ObjectiveWe argue that people often fail to perceive and process stimuli easily available to them. In other words, we challenge the tacit assumption that awareness is unbounded and provide evidence that humans regularly fail to see and use stimuli and information easily available to them. We call this phenomenon “bounded awareness” (Bazerman and Chugh in Frontiers of social psychology: negotiations, Psychology Press: College Park 2005). Findings We begin by first describing perceptual mental processes in which obvious information (...) is missed—that is, simply not seen—by the visual perceiver. Inattentional blindness and change blindness are examples. We then extend this phenomenon to decision making and forecasting, using evidence about focalism to illustrate how people over focus on some information and fail to use other easily available information. We next examine how these processes of bounded awareness may extend to other important domains and across levels of analysis, such as information-sharing in groups, decision making in negotiators, and in competitive bidding situations such as auctions.ConclusionsBounded awareness is a phenomenon that encompasses a variety of psychological processes, all of which lead to the same error: a failure to see, seek, use, or share important and relevant information that is easily seen, sought, used, or shared. (shrink)

ObjectiveWe argue that people often fail to perceive and process stimuli easily available to them. In other words, we challenge the tacit assumption that awareness is unbounded and provide evidence that humans regularly fail to see and use stimuli and information easily available to them. We call this phenomenon “bounded awareness” (Bazerman and Chugh in Frontiers of social psychology: negotiations, Psychology Press: College Park 2005). Findings We begin by first describing perceptual mental processes in which obvious information (...) is missed—that is, simply not seen—by the visual perceiver. Inattentional blindness and change blindness are examples. We then extend this phenomenon to decision making and forecasting, using evidence about focalism to illustrate how people over focus on some information and fail to use other easily available information. We next examine how these processes of bounded awareness may extend to other important domains and across levels of analysis, such as information-sharing in groups, decision making in negotiators, and in competitive bidding situations such as auctions.ConclusionsBounded awareness is a phenomenon that encompasses a variety of psychological processes, all of which lead to the same error: a failure to see, seek, use, or share important and relevant information that is easily seen, sought, used, or shared. (shrink)

: This essay takes seriously the many Buddhist admonitions about ‘‘not settling down in things’’ and the importance of wandering freely ‘‘without a place to rest.’’ The basic thesis is that delusion is awareness trapped, and liberation is awareness freed from grasping. The familiar words ‘‘attention’’ and ‘‘awareness’’ are used to emphasize that the distinction being drawn refers not to some abstract metaphysical entity but simply to how our everyday awareness functions. This way of distinguishing between (...) delusion and enlightenment is not only consistent with basic Buddhist teachings but gives us insight into some of the more difficult ones, such as the way karma works and the Mahāyāna claim that ‘‘form is not other than emptiness, emptiness not other than form.’’ Moreover, this perspective illuminates some aspects of our contemporary life-world, including the particular challenges of modern technology and economics. It is important to see the implications for some of the social issues that concern us today. The constriction or liberation of awareness is not only a personal matter. What do societies do to encourage or discourage its emancipation? (shrink)

In recent years, much work has been dedicated by logicians, computer scientists and economists to understanding awareness, as its importance for human behaviour becomes evident. Although several logics of awareness have been proposed, little attention has been explicitly dedicated to change in awareness. However, one of the most crucial aspects of awareness is the changes it undergoes, which have countless important consequences for knowledge and action. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal model (...) of awareness change, and to derive from it logics of awareness change. In the first part of the paper, the model of epistemic states of bounded agents proposed in Hill (Stud Log 89(1):81–109, 2008a ) is extended with operations modelling awareness change. In the second part of the paper, it is shown how this model naturally extends the “standard” logic of awareness to yield a logic of awareness change. (shrink)

The present paper—taking the example of the English translation of the Hungarian Civil Code of 2013—aims to give an overview on the legal and terminology-related challenges and pitfalls that might occur during the process of translating a civil code with civil law traditions into the language of the common law world. An attempt is made to categorise terminology-related conceptual problems and elaborate how the different types of translation methods could be applied; moreover, how a kind of legal-linguistic checks-and-balances can be (...) achieved through the well-dosed combination, having also the ratio of similarities to differences of legal concepts behind the respective terms in mind. Legal translators must act beyond the role of a simple translator: they must be comparatists, being aware of the legal origin of the relevant concepts and using the methods of comparative private law and translation studies at the same time, since both law and language are system-bound and are heavily influenced by the cultural and social environment. The authors strive to identify the significance of those problems from the perspective of how language-related aspects can perform some fine-tuning on the comparative methodology and findings, whether they are barriers only or provide also an opportunity to verify or refute prima facie comparative results. Comparative law—no doubt—supports legal translation, but their relationship is reciprocal: legal-linguistic subjects and problems emerging in the course of legal translation supply valuable feedback and further sources of inspiration. (shrink)

Rationality has been a principle widely assumed in economics from early on. In contrast, rationality in the formation of economic expectations is rather new. Since the term “rational expectations” has meanwhile become a kind of slogan for diverse issues in economics as in related fields, there is some danger of authors’ not always being aware of the true meaning of this technical term. Sometimes it is used, in a context where expectation formation about uncertain events is essential, as if rational (...) expectations solved this fundamental problem. (shrink)

The fruit of several centuries of rationalistic thought in the West has been to reduce both the objective and the subjective poles of knowledge to a single level. In the same way that the Cogito of Descartes is based on reducing the knowing subject to a single mode of awareness, the external world which this ‘knowing self’ perceives is reduced to a spatio-temporal complex limited to a single level of reality – no matter how far this complex is extended (...) beyond the galaxies or into aeons of time, past and future. The traditional view as expressed in the metaphysical teachings of both the Eastern and Western traditions is based, on the contrary, upon a hierarchic vision of reality, not only of reality's objective aspect but also of its subjective one. Not only are there many levels of reality or existence stretching from the material plane to Absolute and Infinite Reality, but there are also many levels of subjective reality or consciousness, many envelopes of the self, leading to the Ultimate Self which is Infinite and Eternal and which is none other than the Transcendent Reality beyond. Moreover, the relation between the subjective and the objective is not bound to a single mode. There is not just one form of perception or awareness. There are modes and degrees of awareness leading from the so-called ‘normal’ perception by man of both his own ‘ego’ and the external world to awareness of Ultimate Selfhood, in which the subject and object of knowledge become unified in a single reality beyond all separation and distinction. (shrink)

Bodily sensations are mental states typically suitable to be reported in judgments in which a first-person indexical is used to qualify the felt body. In other words, subjects typically have a sense of bodily ownership for the body that they feel in bodily sensations. This paper puts forward, firstly, three desiderata that theories on the sense of bodily ownership should meet. Secondly, it assesses two views that account for the sense of bodily ownership in terms of the spatial content of (...) bodily sensations, appealing to a notion of a sense of boundedness, and argues that they do not meet the goals defined. (shrink)

Part of the philosophical interest of the topic of organic individuals is that it promises to shed light on a basic and perennial question of philosophical self-understanding, the question what are we? The class of organic individuals seems to be a good place to look for candidates to be the things that we are. However there are, in principle, different ways of locating ourselves within the class of organic individuals; organic individuals occur at both higher and lower mereological levels than (...) the stereotypical bounded and physiologically unified vertebrate organism. The view that we are organic individuals smaller than the physiological organism is one that has recently been endorsed by Derek Parfit. This paper attempts to resolve a dispute between Parfit’s ‘embodied part’ view and a contrary ‘animalist’ view according to which we are whole organisms. It is explained why a problem of multiple thinkers presents a serious obstacle to a straightforward resolution of this dispute. Parfit’s own strategy for dealing with this obstacle is found to be problematic. However his strategy has a certain general shape, which can be instantiated in a different, and better, specific way. I close in the final section, not with a definite resolution of the dispute, but with illustration of how progress on the question of about which organic individuals we are requires engagement with questions about the nature and function of self-awareness. (shrink)

I offer a close reading of the first part of Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, arguing that contrary to widely held interpretation, one of Sartre's main goals in that text is to defend the view that consciousness does not necessitate self-awareness, that not all conscious states need be, ipso facto, states of self-awareness. In addition, I explain that this view about the conceptual relationship between consciousness and self-awareness has important methodological implications. One of the standard strategies (...) for accounting for the possibility of the type of capacity to have I* thoughts and attitudes is based on the assumption that being conscious necessarily entails being self-aware in at least a minimal sense, and then proceeds to explain how it I*-thoughts and attitudes are possible on the basis of those minimal states of self-awareness. Yet if Sartre's account of self-awareness is so much as plausible, this kind of strategy is bound to be incomplete. By helping itself to a notion of minimal self-awareness that is purportedly constitutive of consciousness, it fails to account for what is, by its own lights, the most fundamental form of self-awareness. (shrink)

Recent literature has examined the problem facing decision makers with bounded awareness, who may be unaware of some states of nature. A question that naturally arises here is whether a value of awareness, analogous to value of information, can be attributed to changes in awareness. In this paper, such a value is defined. It is shown that the sum VOA +\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$+$$\end{document} VOI is constant and, except for scale (...) effects, independent of the choice set. It follows that the larger is VOA, the smaller is VOI. This point is illustrated for a simple two-state case, then proved for general classes of compact convex choice sets, and for alternative interpretations of the concept of unawareness. (shrink)

Persuasive technologies are interactive systems designed to change and shape users’ behaviours towards specific goals. By discussing the case of screen-time management applications, this paper explores how persuasive systems transform self-awareness and the self’s cognitive architecture. Drawing on the notion of tectonoetic awareness, I will illustrate how artefacts enable the transition from the temporal bounded experience characterizing first-person perspective (noetic awareness) to the ability of reflecting on oneself from a third person and temporally extended perspective (autonoetic (...) awareness). I will argue that persuasive systems make possible new modalities of self-recognition and self-projection while they simultaneously affect the sense of agency by interfering with users’ actions and intentions. (shrink)

In this paper we design a new logical system to explicitly model the different deductive reasoning steps of a boundedly rational agent. We present an adequate system in line with experimental findings about an agent’s reasoning limitations and the cognitive effort that is involved. Inspired by Dynamic Epistemic Logic, we work with dynamic operators denoting explicit applications of inference rules in our logical language. Our models are supplemented by (a) impossible worlds (not closed under logical consequence), suitably structured according to (...) the effect of inference rules, and (b) quantitative components capturing the agent’s cognitive capacity and the cognitive costs of rules with respect to certain resources (e.g. memory, time). These ingredients allow us to avoid problematic logical closure principles, while at the same time deductive reasoning is reflected in our dynamic truth clauses. We further show that our models can be reduced to awareness-like plausibility structures that validate the same formulas and we give a sound and complete axiomatization with respect to them. This approach to the agent’s internal deductive reasoning is finally combined with actions of external information. (shrink)

For the first time ever, the Toltec wisdom from the Ruiz family is bound together in a book of Daily Meditations. Readers are invited on a six-month journey of daily lessons with don Miguel Ruiz Jr. that are designed to inspire, nourish, and enlighten adherents as they travel along the Toltec path. Drawing on years of apprenticeship under his father and grandmother, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. shares Toltec lessons on Love, Faith, Agreements, and most importantly: Awareness. The purpose of (...) each meditation is to guide readers into a deeper understanding of his or her self, as well as the world in which we live. In the introduction to the book, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. reminds readers that progress on the Toltec path is not measured by the acquisition of things, status, or even ideas, but rather the complete and total realization that everything in the world is perfect, exactly the way it is at this moment. "Love is accepting ourselves just the way we are, with all of our flaws and our ever-changing belief system. You are nothing else but who you are. You are not the person you were a year ago. You are not the person you will be in a year. You aren't even the person you think you are. You simply are, and that must be enough." --don Miguel Ruiz Jr. This book will have special appeal to those already familiar with his father's books The Four Agreements, The Mastery of Love, and The Fifth Agreement, as well as don Miguel Ruiz Jr.'s own book, The Five Levels of Attachment. It also makes a wonderful gift. (shrink)

"This book is addressed to the one who lives in a passionate quest for deepened awareness, who hungers to touch and taste human existence more intimately, who delights in the celebration of now." "In the era of the multiversity with its fragments of introverted expertise, it does sound absurdly ambitious to make an integrative attempt at synoptic reflection, seeking to conjoin disparate insights from developmental psychology, psychotherapy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, phenomenology, the fine arts, jurisprudence, linguistics, theology, hermeneutics, liturgics, history, (...) and the philosophy of history...Admittedly it is not because I am an expert in any or all of these fields, but instead a human being--a single, experiencing, time-bound, warm-bodied human being--that emboldens me to speak with any assurance about the human situation. More than most other academic bailiwicks, my own academic discipline (theological ethics) invites and demands such integrative reflection on man, culture, time, being and value, dysfunctional and constructive human behavior." "Our thesis: The structure of human awareness emerges directly out of man's temporal situation and his relation to being." (excerpts from the Introduction, by Thomas C. Oden). (shrink)

In a society where mobility, globalization and contact with people from other cultures have become its basic descriptors, the enhancement of plurilingualism and intercultural understanding seem to be of the utmost concern. From a Positive Psychology Perspective, agency is the human capacity to affect other people positively or negatively through their actions. This agentic vision can be related to mediation, a concept rooted in the socio-cultural learning theory where social interaction is considered a fundamental cornerstone in the development of cognition. (...) Social interactions in the language learning setting may be facilitated through musical activities due to its social bonding effect. This paper tries to offer insights on how a musical-mediated experience in language learning may develop students’ interpersonal and collaborative competences to become active members of a more inclusive society. Mediation, considered as a paradigm shift in the foreign language classroom and the different out-of-class language learning possibilities, could also provide an environment where learners maximize their emotional intelligence. Our paper focuses on this paradigm shift spearheaded by the CEFR Companion Volume and the considerable repercussions it is bound to have for foreign language didactics, as cooperative tasks become central to foreign language learning. We hypothesize that mediated language learning experiences imply a socioemotional change in learners, focusing on the others, on their needs and interests, by trying to help them understand texts, concepts or facilitating communication with their peers. An intervention with a musical-mediated language learning experience was designed and implemented in the classroom. A self assessment scale with mediation descriptors and the socioemotional expertise scale (SEE) were administered. Results show that students become more mindful of their strengths, of their capacity for collaborating and team working. This leads to more awareness of their mediation skills. Students’ mediation skills correlate significantly with their socio-emotional skills, more concretely with their expressivity. The implementation of a musical-mediated experience also promoted tolerance and enhanced learners’ intrinsic motivation for language learning at the same time as they acknowledged their diversity. (shrink)

Sustainability problems often seem intractable. One reason for this is due to difficulties coordinating actors’ efforts to address socially responsible outcomes. Drawing on theories of bounded ethicality and incorporating work on communicating shared values in coordinating action this paper outlines the lack coordination as a matching issue, one complicated by underlying heterogeneity in actors’ moral values and thus motivation to address socially responsible outcomes. Three factors contribute to this matching problem. First, we argue it is not actors’ simple cognitive (...) awareness, but their moral awareness of social issues that explains why certain actors move to address problems while others do not. In other words, actors may recognize sustainability problems, but are not motivated to solve them as they are not understood as moral problems. Second, we posit that progress requires alignment in issues that some actors find worth addressing whereas others do not, thus explaining how heterogeneity in moral perceptions interrupt coordination towards socially important goals. Finally, we propose that progress is undermined if actors myopically focus on level-specific outcomes in ways that elucidates why institutional responses often fail to address individual outcomes and vice versa. We use the existing literature on the socially important issue of food waste to examine our theoretical contribution and develop a typology that explains conditions that inhibit coordination. Thus, our work proposes a psycho-structural view on matching and coordination toward sustainable outcomes, highlighting how psychological and structural constraints prevent effective coordination in addressing sustainability goals. (shrink)

Visual feature binding has been suggested to depend on reentrant processing. We addressed the relationship between binding, reentry, and visual awareness by asking the participants to discriminate the color and orientation of a colored bar and to report their phenomenal awareness of the target features. The success of reentry was manipulated with object substitution masking and backward masking. The results showed that late reentrant processes are necessary for successful binding but not for phenomenal awareness of the bound (...) features. Binding errors were accompanied by phenomenal awareness of the misbound feature conjunctions, demonstrating that they were experienced as real properties of the stimuli . Our results suggest that early preattentive binding and local recurrent processing enable features to reach phenomenal awareness, while later attention-related reentrant iterations modulate the way in which the features are bound and experienced in awareness. (shrink)

The phenomenon of perceptual persistence after the motion stops in shape-from-motion displays was used to study the influence of prior knowledge on the maintenance of a percept in awareness. In SFM displays an object composed of discontinuous line segments are embedded in a background of randomly oriented lines. The object only becomes perceptible when the line segments that compose the object and the lines that compose the background move in counterphase. Critically, once the movement of the line segments stops, (...) the percept of the object persists for a short period of time. In the present study, perceptual persistence for digits exceeded that reported for nonsense shapes composed of the same line segments. This result is taken as evidence that the processes involved in the persistence of SFM, and therefore sustained perception, are sensitive to top-down influences. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany social scientific studies have shown the positive effects of self-awareness and reflexivity in shaping individuals’ career paths. However, using life- and work-history interviews conducted with salespersons in Toronto, Canada, I find that high levels of self-awareness – as demonstrated by active deliberation over one’s career – has both positive and negative results in terms of career outcomes. Respondents whose careers initially progressed as they expected tended to benefit from reflexively managing their careers. However, the benefits of reflexivity (...) were mixed for respondents whose careers did not begin as planned. This group of respondents sometimes benefited from thinking about alternatives; but also, sometimes, cast themselves outside of careers that they deemed to be ‘normal’. Observing the way that some respondents formed new career plans based on unmet expectations, and began to pursue those emergent plans, I argue that scholarly uses of reflexivity should incorporate its function as a potential career trajectory anchor. (shrink)

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: the problem of cue salience, and the problem of cue uncertainty. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that (...) underlies ecological rationality, which originate from the misapplication of concepts in psychophysics. We then work through the most popular experimental task in the ecological rationality literature—the city size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have informally been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology—in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given or available for statistical processing. Therefore we focus on the psychogenesis of awareness rather than psychophysics of cues. For any agent or organism, environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and the organism-directed probing that shapes awareness and perception. Cues in teeming environments are noticed when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. In this sense, awareness toward a cue or cues is actively “grown.” We thus argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. This generative approach not only applies to relatively mundane organism interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissors” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments. (shrink)

When a fragmented line-drawing of an object moves relative to a background of randomly oriented lines, the previously hidden object can be segregated from the background and consequently enters awareness. In this shape-from-motion paradigm, the percept of the object briefly persists after the motion stops, demonstrating the maintenance of a bound percept in awareness. This study investigated how the manipulation of object features that are crucial to recognition influences both the binding process and the maintenance of objects in (...) awareness. Overall, we found that objects that took longer to recognize were nonetheless maintained in awareness for longer. We argue that this effect is mediated by additional elaborative processing that is required to bind these less recognizable forms, which generates stronger and more robust representations. These representations are then more easily maintained in awareness, suggesting an important role of elaborative mechanisms for conscious representations. (shrink)

The story of the body. Fay Bound Alberti takes the human body apart in order to put it back anew, telling the cultural history of our key organs and systems from the inside out, from blood to guts, brains to sex organs.

Many contemporary scholars argue that Schelling’s version of intellectual intuition retains certain central features of the Kantian and Fichtean conceptions. One of the common claims is that, as with Kant and Fichte, Schelling’s intellectual intuition is the power of the subject’s productive understanding. However, we show that for the Schelling of the Identitätsphilosophie period, intellectual intuition is the power not of an understanding that intuits, or a productive intellect, but of a receptive and penetrating sensibility that understands.

In this paper I draw from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of the 1920s to outline some basic features of his theory of intentionality that I believe have not been fully appreciated or utilized, and that allow for both novel and fruitful interventions in questions about meaning, the relationship between mind and the world, and epistemic justification, principally as they appear in John McDowell’s synoptic project in Mind and World. I argue that while elements of McDowell’s picture are ultimately unsatisfying and problematic, (...) much of his conceptual framework can and should be put into dialogue with Heidegger’s, and that in so doing we make available powerful resources for amending the McDowellian account. Moreover, these emendations have attractive implications for his distinctive desiderata. In particular, they provide original conceptions of normativity’s place in nature, of the boundaries of the space of reasons, and of the relationship between the answerability of thought both to the world and to human beings as a rational community. (shrink)

Loneliness is one of the most neglected aspects of emotion history, despite claims that the 21st century is the loneliest ever. This article argues against the widespread belief that modern-day loneliness is inevitable, negative, and universal. Looking at its language and etymology, it suggests that loneliness needs to be understood firstly as an “emotion cluster” composed of a variety of affective states, and secondly as a relatively recent invention, dating from around 1800. Loneliness can be positive, and as much a (...) part of the body as the mind. Using a longue durée approach, I argue that we cannot understand loneliness as a “modern epidemic” without considering its history, its meanings, its practice, and its links with the body. (shrink)

There are important synergies for the next generation of ethical leaders based on the alignment of modified or adjusted mental models. This entails a synergistic application of moral imagination through collaborative input and critique, rather than "me too" obedience. In this article, we will analyze the Milgram results using frameworks relating to mental models (Werhane et al., Profitable partnerships for poverty alleviation, 2009), as well as work by Moberg on "ethics blind spots'' (Organizational Studies 27(3): 413-428, 2006), and by Bazerman (...) and Chugh on "bounded awareness" (Harvard Business Review, 2006; Mind & Society 6: 1-18, 2007) Using these constructs to examine the Milgram experiment, we will argue that the ways in which the experiments are framed, the presence of an authority figure, the appeal to the authority of science, and the situation in which the naïve participant finds herself or himself, all create a bounded awareness, a narrow blind spot that encourages a climate for obedience, brackets out the opportunity to ask the moral question: "Am I hurting another fellow human being?" and may preclude the subject from utilizing moral imagination to opt out of the experiment. We will conclude that these forms of almost blind obedience to authority are correctable, but with difficulty. We will argue that linking the modification of mental models to an unbinding of awareness represents an important synergistic relationship and one that can build effectively on the lessons learned from our experience with moral imagination. (shrink)

This essay explores small “ordinary” experiences of moral harm as problems of social injustice. Starting with two stories, we first argue against a dominant framework of personal responsibility that assigns responsibility to particular blameworthy agents. Instead we sketch an account of why structural responsibility for social harm must be considered, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, drawing on Margaret Walker’s notion of moral repair and Christopher Marshall’s interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, (...) we sketch an account of Christian moral responsibility grounded in restorative justice that seeks to address daily experiences of moral harm through the moral repair work of neighbor-love. (shrink)

Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are in principle able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind. Adopting a sensemaking approach, we argue that ethical blindness results from a complex interplay between individual sensemaking activities and context factors.

Awareness of boundary, both physical and mental, is seen as the beginning of perception. In any account of the world, therefore, boundary must be a ubiquitous component. In sharp contrast, accounts of God within the Christian tradition commonly have proceeded by the affirmation that God is above and beyond boundary as infinite, timeless, and simple. To overcome this “problem of transcendence,” of how such a God can relate to such a world, an eight-term grammar of boundary is developed to (...) demonstrate how God as Trinity can properly be held to be without boundary yet constitute the ground of a bounded world. This leads to a way of granting theological significance to the origin and development of life. Life is seen to exist in dynamic, intentional relationships between context (“outside”) and intext (“inside”) across permeable boundaries through which an exchange of resources and information takes place for the sake of self-continuation. Comprehending life's distinctive utilization of boundary in terms of the grammar developed here enables life to be seen not only as a vestige of the Trinity but also, precisely because of this, as a sign and parable of redemption. (shrink)

Consciousness and self-awareness seem intuitively linked, but how they intertwine is less than clear. Must one be self-aware in order to be consciousness? Indeed, is consciousness just a special type of self-awareness? Or perhaps it is the other way round: Is being self-aware a special way of being conscious? Discerning their connections is complicated by the fact that both the main relata themselves admit of many diverse forms and levels. One might be conscious or self- aware in many (...) different ways or respects, and to varying degrees. Thus the real questions of linkage must be posed more specifically. We need to ask not whether the two are bound in general, but whether and how being conscious in some specific sense and degree relates to some particular sort of self-awareness. Only those more specific questions are likely to have fully determinate answers. (shrink)

When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result of (...) experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines. (shrink)

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we (...) project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate--either in the waking state or in a lucid dream--we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives. (shrink)