Online research in philosophy

It is argued that experiences are complex events that befall their subjects. Each experience has a single subject and depends on the state or the event that it is of. The constituents of an experience are (or underlie) its subject, its grounding event or state, and everything that the subject is aware of during that time that's relevant to the telling of the story of how it was to participate in that event or be put in that state. The experience (...) occurs where the person having the experience is. An experience of an event or state occurs when that event or state makes a difference to its possessor's conscious life, where this difference is either a matter of really knowing what's happening or merely a matter of being affected. (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusional beliefs are based on unusual experiences of various kinds. For example, it is argued that the Capgras delusion (the belief that a known person has been replaced by an impostor) is triggered by an abnormal affective experience in response to seeing a known person; loss of the affective response to a familiar person’s face may lead to the belief that the person has been replaced by an impostor (Ellis & Young, 1990). (...) Similarly, the Cotard delusion (which involves the belief that one is dead or unreal in some way) may stem from a general.. (shrink)

If the universe is a machine, consciousness is not possible. If the universe is more than a machine, then physics is incomplete. Since we are both part of the universe and conscious, physics must be incomplete and the understanding required to construct conscious mechanisms must be sought through the advancement of physics not the continued application of inadequate concepts. In this paper I will show that an impediment to this advancement is the confusion arising through the use of terms such (...) as 'physical reality' to refer to an absolute a priori Kantian 'Ding an Sich' when they should both be recognized as referring to data structures holding the knowledge upon which we act and nothing more. Once this confusion has been clarified, I will go on to suggest that the cycle of activity updating physical reality becomes a candidate for a conscious process. I will show how implementing algorithms in modern computers can mimic this process but if actual consciousness is to be achieved the update activity must correspond to a cycle in time. Such cycles have been identified with Whitehead's 'actual occasions' and thus I will argue that fundamental events should replace fundamental particles as the building blocks of the universe if consciousness is to be explained. (shrink)

Throughout history there have been people who say it is all illusion. I think they may be right. But if they are right what could this mean? If you just say "It's all an illusion" this gets you nowhere - except that a whole lot of other questions appear. Why should we all be victims of an illusion, instead of seeing things the way they really are? What sort of illusion is it anyway? Why is it like that and not (...) some other way? Is it possible to see through the illusion? And if so what happens next. (shrink)

This is a brief and accessible English summary of the "Self-model Theory of Subjectivity" (SMT), which is only available as German book in this archive. It introduces two new theoretical entities, the "phenomenal self-model" (PSM) and the "phenomenal model of the intentionality-relation" PMIR. A representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person persepctive is offered. This is a revised version, including two pictures.

This paper explores the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and critiques it from a phenomenlogical perspective, especially Sartre and Heidegger, with a view to conceptualizing the unconscious from an ontological rather than psychological mindset.

This paper explores the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and critiques it from a phenomenlogical perspective, especially Sartre and Heidegger, with a view to conceptualizing the unconscious from an ontological rather than psychological mindset.

This paper takes an evolutionary approach to what we are, namely autopoietic systems with a first person perspective on our surroundings and ourselves. This in contrast with Thomas Metzinger.

In the latter part of this two-article sequence, the concept of emotion as reorganization of the organism-environment system is developed further in relation to consciousness, subjective experience and brain activity. It is argued that conscious emotions have their origin in reorganizational changes in primitive co-operative organizations, in which they get a more local character with the advent of personal consciousness and individuality, being expressed in conscious emotions. However, the conscious emotion is not confined to the individual only, but it gets (...) its content and the emotional quale in the social context, and in relation to the norms of the given culture. Emotion is fundamentally the process of ascription of meaning to the parts of the world which are relevant in the achievement of results of behavior. Although emotions may be studied as reorganizational processes in the organism-environment system with the help of physiological recordings and behavioral observations, it is argued — in contrast to the mainstream cognitive science — that emotions cannot be localized in the brain, although the brain is important in their generation as a part of the organism-environment system. It is suggested that the parts of the brain most closely related to emotional expression contain neurons subserving functional systems which are formed in early development, and which are therefore most intimately related to reorganizational processes in the organism-environment system. (shrink)

That consciousness is composed of simple or basic elements that combine to form complex experiences is an idea with a long history. This idea is approached through an examination of our “picture” or conception of consciousness (CC). It is argued that CC commits us to a certain abstract notion of simple experiential events, or simples, and that traditional critiques of simple elements of experience do not threaten simples. To the extent that CC is taken to conform to how consciousness really (...) is, therefore, the concept of simples must be treated in kind. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that our conception of phenomenal consciousness commits us to simple phenomenal experiences that in some sense constitute our complex experiences. In this paper I argue that the temporal boundaries of simple phenomenal experiences cannot be conceived as fuzzy or vague, but must be conceived as instantaneous or maximally sharp. The argument is based on an account of what is involved in conceiving fuzzy temporally boundaries for events generally. If the argument is right, and our conception of (...) phenomenal consciousness is assumed to reflect the facts about consciousness, then since the temporal boundaries of neurophysiological events can be conceived as fuzzy, considerable pressure can be applied to neurophysiological identity theories, as well as to dualist accounts that posit temporal correspondence with neurophysiological events. (shrink)

The paper develops an objection to the extensional model of time consciousness—the view that temporally extended events or processes, and their temporal properties, can be directly perceived as such. Importantly, following James, advocates of the extensional model typically insist that whole experiences of temporal relations between non-simultaneous events are distinct from mere successions of their temporal parts. This means, presumably, that there ought to be some feature(s) differentiating the former from the latter. I try to show why the extensional models (...) offers no credible ground for positing such a difference. (shrink)

Twenty-nine environmental activists (mean age, 49.8) responded in writing to questions on influences that gave rise to environmental ethics in their own lives. Answers represented all phases of the lifespan. Through a qualitative analysis, six principle themes emerged: (a) deep environmental concern and an affiliation with nature often began in early childhood; (b) a combination of intellectual or academic and direct experiences with nature contributed to the development of environmental ethics; (c) familial and extra familial models were influential; (d) for (...) some, environmental ethics was tied to spiritual, cultural, or religious feeling; (e) the development of environmental ethics was linked with identity and generativity issues; and (f) historical events interacted with individual development in the formation of an environmental ethics. These themes are discussed in terms of continuities and discontinuities in lifespan development, the role of the family and of history, and the relation between reason and emotion in the development of an environmental ethics. (shrink)

Velmans’ paper raises three problems concerning mental causation: (1) How can consciousness affect the physical, given that the physical world appears causally closed? 10 (2) How can one be in conscious control of processes of which one is not consciously aware? (3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate. In an appendix Velmans gives his reasons for refusing to resolve these problems through adopting the position (which he labels ‘physicalism’) (...) that ‘consciousness is nothing more than a state of the brain’. The rest of the paper, then, is an attempt to solve these problems without embracing a reductionist physicalism. Velmans’ solution to the first problem is ‘ontological monism combined with epistemological dualism’: First-person and third-person accounts are two different ways of knowing the same facts. This kind of reply is not new; it is, for example, a twist on the position expressed in Davidson (1970). True, there are substantial differences: For one, Davidson reconciles the tension between descriptions of events in mentalistic and physicalist language, not between firstand third-person descriptions of states; for another, Davidson actually provides an argument for his position, although to do so he assumes that there are no psycho-physical (or indeed, psycho-psycho) laws, something which I suspect Velmans would be reluctant to do. Nevertheless, they have in common the idea that the causal efficacy of the mental is not at odds with the causal closure of physics, since a mind-involving causal story is just another way of talking about the same facts that a purely physical causal story talks about. This ‘dual-aspect’ approach is a popular tactic for resolving the mind–body problem, but it has some well-known problems, and it is unfortunate Velmans doesn’t reply to these standard objections. For example, a frequently discussed issue in connection with theories of mental causation is the problem of overdetermination (see, e.g., Unger, 1977; Peacocke, 1979).. (shrink)

Se mencionan hechos importantes y transformaciones ocurridas en el Ministerio de Salud Pública, la Educación Superior desde el siglo XX, y la Colaboración Internacional de Cuba después del triunfo de la Revolución. Se relata la experiencia docente durante 7 años de profesoras especialistas en Ortodoncia, quienes representaron la Facultad de Estomatología de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas "Carlos J. Finlay" de Camagüey, en la Universidad de Saná en la República de Yemen. El reconocimiento por parte de estudiantes, profesores y evaluadores (...) externos de otras universidades del mundo árabe, sobre la calidad de programas de la especialidad, introducción de formas de organización docentes y la metodología en las evaluaciones frecuentes es una muestra de la utilidad de la colaboración docente cubana en países hermanos. Important events and changes that occurred within the Public Health Ministry, the Higher Education from the 20th century, and the International Collaboration of Cuba after the Triumph of the Revolution are mentioned. The objective of the work is to expose the teaching experiences during the teaching of the undergraduate degree in Stomatology and contribution provided by two medical teachers from the Medical University "Carlos J. Finlay" of Camagüey in Sana'a University, Republic of Yemen during the international collaboration for 7 years. Recognition by students, faculty and external evaluators of other universities in the Arab world on the equality of programs of specialty, introduction of Teaching Organization Forms and the methodology in the frequent evaluations is an example of the usefulness of the Cuban educational collaboration in neighboring countries. (shrink)

Several theories claim that dreaming is a random by-product of REM sleep physiology and that it does not serve any natural function. Phenomenal dream content, however, is not as disorganized as such views imply. The form and content of dreams is not random but organized and selective: during dreaming, the brain constructs a complex model of the world in which certain types of elements, when compared to waking life, are underrepresented whereas others are over represented. Furthermore, dream content is consistently (...) and powerfully modulated by certain types of waking experiences. On the basis of this evidence, I put forward the hypothesis that the biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance. To evaluate this hypothesis, we need to consider the original evolutionary context of dreaming and the possible traces it has left in the dream content of the present human population. In the ancestral environment human life was short and full of threats. Any behavioral advantage in dealing with highly dangerous events would have increased the probability of reproductive success. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills. Empirical evidence from normative dream content, children's dreams, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post traumatic dreams, and the dreams of hunter-gatherers indicates that our dream-production mechanisms are in fact specialized in the simulation of threatening events, and thus provides support to the threat simulation hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Key Words: dream content; dream function; evolution of consciousness; evolutionary psychology; fear; implicit learning; nightmares; rehearsal; REM; sleep; threat perception. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world.. (shrink)

The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of thought. Under (...) the heading of ‘thought’ we can include many different kinds of mental apprehension of an object—including relatively temporary episodes of contemplating or scrutinising, as well as persisting states like beliefs and hopes which are not similarly episodic in character. These are all ways of thinking about an object. But even construing ‘thought’ in this broad way, it is clear that not all mental states and events are thoughts: sensations, emotions and perceptual experiences are not thoughts, but they are also paradigmatically mental. Do these mental states and events have objects too? Or are there mental states and events which have no objects? 1 The view that all mental phenomena have objects is sometimes called ‘Brentano’s thesis’ or the thesis that intentionality is the ‘mark’ of the mental.1 Sometimes the name ‘Brentano’s thesis’ is given to certain other views too: for example, to the view that only mental phenomena are intentional, or that all and only mental phenomena are intentional, or that nothing physical is intentional. These views are, however, distinct from the view that all mental phenomena are intentional. For holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply that nothing nonmental is.2 And holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply (pace Dennett 1969) that nothing physical is intentional; since if physicalism were true, then the mental itself would be physical. What I am concerned with here, however, is the idea that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether anything else is, or whether anything physical is. In recent years there has been considerable debate over whether all mental states are intentional; in particular, over whether all conscious mental states are intentional or entirely intentional. (shrink)

Contra Derek Parfit’s psychological continuity theory, I argue for an externalist conception of what matters in the survival of persons over time. Specifically, I claim that what matters in the survival of persons is the continuation of what I call their “life trajectories.” This condition on the quasi-continuation of the diachronic identity of persons comes from considering the implications of what certain kinds of cases of “complete virtual immersion”-- the immersion of a psychological subject in a completely virtual world, a (...) world in which experiences are de-correlated with events in the objective world. This hypothesis results in some fairly strong conditions on the synchronic identity of persons, conditions that demonstrate that psychological continuity over time is insufficient for having what matters in survival. Of course, the idea that externalist constraints are important in a complete account of what is metaphysically necessary for maintaining persons and what matters in their survival is not new, but I propose my own specific theory about how to understand these constraints. What’s more, I explain in detail why incorporating externalist constraints in an account of what matters in survival proves to rule out fission as a case in which we have what matters equally as much as we do in single case, and unlike the traditional way of rejecting these cases, I do so without requiring a commitment to an identity theory of what matters. The view I offer can also explain our reactions to different virtual immersion scenarios. Therefore, simply on explanatory grounds alone, my view is to be preferred over pure psychological continuity theories. (shrink)

We all know what it is like to have these sorts of experiences. Reflection on the qualitative character of such experiences suggests that events occurring now have a characteristic property of nowness, responsible for a certain special “feel,” and that events pass from the future, to the present, and then into the past. The question I want to explore is whether we should take this suggestion to support an antireductionist ontology of time, that is, whether we should take it to (...) support an ontology that includes a primitive, monadic property of nowness responsible for the special feel of events in the present, and a relation of passage that events instantiate in virtue of literally passing from the future, to the present, and then into the past. It will be important in what follows to avoid prejudging whether the world actually does include nowness and passage, so I’ll use the locution “as of” instead of just “of” when I want to signal that descriptions like “experience as of passage” merely describe experiences with a certain qualitative character. It should be obvious that we need to take temporal experience seriously: experiences as of nowness and as of the passage of events are central to our subjective perspective. In some deep but hard to define way, our temporal experience is caught up with our sense of being, i.e., our sense of what we are and how we are. (Heidegger engages this idea in his Being.. (shrink)

Strong or Pure Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of any perceptual experience can be exhaustively characterized solely by reference to its Intentional content. Strong or Pure Anti-Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of any perceptual experience can be exhaustively characterized solely by reference to its non-Intentional properties. In Chapters One and Two, I consider how best to delineate the opposition between these positions. I reject various characterizations of the distinction, in particular, that it can be (...) captured in modal terms. Pure Intentionalist and Pure Anti-Intentionalist accounts can in fact share a modal profile. The most fundamental way of distinguishing Intentionalism from Anti-Intentionalism is in terms of the Intentionalist claim that experiences have contents with truth or satisfaction conditions. Characterized in this way, Intentionalism is committed to the claim that perceptual experience exhibits a certain kind of generality in that perceptual experiences essentially present their objects as being certain general ways. In contrast, the anti-Intentionalist denies that talk of seeing objects as certain kinds of object or as particular objects of those kinds provides a characterization of any aspect of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Anti-Intentionalist theories must, therefore, account for phenomenal character wholly in terms of particularist properties. In Chapters Three and Four, I argue that neither of these pure views of experience can do justice to the phenomenology of our ordinary perceptual encounters with the world. In Chapter Three, I contend that Pure Anti- Intentionalism, at least in the form of Bill Brewer’s Object View, fails to provide a satisfactory account of the phenomenology of aspect shifts and continuous aspect perception. Furthermore, I argue that the Object View’s accounts of perceptual illusion are ill-motivated and fundamentally unsatisfactory. In Chapter Four, I argue that Pure Intentionalism is inconsistent with the phenomenologically evident fact that experiences are durational events which unfold over time. Accordingly, the assumption that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience must be wholly characterized in terms of one kind of property, be it Intentionalist or non-Intentionalist, should be rejected. Any plausible theory of experience must appeal to different kinds of phenomenal property. In Chapter Five, I defend a view which does just this: the Catholic View of experience. The Catholic View claims that the phenomenal character of any mature human experience must be characterized in terms of both particularist and Intentional properties. I conclude by showing how this account avoids the most serious criticisms that have been levelled against the idea of non-representational, or ‘given’ elements in experience. (shrink)

There are both externalist and internalist theories of the phenomenal content of conscious experiences. Externalists like Dretske and Tye treat the phenomenal content of conscious states as representations of external properties (and events). Internalists think that phenomenal conscious states are reducible to electrochemical states of the brain in the style of the type-type identity theory. In this paper, we side with the representationalists and visit a dispute between them over the test case of Swampman. Does Swampman have conscious phenomenal (...) states or not? Dretske and Tye disagree on this issue. We try to settle the dispute in favor of Dretske's theory (to our own surprise). (shrink)

Two aspects of consciousness are first considered: consciousness as awareness (phenomenological meaning) and consciousness as strategic control (functional meaning). As to awareness, three types can be distinguished: first, awareness as the phenomenal experiences of objects and events; second, awareness as meta-awareness, i.e., the awareness of mental life itself; third, awareness as self-awareness, i.e., the awareness of being oneself. While phenomenal experience and self-awareness are usually present during dreaming (even if many modifications are possible), meta-awareness is usually absent (apart from some (...) particular experiences of self-reflectiveness) with the major exception of lucid dreaming. Consciousness as strategic control may also be present in dreams. The functioning of consciousness is then analyzed, following a cognitive model of dream production. In such a model, the dream is supposed to be the product of the interaction of three components: (a) the bottom-up activation of mnemonic elements coming from LTM systems, (b) interpretative and elaborative top-down processes, and (c) monitoring of phenomenal experience. A feedback circulation is activated among the components, where the top-down interpretative organization and the conscious monitoring of the oneiric scene elicitates other mnemonic contents, according to the requirements of the dream plot. This dream productive activity is submitted to unconscious and conscious processes. (shrink)

Many of the most popular genres of narrative art are designed to elicit negative emotions: emotions that are experienced as painful or involving some degree of pain, which we generally avoid in our daily lives. Melodramas make us cry. Tragedies bring forth pity and fear. Conspiratorial thrillers arouse feelings of hopelessness and dread, and devotional religious art can make the believer weep in sorrow. Not only do audiences know what these artworks are supposed to do; they seek them out in (...) pursuit of prima facie painful reactions.Traditionally, the question of why people seek out such experiences of painful art has been presented as the paradox of tragedy. Most solutions to the paradox of tragedy assume that the reason we seek out tragedies, horror films, melodramas, and the like is because they afford pleasureful experiences. From there, theorists attempt to account for the source of this pleasure, a pleasure assumed to be had from representations of events from which we do not derive pleasure in real life. I argue that this assumption is suspect: the motive for seeking out devotional religious art, melodrama, tragedy, and some horror is not clearly to find pleasure. (shrink)

Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in the physical nature of the stimulus, in the sensorimotor interactions that characterize its use, in the (...) structure of its intramodal distinctions and in the functional role that it plays in people's behaviour. We present two thought experiments in which we detail what would be involved in transforming sounds into smells, and also smells into colours. Through these thought-experiments, we argue that the experiential character of smell derives precisely from the structural features of olfaction, and that an embodied account of olfactory phenomenology is called for. (shrink)

In this article, I shall consider the nature of our aesthetic thought and experience. I will not directly discuss the issue of whether or not we should think that reality includes mind-independent aesthetic properties and thus mind-independent aesthetic states of affairs in which objects or events possesses mind-independent aesthetic properties. I shall not tackle this purely metaphysical issue about the world head on. However, thinking about the nature of our aesthetic thought and experience unavoidably involves us in thinking about the (...) metaphysics that we are committed to in our aesthetic thought and experience. The issue is whether or not aesthetic thought and experience is ’realist’, in the sense that we represent aesthetic properties and states of affairs in such thoughts and experiences. If so, ’common-sense’ or ’folk aesthetics’ has metaphysically dirty hands, though whether or not this common-sense metaphysics is true is another matter. In contrast with realists, there are ’non-realists’, who deny that ordinary aesthetic thought and experience have such metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

?In everday language, the word ?attention? implies control of access to consciousness, and we adopt this usage here. Attention itself can be either voluntary or automatic. This can be readily modeled in the theory. Further, a contrastive analysis of spontaneously self?attributed vs. self?alien experiences suggests that ?self? can be interpreted as the more enduring, higher levels of the dominant context hierarchy, which create continuity over the changing flow of events. Since context is by definition unconscious in GW theory, self in (...) this sense is thought to be inherently unconscious as well. This proposal is consistent with a great deal of objective evidence. However, aspects of self may become known through ?conscious self-monitoring,? a process that ??is useful for self-evaluation and self?control. The results of conscious self-monitoring are combined with self?evaluation criteria, presumably of social origin, to produce a stable ?self?concept?, which functions as a supervisory system within the larger self organization. (shrink)

The special and unique attitudes that we take towards events in our futures/pasts—e.g., attitudes like the dread of an impeding pain—create a challenge for “Reductionist” accounts that reduce persons to aggregates of interconnected person stages: if the person stage currently dreading tomorrow’s pain is numerically distinct from the person stage that will actually suffer the pain, what reason could the current person stage have for thinking of that future pain as being his? One reason everyday subjects believe they have a (...) substantially extended temporal existence stems from introspection—they introspectively experience their selves as being temporally extended. In this paper, I examine whether a Reductionist about personal identity can co-opt this explanation. Using Galen Strawson’s recent work on self-experience as a resource, I reach both a negative and a positive conclusion about the prospects of such a position. First, the relevant kind of self-experience—i.e., the introspective experience of one’s self as being a substantially temporally extended entity—will not automatically arise within a person stage simply in virtue of that stage being psychologically connected to/continuous with other person stages. Second, the relevant kind of self-experience will arise, however, in virtue of person stages weaving together their respective experiences, actions, etc. via a narrative. This positive conclusion points towards a new Reductionist position that focuses upon a narrative, and not mere psychological continuity, in attempting to justify the special attitudes we take towards events in our futures/pasts. (shrink)

In this paper I set out to solve the problem of how the world as we experience it, full of colours and other sensory qualities, and our inner experiences, can be reconciled with physics. I discuss and reject the views of J. J. C. Smart and Rom Harré. I argue that physics is concerned only to describe a selected aspect of all that there is – the causal aspect which determines how events evolve. Colours and other sensory qualities, lacking causal (...) efficacy, are ignored by physics and cannot be predicted by physical theory. Even though physics is silent about sensory qualities, they nevertheless exist objectively in the world – in one sense of “objective” at least. (shrink)

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by “pangs of pleasure” that (...) increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, “mattering” would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the “mattering” necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of “mattering.” An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call “telos”. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. “Negative mattering” means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of “negative mattering”, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. “Positive mattering” would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called “scientific ideology”, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is “value-free”, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering. (shrink)

been recently proposed (Morin, 2003; 2004). The model takes into account most known mechanisms and processes leading to self-awareness, and examines their multiple and complex interactions. Inner speech is postulated to play a key-role in this model, as it establishes important connections between many of its ele- ments. This paper first reviews past and current references to a link between self-awareness and inner speech. It then presents an analysis of the nature of the relation between these two concepts. It is (...) suggested that inner speech can inter- nally reproduce and expand social and physical (ecological) sources of self- awareness. Inner speech can also create a psychological distance between the self and mental events it experiences (thus facilitating self-observation) it can act as a problem-solving device where the self represents the problem and self-information the solution, and can label aspects of one’s inner life that would otherwise be difficult to objectively perceive. Empirical evidence supporting the role of inner speech in self-awareness is also presented. (shrink)

Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives, in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons for doubting that observer ‘memories’ are genuine personal memories. Since (...) field perspectives in personal memory are also likely to be the product of constructive processes, we should reject the common assumption that such constructive processes inevitably bring distortion and error. Yet field perspectives tend to be treated as privileged also in the domains of memory for skilled movement, and memory for trauma. In each case, it is argued that visuospatial perspective in personal memory should be distinguished from other kinds of perspective such as kinesthetic perspective and emotional perspective. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show, by considering a number of sources, including Wittgenstein, Sartre, Thomas Nagel and Spinoza, but also adding something crucial of my own, that it is impossible to construe the subject of experience as an object among other objects in the world. My own added argument is the following. The subject of experience cannot move in time along with material events and processes or it could not be aware of the passage of time, hence neither (...) of change nor of motion. The subject cannot therefore be identified with any neural process, function, or location since whatever goes on in the CNS is necessarily objective and part of the temporal flux. However this does not imply any form of dualism for experiences exist only for the subject whose experiences they are and hence they have no objective reality. (shrink)

We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving (...) with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children's episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks. (shrink)

This essay examines continuities and transformations in Heidegger's appropriation of Dilthey's account of life and the accompanying picture of history between the end of World War One and Being and Time . The essay also judges the cogency of two conclusions that Heidegger draws in that book about history, viz, that historicity qua feature of Dasein's being both underlies objective history and makes the scholarly narration of history possible. Part one describes Dilthey's account of life, Heidegger's criticism that this account (...) objectifies life, and Heidegger's appropriation of those aspects of Dilthey's account - temporality, movement, and wholes - that do not result from objectification. Part two focuses on how Heidegger reworks the idea that life is movement by reconceptualizing movement as a happening (and not a stream) and by replacing Dilthey's lived experiences with actions. Part three examines how Heidegger takes over from Dilthey the idea that something is historical if and only if the past is part of its present, also attending to the type(s) of past that these thinkers consider to be part of life. A final section judges the cogency of the two aforementioned theses, defending the claim that the historicity of life is the condition of the objective nexus of actions and events called history and criticizing the thesis that the historicity of a historian's life makes the writing of history possible. (shrink)

Philosophical zombies are exactly as physicalists suppose we are, right down to the tiniest details, but they have no conscious experiences. (It is presupposed that all explicable physical events are explicable physically.) Are such things even logically possible? My aim is to contribute to showing not only that the answer is 'No', but why. (I concede that systems superficially like human beings might exist and lack consciousness.) My strategy has two prongs: a fairly brisk argument which demolishes the zombie idea; (...) followed by an attempt to throw light on how something can qualify as a conscious perceiver. The argument to show that zombies are impossible exploits the point that in order to be able to detect our own 'qualia' we should have to be somehow sensitive to them; which the zombie idea rules out. The attempt to make clear why my zombie twin must be conscious exploits the idea that we have a reasonably clear grasp of a 'Basic Package' of psychological concepts. (shrink)

Abstract: Each affective state has distinct motor-expressions, sensory perceptions, autonomic, and cognitive patterns. Panksepp (1998) proposed seven neural affective systems of which the SEEKING system, a generalized approach-seeking system, motivates organisms to pursue resources needed for survival. When an organism is presented with a novel stimulus, the dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS) is released. The DA circuit outlines the generalized mesolimbic dopamine-centered SEEKING system and is especially responsive when there is an element of unpredictability in forthcoming rewards. (...) We propose that when the outcome of this interaction is unexpected or unanticipated then Panksepp’s “cognitive or expectancy reset” mechanism involving the cognitive dissonance would yield the subjective emotion of surprise. In order to appropriately react to the environment’s stimuli one needs fundamental processes that would enable one to distinguish between what is novel and what has been already experienced, as well as the different degrees of novelty. Novel events are those whose essential features of the representation (visceral and perceptual) are altered and being discrepant provoke more sustained attention. Novelty arises from salient and arousing events and the organism experiences surprise, as coming out of a habitual state. In this framework, we shall look at established theories of emotions and propose a different approach to their taxonomy. (shrink)

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., (...) daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)

Discourse containing the verb ‘feel’, almost without exception, purports to describe inner experience. Though this much is evident, the question remains what exactly is conveyed when we talk about what and how we feel? Does discourse containing the word ‘feel’ actually succeed in describing the content and phenomenology of inner experience? If so, how does it reflect the phenomenology and content of the experience it describes? Here I offer a linguistic analysis of ‘feels’ reports and argue that a subset of (...) ‘feels’ reports, when accurate, reflect the representational content of emotions, tactile experiences and bodily sensations. Because ‘feels’ reports may reflect the representational content of bodily experience, these types of report may be able to give us some insight into the structure of bodily experience. I argue that our descriptions of bodily experience, on the assumption that they are sometimes accurate, indicate that emotions and tactile experiences are experiences of bodily reactions to objects, whereas bodily sensations are partial descriptions of emotions and tactile experiences or other events of the body. At the end I address the concern that an adequate account of inner experience cannot be given in terms of an analysis of ordinary language. (shrink)

The article attempts to show some limitations to reductive accounts in science and philosophy of body-mind relations, experience and skill. Extensive literature has developed in analytic philosophy of mind recently due to new technology and theories in the neurosciences. In the sporting sciences, there are also attempts to reduce experiences and skills to biology, mechanics, chemistry and physiology. The article argues there are three fundamental problems for reductive accounts that lead to an explanatory gap between the reduction and the conscious (...) experience. First, reductive accounts deal with objective observations; conscious experiences are subjective. Second, subjective experience seems difficult to identify with physical events described by chemistry, biology, mechanics or neurophysiology. Finally, sport involves knowing how and knowing how is also difficult to reduce to propositional knowledge, which is the reductive scientific/philosophical project. The article argues that sport provides an excellent platform to better understand what is wrong with reductive analysis in body-mind relations, since both conscious experience and knowing how are fundamental to sport performance. (shrink)

In its narrative, dramatic, and representational genres, art regularly depicts contexts for human emotions and their expressions. It is not surprising, then, that these artforms are often about emotional experiences and displays, and that they are also concerned with the expression of emotion. What is more interesting is that abstract art genres may also include examples that are highly expressive of human emotion. Pure music – that is, stand-alone music played on musical instruments excluding the human voice, and without words, (...) literary titles, or associated texts connected to it by its composer – is often characterized as the expressive art par excellence. Yet how could that be possible, given that such music lacks semantic or representational content? Pure music presents the hardest and most vivid philosophical challenge to any account of expressiveness in the arts, which is why it is crucial to consider the musical case for the light it sheds on the underlying principles and issues. In this chapter I consider two accounts of expressiveness in pure music. Both regard expressiveness as an objective property of such music. I argue for the position I call appearance emotionalism and against the alternative, which I label hypothetical emo- tionalism. But before I get to that, there is a different mode of musical expression to be acknowledged. Even instrumental music comes charged with associations. Some of these are private to the listener, but many are widely shared. The latter may be included in a piece by accident but are, more often, deliberately placed for their effects. For instance, when a song is quoted in an instrumental work, its title or words may be brought to mind. Certain melodies (e.g., “Ode to Joy”), styles (e.g., tarantella), idioms (e.g., fanfares), forms (e.g., minuet), modalities (e.g., church modes), and instruments (e.g., fifes and snare drums) recall particular social events, geocultural regions, historical periods, ideas, and sensibilities, and in this way can hook up with affective life-experiences. Though it is music’s associative ties that are likely to be referred to when most people are asked about music’s significance, philosophers say little about them.. (shrink)

According to color subjectivism, colors are mental properties, processes, or events of visual experiences of color. I first lay out an argument for subjectivism founded on claims from visual science and show that it also relies on a philosophical assumption. I then argue that subjectivism is untenable because this view cannot provide a plausible account of color perception. I describe three versions of subjectivism, each of which combines subjectivism with a theory of perception, namely sense datum theory, adverbialism, and the (...) virtual color proposal, and argue that each version faces serious objections. Considering these three theories of perception to be exhaustive of those available to the subjectivist, I conclude that subjectivism is untenable and that the scientifically motivated argument for this view is unsound. I then offer the diagnosis that the philosophical assumption on which this argument relies is mistaken. (shrink)

Why do design arguments—particularly those emphasizing machine metaphors such as “Organisms and/or their parts are machines”—continue to be so convincing to so many people after they have been repeatedly refuted? In this essay I review various interpretations and refutations of design arguments and make a distinction between rationally refuting such arguments (RefutingR) and rendering them psychologically unconvincing (RefutingP). Expanding on this distinction, I provide support from recent work on the cognitive power of metaphors and developmental psychological work indicating a basic (...) human propensity toward attributing agency to natural events, to show that design arguments “make sense”unless one is cued to look more closely. As with visual illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer arrow illusion, there is nothing wrong with a believer's cognitive apparatus any more than with their visual apparatus when they judge the lines in the illusion to be of unequal length. It takes training or a dissonance between design beliefs and other beliefs or experiences to play the role that a ruler does in the visual case. Unless people are cued to “look again” at what initially makes perfect sense, they are not inclined to apply more sophisticated evaluative procedures. (shrink)

The justification of induction is of central significance for cross-cultural social epistemology. Different ‘epistemological cultures’ do not only differ in their beliefs, but also in their belief-forming methods and evaluation standards. For an objective comparison of different methods and standards, one needs (meta-)induction over past successes. A notorious obstacle to the problem of justifying induction lies in the fact that the success of object-inductive prediction methods (i.e., methods applied at the level of events) can neither be shown to be universally (...) reliable (Hume's insight) nor to be universally optimal. My proposal towards a solution of the problem of induction is meta-induction. The meta-inductivist applies the principle of induction to all competing prediction methods that are accessible to her. By means of mathematical analysis and computer simulations of prediction games I show that there exist meta-inductive prediction strategies whose success is universally optimal among all accessible prediction strategies, modulo a small short-run loss. The proposed justification of meta-induction is mathematically analytical. It implies, however, an a posteriori justification of object-induction based on the experiences in our world. In the final section I draw conclusions about the significance of meta-induction for the social spread of knowledge and the cultural evolution of cognition, and I relate my results to other simulation results which utilize meta-inductive learning mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper explores consequences of the claim that phenomenal experiences are physical events of great descriptive complexity. This claim is attractive both because it can explain our most perplexing intuitions about the quality of consciousness and also because it is suggestive of very productive research opportunities. I illustrate the former by showing that two of the most compelling anti-physicalist arguments about phenomenal experience – the modal argument of Kripke and the conceivability argument of Chalmers – are not sound if this (...) claim is true. I illustrate the latter by showing that significant empirical predictions are a consequence of this claim. (shrink)

The study of consciousness in modern science is hampered by deeply ingrained, dualist presuppositions about the nature of consciousness. In particular, conscious experiences are thought to be private and subjective, contrasting with physical phenomena which are public and objective. In the present article, I argue that all observed phenomena are, in a sense, private to a given observer, although there are some events to which there is public access. Phenomena can be objective in the sense of intersubjective, investigators can be (...) objective in the sense of truthful or dispassionate, and procedures can be objective in being well-specified, but observed phenomena cannot be objective in the sense of being observer-free. Phenomena are only repeatable in the sense that they are judged by a community of observers to be tokens of the same type. Stripped of its dualist trappings the empirical method becomes if you carry out these procedures you will observe or experience these results - which applies as much to a science of consciousness as it does to physics. (shrink)

This paper discusses possible correspondences between neuroscientific findings and phenomenologically informed methodologies in the investigation of kinesthetic empathy in watching dance. Interest in phenomenology has recently increased in cognitive science (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008 ) and dance scholars have recently contributed important new insights into the use of phenomenology in dance studies (e.g. Legrand and Ravn (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8(3):389–408, 2009 ); Parviainen (Dance Research Journal 34(1):11–26, 2002 ); Rothfield (Topoi 24:43–53, 2005 )). In vision research, coherent neural (...) mechanisms for perceptual phenomena were uncovered, thus supporting correlation of phenomenology and neurophysiology Spillmann (Vision Research 49(12):1507–1521, 2009 ). Correspondingly, correlating subjects’ neurophysiological data with qualitative responses has been proposed as a means to research the human brain in the study of consciousness (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008 ), with similar issues in clinical psychology Mishara (Current Opinion in Psychiatry 20(6):559–569, 2007 ) and biology Kosslyn et al. (American Psychologist 57:341–351, 2002 ). Yet the relationship between neuroscience and qualitative research informed by phenomenology remains problematic. How qualitative research normally handles subjective experiences is difficult to reconcile with standard statistical analysis of objective data. Recent technological developments in cognitive neuroscience have inspired a number of researchers to use more naturalistic stimuli, outside the laboratory environment, such as dance, thereby perhaps helping to open up the cognitive sciences to more phenomenologically informed approaches. A question central to our research, addressed here, is how the phenomenal experiences of a dance audience member, as accessed by qualitative research methods, can be related to underlying neurophysiological events. We outline below some methodological challenges encountered in relating audiences’ first-person accounts of watching live dance performance to neurophysiological evidence of their experiences. (shrink)

Recent findings suggest that our capacity to imagine the future depends on our capacity to remember the past. However, the extent to which episodic memory is involved in our capacity to think about what could have happened in our past, yet did not occur (i.e., episodic counterfactual thinking), remains largely unexplored. The current experiments investigate the phenomenological characteristics and the influence of outcome valence on the experience of past, future and counterfactual thoughts. Participants were asked to mentally simulate past, future, (...) and counterfactual events with positive or negative outcomes. Features of their subjective experiences during each type of simulation were measured using questionnaires and autobiographical interviews. The results suggest that clarity and vividness were higher for past than future and counterfactual simulations. Additionally, emotional intensity was lower for counterfactual simulations than past and future simulations. Finally, outcome valence influenced participants’ judgment of probability for future and counterfactual simulations. (shrink)

The answer, if you look at this paper, is that writing is not good for your mental health, but I think that anything done excessively is not good for your mental health. This paper is about excessive reactions, which given the childhood he gives us a glimpse of he has a tendency toward. I, like him, am a mental health service user. However, all experiences of mental ill health are unique to the person concerned. We all have a tendency to (...) blame others for what has happened to us, for what has triggered our mental distress. For Jason, it is his mother who was triggered in to mental illness. For me it was an alcoholic husband, who was triggered in to alcoholism/mental illness by childhood events. This is a .. (shrink)

Many contemporary theologies have given considerable attention to the inbreaking work of God whereby the Spirit imbues creation with life and vitality, but in the process the seriousness of the destructive forces that plague the world has been overlooked. This oversight not only has significant theological consequences, but it also generates a tension with scientific postulates about physical reality. Paradoxically, increasing complexity, including emergent life systems, arise in spite of the overarching conditions. I posit from a theological perspective that the (...) Spirit acts within the world to generate pockets of organization out of disorder. The Spirit not only was present and active at initial creation but also continues to act within the cosmos, sustaining the natural order and giving rise to innovative acts of creation. The world, which groans for and anticipates transformation, experiences local decreases in entropy as proleptic events of God's inbreaking kingdom. This theological hypothesis provides the framework for considering an eschatological response to the world's decay. (shrink)

Emotions and consciousness are intimately linked and often conceived from a purely intrapersonal perspective. This paper explores the implications of considering emotions as not only intrapersonal but also as interpersonal and transpersonal heterarchical (i.e., every component has potentially equal importance) systems. It is telling that in contemplative traditions and contemporary research on hypnotic experience, deep 'inner' experience is pregnant with interpersonal and transpersonal meanings. Similarly, the propensity to have porous conscious experiences is paralleled by the tendency to be affected by (...) the emotion of others. Anecdotal and experimental evidence on anomalous events clearly suggests that strong emotions can have non-local effects. That consciousness and emotions are embedded within interpersonal and transpersonal fields has important epistemological and ethical implications. (shrink)

The present paper analyzes the regularities referred to via the concept 'self.' This is important, for cognitive science traditionally models the self as a cognitive mediator between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. This leads to the assertion that the self causes action. Recent findings in social psychology indicate this is not the case and, as a consequence, certain cognitive scientists model the self as being epiphenomenal. In contrast, the present paper proposes an alternative approach (i.e., the event-control approach) that is (...) based on recently discovered regularities between perception and action. Specifically, these regularities indicate that perception and action planning utilize common neural resources. This leads to a coupling of perception, planning, and action in which the first two constitute aspects of a single system (i.e., the distal-event system) that is able to pre-specify and detect distal events. This distal-event system is then coupled with action (i.e., effector-control systems) in a constraining, as opposed to 'causal' manner. This model has implications for how we conceptualize the manner in which one infers the intentions of another, anticipates the intentions of another, and possibly even experiences another. In conclusion, it is argued that it may be possible to map the concept 'self' onto the regularities referred to in the event-control model, not in order to reify 'the self' as a causal mechanism, but to demonstrate its status as a useful concept that refers to regularities that are part of the natural order. (shrink)

The following paper considers one important feature of our experiential or ‘recollective’ memories, namely their spatial perspectival characteristics. I begin by considering the ‘Past-Dependency-Claim’, which states that every recollective memory (or ‘R-memory’) has its spatial perspectival characteristics in virtue of the subject’s present awareness of the spatial perspectival characteristics of a relevant past perceptual experience. Although the Past-Dependency-Claim might for various reasons seem particularly attractive, I show that it is false. I then proceed to develop and defend the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’, namely (...) the claim that the spatial perspectival characteristics of an R-memory depend on the spatial perspectival characteristics of perceptual experiences that the subject has at the time at which the R-memory occurs. Lastly, I discuss the phenomenon of so-called ‘observer-memories’, which presents a special challenge for any attempt to account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of R-memories. I argue that we have no good reason to deny that the relevant experiences should count as memories, and I show that we can account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of observer-memories with the help of the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’. More generally, the paper shows that certain events that occur in a subject’s mental life (namely, a subject’s R-memories) are necessarily dependent on other events that occur in the relevant subject’s mental life (namely, on certain perceptual experiences). This more general conclusion in turn should be relevant for any attempt to develop an appropriate account of a subject’s mental life as a whole. (shrink)

To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing (...) much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace— and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs. (shrink)

IT IS DIFFICULT for me to read Pride and Prejudice without empathizing either with Elizabeth Bennet, or sometimes with her father, Mr Bennet. Not only do my own responses to and opinions of the events and characters of the book at times resemble theirs, but even when they do not, I find myself seeing the event from Elizabeth’s or Mr Bennet’s point of view. For example, at the close of the book, Elizabeth’s former dislike of Mr Darcy has completely vanished, (...) in part because of learning of a number of good deeds that Mr Darcy has done very quietly for their family. When Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth (for the second time) she is delighted to accept him. However, everyone else in Elizabeth’s family despises Mr Darcy, and they also believe that Elizabeth still hates him. So it is easy to understand Mr Bennet’s surprise and distaste when Mr Darcy asks Mr Bennet for Elizabeth’s hand; after all, Mr Bennet still believes Mr Darcy to be prideful and haughty. While I am not myself surprised to hear Elizabeth’s response—the reader learns much more of Mr Darcy’s character than Mr Bennet does—I do have the experience of imagining being surprised. I am also capable of empathizing with Elizabeth, who is excited, flustered, and a bit ashamed at having so misjudged Mr Darcy early on, and I can imagine having these feelings for people I have misjudged. I can (to some degree) understand why she finds explaining all this to Mr Bennet so difficult. I go back and forth, as I read, between the perspectives of Mr Bennet and Elizabeth. These experiences of mine are experiences of the sort that I call ‘empathizing with fictions’, although we sometimes might describe such experiences by saying that we ‘identified’ with a particular character or characters in a story. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)

Quantum theory has been formulated in several different ways. The original version was ‘Copenhagen’ quantum theory, which was formulated as a practical set of rules for making predictions about what we human observers would observe under certain well-defined sets of conditions. However, the human observers themselves were excluded from the system, in much the same way that Descartes excluded human beings from the part of the world governed by the natural physical laws. This exclusion of human beings from the world (...) governed by the physical laws is an awkward feature of Copenhagen quantum theory that is fixed by “Orthodox” quantum theory, which is the form devised by von Neumann and Wigner. This orthodox form treats the entire world as a quantum system, including the brains and bodies of human beings. Some more recent formulation of quantum theory seek to exclude from the theory all reference to the experiences of human observers, but I do not consider them, both because of their technical deficiencies, and because they are constitutionally unequipped to deal adequately with the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts.1 The observer plays a central role in both Copenhagen and Orthodox quantum theory. In this connection, Bohr, describing the 1927 Solvay conference, noted that: “…an interesting discussion arose about how to speak of the appearance of phenomena for which only statistical predictions can be made. The question was whether, as to the occurrence of such individual events, we should adopt the.. (shrink)

In Stephanie Beardman's discussion of the empirical results of Kahneman and Tversky and Kahneman, et al. on pain preference and rational utility decision she argues that an interpretation of these results does not require that false memory for pain episodes yields irrational preferences for future pain events. I concur with her conclusion and suggest that there are reasons from within the pain sciences for agreeing with Beardman's reinterpretation of the Kahneman, et al. data. I cite some of these theoretical and (...) empirical reasons. I engage in some speculation as to why preferences for pain experiences, which harbor the Peak and Ending profile, make biological sense. Given the results from the pain sciences and the clinical practices based in them, I conclude that the medical ethical issue Kahneman raises and Beardman tries to solve is not a pressing moral demand on medical practitioners. (shrink)

Neurophenomenology (Varela 1996) is not only philosophical but also empirical and experimental. Our purpose in this article is to illustrate concretely the efficiency of this approach in the field of neuroscience and, more precisely here, in epileptology. A number of recent observations have indicated that epileptic seizures do not arise suddenly simply as the effect of random fluctuations of brain activity, but require a process of pre-seizure changes that start long before. This has been reported at two different levels of (...) description: on the one hand, the epileptic patient often experiences some warning symptoms that precede seizures from several minutes to hours in the form of very specific lived events. On the other hand, the analyses of brain electrical activities have provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neuronal dynamics several minutes before the electro-clinical onset of a seizure. We review here some of the ongoing work of our research group concerning seizure anticipation. In particular, we discuss experimental evidence of upward (local-to-global) formation of conscious experience and its neural substrate, but also of the downward (global-to-local) determination of local neuronal activity by situated conscious activity and its substrate large-scale neural assemblies. This causal role of conscious experience may lead to new kinds of therapy for epileptic patients. (shrink)

The Psychological Study of Social Memory Phenomena Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And “in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event” (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p.129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime (...) they happened to witness together. Psychology is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationships between an individual remembering alone, an individual remembering in a group, and the group itself remembering. (shrink)

This is the first volume of an impressive project on the relation of art, philosophy and social change. In an on-going argument and review ing several important aesthetic theories Paul Crow ther in this book argues for the idea that aesthetics should be a kind of critical assessment of art w orks' experiential consequences. Although I go along w ith his resistance against postmodernist reasoning, w hich functions as the starting point of his book, beyond that, our w ays often (...) part. My disagreement, how ever, does not annul the evident quality of the argument in this w ork. It is recommended reading material for all those aestheticians w ho are interested in the cognitive and non-cognitive functionality of art w orks and in the possibility of any influence of art on societal change. I w ill now discuss the most crucial steps in Crow ther's argument. Postmodernists claim to have undone the alleged rigidity of modern categories, like that of the autonomous subject, but according to Crow ther they reach this `achievement' by overemphasizing the fluidity of modes of know ledge and experience, and of their status as social constructs, but there may w ell exist flexible constants. Aesthetics can help w ith the analysis of these flexible constants, not by looking for the essences of art or aesthetic experience, but by supplementing our theoretical assessments w ith a critique of art. Crow ther proposes to view aesthetic experiences as w ell as w orks of art as functions of critical aw areness and of body-hold, an historicized version of Merleau-Ponty's much neglected notion of embodiment. Critical aesthetics actualizes the critical aw areness involved in our aesthetic experiences. Art, defined in terms of originality, roots in the body-hold of the artist, w ho moulds his medium to solve technical problems traditional art forms confront him w ith. Postmodernism involves only tw o theses, really. First, contemporary experience and sensibility are analyzed as imbued by the shocks generated by the rapid succession of mechanically reproduced events.. (shrink)

This book traces the trajectory of John J. McDermott’s philosophical career through a selection of his essays. Many were originally occasional pieces and address specific issues in American thought and culture. Together they constitute a mosaic of McDermott’s philosophy, showing its roots in an American conception of experience. Though he draws heavily on the thought of William James and the pragmatists, McDermott has his own unique perspective on philosophy and American life. He presents this to the reader in exquisitely crafted (...) prose. Drawing inspiration from American history, from existentialist themes, and from personal experiences, he offers a dramatic consideration of our culture’s failures and successes.McDermott crosses disciplinary boundaries to draw on whatever works to help make sense of theissues with which he is dealing—issues rooted in medical practice, political events, pedagogical habits, and the worlds of the arts. His work thus resists simple categorization. It is precisely this that makes his vibrant prose appealing to so many both inside and outside the world of American philosophy. (shrink)

There is disagreement among contemporary theorists regarding human well-being. On one hand there are “substantive good” views, according to which the most important elements of a person’s well-being result from her nature as a human, rational, and/or sentient being. On the other hand there are “agent-constituted” views, which contend that a person’s well-being is constituted by her particular aims, desires, and/or preferences. Each approach captures important features of human well-being, but neither can provide a complete account: agent-constituted theories have difficulty (...) accounting for the normativity of their claims, and substantive good theories have difficulty accounting for how a person’s actually adopted aims shape what is good for her and hence what she has reason to do. I articulate and defend a hybrid view that equals these approaches in systematicity and completeness of explanation yet seeks to surpass them in coherence with our ordinary judgments about what human well-being consists in. This hybrid view maintains, with agent-constituted theories, that a person’s well-being is (1) significantly constituted by her actually adopted aims; (2) deeply contingent; (3) agent-relative; (4) significantly dependent on spatially and temporally remote events; and (5) significantly independent of her experiences. The hybrid view also maintains, with substantive good theories, that a person’s well-being is (6) in part determined by facts independent of her aims, desires, and preferences; (7) such that all her aims are subject to critical evaluation and revision; and (8) constituted by her aims only if these aims are choiceworthy. (shrink)

Human aesthetic experiences are pervasive; they are triggered by faces, art, natural scenery, foods, ideas, theories, and decision-making situations, among many sources, and seem to be a distinctive trait of our species. Our moral sense, understood as our capacity to judge events, actions, or people as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, also seems to be an exclusively human endowment (Ayala 2010). As part of the scientific efforts to characterize the biological foundations of our human uniqueness, recently there has been (...) interest in the brain’s underpinnings of aesthetic reactions to art on the one hand, and in the neural correlates of moral judgment and decision-making on the other (Greene and Paxton .. (shrink)