Postmodernists have been suspicious of the term 'consciousness,' because it seems to suggest the existence of a separate ego-subject, standing over again an object which it 'represents,' and to neglect the sense in which this subject-object relation is an artificial creation of modernity (Globus 1994). The modernist notion of consciousness, which seems to presuppose such a bifurcated subject-object relation, has led to the need to choose between a mind-body dualism and its equally problematic alternative, reductionistic physicalism; it has encouraged naive-objectivist (...) epistemologies such as empiricism and logical positivism; it leads to misunderstandings of the 'unconscious' and the role of unconscious hermeneutic contributions to the ways people experience reality; it exacerbates the problems of self-absorbed egoism, socio-political atomism, and the attendant unworkable contractarian approaches to political theory; and these are just a few of the worst problems that arguably can be blamed on the subject-object paradigm and the related notion of individual consciousness. (shrink)
An argument that there is a common pattern in conflict between desires and the dialectical integration of those conflicts, at both individual and socio-political levels. Philosophical, psychological, poltical and Buddhist approaches to integration are brought together here to show how the integration of desire contributes to moral objectivity.
The first of a planned series of 5 volumes on Middle Way Philosophy. Middle Way Philosophy was originally inspired by the Middle Way of the Buddha but is developed in an entirely Western context. It addresses the questions of objectivity, justification, facts and values, and the relationship of philosophy and psychology. It develops the concept of experiential adequacy to provide a non-metaphysical resolution of the dichotomy between absolutism and relativism in both facts and values.
This book is a survey of practical moral issues applying the Middle Way (as developed in 'A Theory of Moral Objectivity') as the basis of 'Buddhist' Ethics. No appeal is made to Buddhist traditions or scriptures, but instead the Middle Way is applied consistently as a universal philosophical and practical principle to suggest the direction of resolutions to moral debates. Practical ethics topics covered include sexual ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics, animals, violence, the arts, scientific issues and political ethics.
An inter-disciplinary philosophical treatise (written as an accredited Ph.D. thesis) that attempts to establish a new approach to moral objectivity. Inspired by the Buddha's Middle Way, but arguing from first premises, it challenges widespread and interlinked assumptions in both analytic and continental philosophy, whilst drawing on both these traditions together with psychological, religious and historical evidence. The first section of the book provides a detailed critique of existing approaches to ethics in the Western tradition. The second half then puts forward (...) positive and practical alternatives, and solutions to long-standing philosophical problems. (shrink)
This book is a briefer and updated account of the Middle Way Philosophy developed in 'A Theory of Moral Objectivity'. Its starting point is the argument that we are not justified in making any claims about truth, whether moral or scientific, but the idea of truth is still meaningful. Instead of making or denying metaphysical claims about truth, we need to think in terms of incrementally objective justification within experience. This standpoint is related to an account of objectivity as psychological (...) integration, and applied to questions of resposibility, ethics, science, religion and politics. (shrink)
This book is a philosophical critique of the Buddhist tradition (not a scholarly work about the Buddhist tradition), applying the standards of judgement developed in 'A Theory of Moral Objectivity'. It is argued that although the Buddhist tradition provides access to the insights of the Middle Way, many other aspects of Buddhist tradition are inconsistent with this central insight. The sources of justified belief in Buddhism, karma, conditionality, concepts of reality, monasticism and Buddhist ethics are all subjected to the same (...) critique. (shrink)
R. D. Ellis (2010). On the Cusp. In James J. Giordano & Bert Gordijn (eds.), Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics. Cambridge University Press.
Introduction: Searching for the covert agent of consciousness -- The devil's pact (or, why the hard problem is now so hard) -- Action at the macro level : an agent-based theory of intentionality -- Action imagery and representation of the external world -- Do we need an emergency metaphysician? : action versus reaction at the micro level -- Herding neurons : the causal structure of self-organizing systems -- The paradoxes of phenomenal consciousness -- The self-organizing imagination : addressing the mind-body (...) problem -- Introspection and private access -- Action imagery and the role of efference -- Connecting physiology with phenomenology. (shrink)
If human motivation is "enactive" rather than merely a series of passive reactions to extemal stimuli, then a correspondingly "enactive" approach to education should be taken seriously. This paper argues that recent research on the emotional brain by such neuropsychologists as Jaak Panksepp, combined with a self-organizational approach to the concept of action, and the importance of the questioning process in human understanding of information, suggests that treating humanities education as intrinsically valuable, and not just as means toward other ends, (...) is cmcially important. The questioning process that appealsto students' natural exploratory tendencies, or what Hume called a "love of truth," is fostered by an approach that, rather than dumbing down, actually appeals to the "glamour of the complex." The glamour of the complex cannot stop with interesting application of memorized information; it must go all the way down to basic epistemology and the basic questioning of human nature itself that are encouraged by taking the humanities seriously and for their own sake. (shrink)
While much of contemporary psychology preserves the legacy of behaviorism and consummatory drive-reductionism, this paper by contrast grounds itself in an "enactivist" approach to emotion and motivation, and goes on to consider the implications of this view for the psychology of inspiration, especially as applied to love and religion. Emotions are not responses to stimuli, but expressions of an active system. The tendency of complex systems is to prefer higher-energy basins of attraction rather than settle into satiation and dull comfort. (...) Given this understanding of the emotions in complex animals, there is a fundamental need for inspiration to fuel the self-initiated activation of the system; lack of this basic inspiration is depression. In sophisticated conscious beings, the need for inspiration is exacerbated by awareness of the problems of finitude; love, the arts and religion are meant to address this heightened need for inspiration. Fundamentalist approaches, however, contend with the problem of finitude in an inauthentic way-by simply denying them. This fundamentalist approach leads to corresponding distortions of ethical and political attitudes. (shrink)
This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology – the “enactive” approach to the mind-body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from (...) passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago. (shrink)
Lewis's dynamical systems emotion theory continues a tradition including Merleau-Ponty, von Bertallanfy, and Aristotle. Understandably for a young theory, Lewis's new predictions do not follow strictly from the theory; thus their failure would not disconfirm the theory, nor their success confirm it – especially given that other self-organizational approaches to emotion (e.g., those of Ellis and of Newton) may not be inconsistent with these same predictions.
Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The (...) increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)
In addressing the shortcomings of computationalism, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon with optional access to unconscious computations does not imply that unconscious computations, in the limited domain where they do occur (e.g., occipital transformations of visual data), cannot be reformulated in a way consistent with a self-organizational view.
Editors’ note: These four interrelated discussions of the role of the cerebellum in coordinating emotional and higher cognitive functions developed out of a workshop presented by the four authors for the 2000 Conference of the Cognitive Science Society at the University of Pennsylvania. The four interrelated discussions explore the implications of the recent explosion of cerebellum research suggesting an expanded cerebellar role in higher cognitive functions as well as in the coordination of emotional functions with learning, logical thinking, perceptual consciousness, (...) and action planning. (shrink)
Mack and Rock show evidence that no consciousperception occurs without a prior attentiveact. Subjects already executing attention taskstend to neglect visible elements extraneous tothe attentional task, apparently lacking evenbetter-than-chance ``implicit perception,''except in certain cases where the unattendedstimulus is a meaningful word or has uniquepre-tuned salience similar to that ofmeaningful words. This is highly consistentwith ``enactive'' notions that consciousnessrequires selective attention via emotional subcortical and limbic motivationalactivation as it influences anterior attentionmechanisms. Occipital activation withoutconsciousness suggests that motivated search,enacted through the organism's (...) subcorticalmotivational functions, is needed beforevisual stimulation engenders consciousness.This enactive view – that searching for,rather than receiving or processing input isthe basis of consciousness – was slow ingaining acceptance lacking empirical evidenceof this kind, combined with thestimulus-response assumption that brain eventssubserving perceptual consciousness must resultfrom transformation of perceptual input ratherthan from the organism's self-regulatedactivity as manifested through subcorticalactivity. Implicit perception occurring withword priming is ``paradoxical'' according to Mackand Rock, suggesting late selection forattention after extensive unconsciousprocessing, while most trials involvingnonverbal rather than verbal images mightsuggest earlier selection, sinceunattended objects are unseen, apparently evenimplicitly. This paper argues that anteriorand subcortical motivational mechanisms play animportant role in early selection; posteriormechanisms then unconsciously enhance signals;if data survive early gating andcorticothalamic enhancement, then still further anterior-limbic loops motivatedlyactivate ``image schemas'' resonating withposterior nonconscious processing; at thatpoint, consciousness occurs. (shrink)
Knowing only what is empirically knowable can't by itself entail knowledge of what consciousness "is like." But if dualism is to be avoided, the question arises: how can a process be completely empirically unobservable when all of its components are completely observable? The recently emerging theory of self-organization offers resources with which to resolve this problem: Consciousness can be an empirically unobservable process because the emotions motivating attention are experienced only from the perspective of the one whose phenomenal states are (...) executed by the self-organizing processes which themselves constitute the consciousness. I argue that a self-organizing process can differ from the sum of its (empirically observable) substrata because, rather than just being realized by them, it actively rearranges the background conditions under which alternative component causal sequences can realize the self-organizing pattern into the future. (shrink)
CHAPTER 1 Integrating the Physiological and Phenomenological Dimensions of Affect and Motivation Ralph D. Ellis Clark Atlanta University A neglected but ...
According to “imaginability arguments,” given any explanation of the physiological correlates of consciousness, it remains imaginable that all elements of that explanation could occur without consciousness, which thus remains unexplained. The O'Brien & Opie connectionist approach effectively shows that perspicuous explanations can bridge this explanatory gap, but bringing in other issues – for example, involving biology and emotion – would facilitate going much further in this direction. A major problem is the ambiguity of the term “representation.” Bridging the gap requires (...) perspicuously explaining not just how we form “representations” in the sense of outputs isomorphic to what is represented, but also what makes representations conscious; I sketch briefly what this would entail. (shrink)
This essay describes the authentic use of religious experience to address the value expressive dimension of being human. This value expressive dimension intensifies our experiential affirmation of the value of existence itself in a way not available through attaining valued or valuable outcomes.
The ‘embodied self’ is the purposeful dimension of any organism capable of acting toward a unified motivation to maintain a self-organizing structure by appropriating, replacing, and reproducing material components to serve as substrata. We reflect on the ‘self’ in this sense when we direct attention away from the objects of experience and toward the way our bodies motivate our experiences in terms of emotional purposes of the organism, by looking, searching, shifting the focus of attention, etc.---actions rather than reactions of (...) our bodies and nervous systems. The ‘transcendental self,’ by contrast, cannot be identified with any particular embodied state of consciousness, because it is that which unifies all the particular stages and gives them direction. It is argued here that affect and motivation are the keys to understanding and unifying the transcendental and embodied selves, because both reflect the organism’s self-organizing tendency; and that we can know ourselves by understanding the way affect and motivation shape the pattern and direction of our stream of consciousness. (shrink)
D.G Attfield's article "Learning from Religion" in BJRE 18:2 raises a number of difficulties in the treatment of truth claims in Religious Education. He argues that these claims should limit the acceptable goals of non-confessional R.E. to teaching about religion and not cross a threshold of faith-commitment beyond which a child may learn from religion. His arguments rest on a questionable understanding of religions as entirely defined by their irreconcilable revelations, which actually condemns R.E to an ineffectual relativism. Attfield also (...) makes contradictory assumptions about the capacity of children to make valid autonomous decisions to enter into faith-commitment. I argue that the coherence of non-confessional R.E. requires a wisdom-based understanding of religious development, coupled with an understanding of educational development which emphasises the importance of individual role-models and the gradual building of coherent world-views. (shrink)
... Geoffrey Underwood (University of Nottingham) Francisco Varela (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique. Paris) Volume 2 Ralph D. Ellis Questioning Consciousness ...
In an essay in these pages, Jeffrey Friedman charged that Cultural Theory obscures the unity and uniqueness of modern egalitarian individualism; reduces culture to society; ignores history; is only applicable to contemporary, Western politics; provides an unsatisfactory account of preference formation and preference change; and leaves no place for the vitally important debate over what we should prefer. Although some of Friedman's criticisms stem from a misreading or strained reading of Cultural Theory, others raise vitally important questions not only about (...) Cultural Theory but social theory generally. My reply to Friedman offers not just a defense of the particular categorization of cultures used in Cultural Theory, but a defense of the entire enterprise of constructing general social theories that seek to discern transhistorical patterns in the all too evident diversity and contingency of history. (shrink)
