breakthrough is needed in order to advance our understanding of this complex and fascinating problem.

Toward an understanding of energetic healing, Part 2: Energetic processes.

The purposes of the article are to discuss the role of consciousness and quantum processes in energetic healing and to present the author's theory of energetic healing. Two opposing views of consciousness are reviewed: consciousness as emerging from material processes and consciousness as primary. Three quantum physics' theories are discussed: potentiality/actuality, observer-created reality, and consciousness-created reality. Psychosynthesis is offered as a model for the dimensions of a psyche that could be involved in consciousness-created reality and in energetic healing. A theory of energetic healing is outlined and applied to holistic nursing.

Welcome to Wales: Searle on the Computational Theory of Mind

In a recent book devoted to giving an overview of cognitive science, Justin Lieber writes:…dazzingly complex computational processes achieve our visual and linguistic understanding, but apart from a few levels of representation these are as little open to our conscious view as the multitudinous rhythm of blood flow through the countless vessels of our brain.It is the aim of hundreds of workers in the allied fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence to unmask these computation processes and install them in digital computers.

心と意識に関する世界観 (<特集gt心のメカ : 人と機械をつなぐ新パラダイム)

心と意識に関する世界観 (<特集gt心のメカ : 人と機械をつなぐ新パラダイム)

The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, it thinks, just as we say, it rains? In late nineteenth century a number of emerged that began to divorce consciousness from notion of a personal They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's as continuous with yesterday's. If American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a real and verifiable personal identity which we feel, his Austrian counterpart, empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded view that the self is unsalvageable. The Vanishing Subject is first comprehensive study of impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether. Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in context of psychologies without self. Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and critics: The Vanishing Subject radically revises way we see them.

The Spark of Conscience: Bonaventure's View of Conscience and Synderesis

O. Lottin's monumental study, Psychologie et morale aux Xlle et XlIIe siecles , first published in 1948, summarized the history of medieval discussions of conscience up to the end of the thirteenth century.1 Regrettably, his work did not generate extensive discussions about the natures and roles of synderesis and conscience. More recently, Timothy Potts attributes this lack of impact to Lottin's failure to write in terms that are easily accessible, psychologically, to contemporary philosophers who are intellectual heirs of Hume, Kant and, now, of Frege.2 Yet, Potts's own work has also failed to spark the interest he clearly hoped it would.3 While this failure may be explained in part by the general neglect of the topic of conscience in recent times, it is probably due more to Potts's own focus in his work. His emphasis on what Philip the Chancellor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas thought about necessary deontic propositions tends to obscure, for example, many of Bonaventure's valuable comments about both synderesis and conscience.4 In this essay, I hope to indicate some of the intriguing features of Bonaventure's analysis: his placing of synderesis in the will, his mixing of the cognitive and affective orders, his view that synderesis controls conscience.

Introduction to Jessie Taft, “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness”

This essay introduces Jessie Taft's pragmatist feminist dissertation, which was written under the guidance of George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago in 1913 and published in 1915. It gives a brief biography of Taft and summarizes the four chapters of her dissertation, the second of which is reprinted below.

The Woman Movement As Part of the Larger Social Situation

This piece is Chapter Two of Jessie Taft's 1913 doctoral dissertation The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.

Time, Intentionality, and a Neurophenomenology of the Dot

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, I wish to correct a systematic bias in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. This bias is in favor of intuition of essences of meaning and against the intuition of essences of sensation. This bias is explained as a product of Husserl's mind‐body dualism. Second, I suggest the possibility of a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural point of view. This neurophenomenology merges the knowledge of essences derived from mature contemplation with knowledge of the structures of experience derived from neuroanthropology. After addressing these two issues I proceed to describe the sensorium from a neurophenomenological perspective, and the constituent element of perception, the dot. I hypothesize fat experience arises in the dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, that experience is constituted within a field of sensorial dots that arise and dissolve in temporal frames. I conclude that Husserl's view of the phenomenology of time is essentially correct and is both in keeping with findings from current neurophysiology, and amenable to a modem scientific view of consciousness and to many of the religious traditions encountered by ethnographers. The implications of a neurophenomenology for the anthropological study of consciousness are suggested.