Consciousness and Neuroscience

ABSTRACT LeDoux's pioneering work on the neurobiology of fear has played a crucial role in informing debates in the philosophy of emotion. For example, it plays a key part in Griffiths’ argument for why emotions don’t form a natural kind. Likewise, it is employed by Faucher and Tappolet to defend pro-emotion views, which claim that emotions aid reasoning. LeDoux, however, now argues that his work has been misread. He argues that using emotion terms, like ‘fear’, to describe neurocognitive data adds (...) a ‘surplus meaning’: it attributes phenomenal properties to survival circuits which they don’t possess. This paper aims to explore LeDoux's new proposal, and examine the potentially devastating consequences that ensue for the aforementioned views. I end by addressing the worry that these lessons are conditional on LeDoux's own higher-order theory of emotional consciousness being true. (shrink)

The brain is composed of electrically excitable neuronal networks regulated by the activity of voltage-gated ion channels. Further portraying the molecular composition of the brain, however, will not reveal anything remotely reminiscent of a feeling, a sensation or a conscious experience. In classical physics, addressing the mind-brain problem is a formidable task because no physical mechanism is able to explain how the brain generates the unobservable, inner psychological world of conscious experiences and how in turn those conscious experiences steer the (...) underlying brain processes toward desired behavior. Yet, this setback does not establish that consciousness is non-physical. Modern quantum physics affirms the interplay between two types of physical entities in Hilbert space: unobservable quantum states, which are vectors describing what exists in the physical world, and quantum observables, which are operators describing what can be observed in quantum measurements. Quantum no-go theorems further provide a framework for studying quantum brain dynamics, which has to be governed by a physically admissible Hamiltonian. Comprising consciousness of unobservable quantum information integrated in quantum brain states explains the origin of the inner privacy of conscious experiences and revisits the dynamic timescale of conscious processes to picosecond conformational transitions of neural biomolecules. The observable brain is then an objective construction created from classical bits of information, which are bound by Holevo's theorem, and obtained through the measurement of quantum brain observables. Thus, quantum information theory clarifies the distinction between the unobservable mind and the observable brain, and supports a solid physical foundation for consciousness research. (shrink)

The first decade of event-related potential (ERP) research had established that the most consistent correlates of the onset of visual consciousness are the early visual awareness negativity (VAN), a posterior negative component in the N2 time range, and the late positivity (LP), an anterior positive component in the P3 time range. Two earlier extensive reviews ten years ago had concluded that VAN is the earliest and most reliable correlate of visual phenomenal consciousness, whereas LP probably reflects later processes associated with (...) reflective/access consciousness. This article provides an update to those earlier reviews. ERP and MEG studies that have appeared since 2010 and directly compared ERPs between aware and unaware conditions are reviewed, and important new developments in the field are discussed. The result corroborates VAN as the earliest and most consistent signature of visual phenomenal consciousness, and casts further doubt on LP as an ERP correlate of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the two-system framework, examine its strengths, point out a fundamental weakness concerning the unity of conscious experience, and then propose a new hypothesis that avoids that weakness and other related concerns. According to our strong emergence hypothesis, what emerges are not merely mental properties in specialized, distributed neural areas, but also a new, irreducibly singular entity that functions in a recurrent manner to integrate its mental properties and to rewire its brain. We argue that the (...) former function is suggested, in part, by the effects of anesthetics on sensory integration, and that the latter function is suggested by evidence garnered from the neuroscience of mindfulness, constraint-induced movement therapy for stroke, and neuroimaging data surrounding mental illness. We then discuss how our strong emergence hypothesis relates to the description and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Finally, potential objections are addressed. (shrink)

Consciousness is arguably the greatest mystery in science, still being unsolved after millennia of thinking. This book is one further attempt at trying to bring new insights regarding consciousness. While certainly the mystery will continue, the ideas in this book will raise awareness regarding an aspect of the phenomenology of consciousness that has been overlooked by past thinkers, and that is the emergent structure of consciousness, which in the end will be shown to be realized by the nature of self-reference (...) of looking-back-at-itself. The great take-away from appreciating the true nature of self-refence would be the need to switch to an unformal way of thinking in doing science if the problem of consciousness is to be resolved. To unformal way of thinking means abandoning the desire to have clearly defined entities in our theories, like “energy” or “space-time” or “spin”, and instead allow for entities that cannot be formalized, to be responsible for the workings of the world. We will slowly see as the book unfolds why the need for unformal way of thinking arises. -/- Regarding the presentation style, the book is both a popular book and a rigorous presentation that goes into thorough phenomenological analyses of consciousness. The reason is that our lives themselves are both familiar and the very nature of existence. As opposed to other writings that use a more technical approach, the philosophy of this book is that a theory of consciousness should focus more on the most mundane manifestations of consciousness, like the redness of an apple or the warmish feeling of cup of hot chocolate, in order to give a clearer understanding of consciousness. Therefore, the book is full of everyday examples of conscious experiences that the reader can relate to and use them to gain deeper insights into the workings of consciousness. In the same way that LHC is the laboratory of physicists, introspection is our own laboratory, the advantage of introspection over LHC being that it is accessible to anyone. Every person can gain a deep knowledge of consciousness by simply paying close attention to his own experiences. Of course, the difficulty arises because of the huge diversity of our experiences and this might raise an apparent initial obstacle of where one is to begin his understanding of consciousness. The book is designed as a guide through the complexities of everyday experiences in the direction of sorting them out in general and clear ways of thinking, showing that consciousness needs not be something that difficult to understand if only the proper attention is given to our experiences. -/- Therefore, the book starts with a chapter about qualia, where through many examples it is shown to be a form of meaning. Then the reader is familiarized with the Self through simple thought experiments that lead to the conclusion of the unicity of the Self, and then a further logical analysis that shows the eternal existence of the Self. After these initial familiarizations with consciousness, the book goes into its core subject, that being the emergent phenomenology, in which it will be shown how consciousness is structured on a holarchy of levels and how ultimately this structuring is a result of self-reference looking-back-at-itself, consciousness being shown to be possible only because of the unformalizable nature of self-reference. (shrink)

This paper is aiming to investigate the physical substrate of conscious process. It will attempt to find out: How does conscious process establish relations between their external stimuli and internal stimuli in order to create reality? How does consciousness devoid of new sensory input result to its new quantum effects? And how does conscious process gain mass in brain? This paper will also try to locate the origins of consciousness at the level of neurons along with the quantum effects of (...) conscious process. (shrink)

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people’s views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of (...) research. 249 participants completed the survey, among which 80% were in academia, and around 40% were experts in consciousness research. Topics covered include the progress made by the field, funding for consciousness research, job opportunities for consciousness researchers, and the scientific rigor of the work done by researchers in the field. The majority of respondents (78%) indicated that scientific research on consciousness has been making progress. However, most participants perceived obtaining funding and getting a job in the field of consciousness research as more difficult than in other subfields of neuroscience. Overall, work done in consciousness research was perceived to be less rigorous than other neuroscience subfields, but this perceived lack of rigor was not related to the perceived difficulty in finding jobs and obtaining funding. Lastly, we found that, overall, the global workspace theory was perceived to be the most promising (around 28%), while most non-expert researchers (around 22% of non-experts) found the integrated information theory (IIT) most promising. We believe the survey results provide an interesting picture of current opinions from scientists and researchers about the progresses made and the challenges faced by consciousness research as an independent field. They will inspire collective reflection on the future directions regarding funding and job opportunities for the field. (shrink)

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel (...) formulation of physicalism. Although physicalism has been traditionally understood to be a metaphysical thesis, Elpidorou and Dove argue that there is an alternative and indeed preferable understanding of physicalism that both renders physicalism a scientifically informed explanatory project and allows us to make important progress in addressing the ontological problem of consciousness. Physicalism, Elpidorou and Dove hold, is best viewed not as a thesis (metaphysical or otherwise) but as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to compositionally explain all natural phenomena that are central to our understanding of our place in nature. Consciousness and Physicalism is replete with philosophical arguments and informed, through and through, by findings in many areas of scientific research. It advances the debate regarding the ontological status of consciousness. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science. And it will challenge both foes and friends of physicalism. -/- . (shrink)

Given the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) there are no brain electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (the felt quality of redness or the redness of red, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field, the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothball, bodily sensations from pains to orgasms, mental images that are conjured up internally, the felt quality of emotion, the experience of a stream of conscious thought or the phenomenology of (...) thought). However, there are brain occipital and left temporal electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (Pereira, 2015). Notwithstanding, as evoked signal, the change in event-related brain potentials phase (frequency is the change in phase over time) is instantaneous, that is, the frequency will transiently be infinite: a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, is instantaneous in electroencephalogram averaging or filtering that the event-related brain potentials required and the underlying structure of the event-related brain potentials in the frequency domain cannot be accounted, for example, by the Wavelet Transform or the Fast Fourier Transform analysis, because they require that frequency is derived by convolution rather than by differentiation. However, as I show in the current original research report, one suitable method for analyse the instantaneous change in event-related brain potentials phase and accounted for a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, in the underlying structure of the event-related brain potentials is the Empirical Mode Decomposition with post processing (Xie et al., 2014) Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition. (shrink)

A strong and growing intuition in society today is the idea that our thoughts create our own reality. Yet it seems obvious that, try as we might, our lives are not quite what we fantasize. Is the intuition thus wrong? Through a rational, methodic interpretation of meditative insights, the validity of which is substantiated with a compelling scientific literature review, the author constructs hypotheses that reconcile facts with intuition. Mesmerizing narratives of his expeditions into the unconscious suggest an amazing possibility: (...) just as dreams are seemingly autonomous manifestations of our psyche, reality may be an externalized combination of the subconscious dreams of us all, mixed as they are projected onto the fabric of space-time. Perhaps the laws of physics are an emergent by-product of such synchronization of thoughts. Through computer simulations, the author explores the implications of these hypotheses, with conclusions uncannily reminiscent of observed phenomena. (shrink)

The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. -/- The features described here (...) are not shared in all PP accounts. Some may not be necessary for an individual model; others may be contested. Indeed, not even all authors of this collection will accept all of them. To make this transparent, we have encouraged contributors to indicate briefly which of the features are necessary to support the arguments they provide, and which (if any) are incompatible with their account. For the sake of clarity, we provide the complete list here, very roughly ordered by how central we take them to be for “Vanilla PP” (i.e., a formulation of predictive processing that will probably be accepted by most researchers working on this topic). More detailed explanations will be given below. Note that these features do not specify individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of “predictive processing”. All we currently have is a semantic cluster, with perhaps some overlapping sets of jointly sufficient criteria. The framework is still developing, and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to provide theory-neutral explanations of all PP ideas without already introducing strong background assumptions. (shrink)

Mental ownership concerns who experiences a mental state. According to David Rosenthal (2005: 342), the proper way to characterize mental ownership is: ‘being conscious of a state as present is being conscious of it as belonging to somebody. And being conscious of a state as belonging to somebody other than oneself would plainly not make it a conscious state’. In other words, if a mental state is consciously present to a subject in virtue of a higher-order thought (HOT), then the (...) HOT necessarily representsthe subject as the owner of the state. But, we contend, one of the lessons to be learned from pathological states like somatoparaphrenia is that conscious awareness of a mental state does not guarantee first-person ownership. That is to say, conscious presence does not imply mental ownership. (shrink)

Recent fndings illustrate how changes in consciousness accommodated by neural correlates and plasticity of the brain advance a model of perceptual change as a function of meditative practice. During the mindbody response neural correlates of changing awareness illustrate how the autonomic nervous system shifts from a sympathetic dominant to a parasympathetic dominant state. Expansion of awareness during the practice of meditation techniques can be linked to the Default Mode Network (DMN), a network of brain regions that is active when the (...) one is not focused on the outside world and the brain is restful yet awake (Chen et al., 2008). A model is presented illustrating the dynamic mindbody response before and after mindfulness meditation, and connections are made with prefrontal cortex activity, the cardiac and respiratory center, the thalamus and amygdala, the DMN and cortical function connectivity. The default status of the DMN changes corresponding to autonomic modulation resulting from meditation practice. (shrink)

The mirror neuron system is widely held to provide direct access to the motor goals of others. This paper critically investigates this idea, focusing on the so-called ‘intentional worry’. I explore two answers to the intentional worry: first that the worry is premised on too limited an understanding of mirror neuron behaviour, second that the appeal made to mirror neurons can be refined in such a way as to avoid the worry. I argue that the first response requires an account (...) of the mechanism by which small-scale gestures are supposedly mapped to larger chains of actions but that none of the extant accounts of this mechanism are plausible. Section 4 then briefly examines refinements of the mirror neuron-mindreading hypothesis which avoid the intentional worry. I conclude that these refinements may well be plausible but that they undermine many of the claims standardly made for mirror neurons. (shrink)

Recent theoretical advances describing consciousness from information and integration have highlighted the unique role of the thalamocortical system in leading to integrated information and thus, consciousness. Here, we examined the differential distributions of specific and nonspecific thalamocortical functional connections using resting-state fMRI in a group of healthy subjects and vegetative-state patients. We found that both thalamic systems were widely distributed, but they exhibited different patterns. Nonspecific connections were preferentially associated with brain regions involved in higher-order cognitive processing, self-awareness and introspective (...) mentalizing. In contrast, specific connections were prevalent in the ventral and posterior part of the prefrontal and precuneus, known involved in representing externally-directed attentions. Significant reductions of functional connectivity in both systems, especially the nonspecific system, were observed in VS. These data suggest that brain networks sustaining information and integration may be differentiated by the nature of their thalamic functional connectivity. (shrink)

Beenfeldt assesses Dennett's approach to the philosophical problem of consciousness.

It is argued that theoretical models cannot use qualia as explanatory tools, and cannot explain them either; thus, there is no way to make qualia do any useful work at all, at least in a theory. However, qualia do occur in both imagery and perception, and this article presents some ways of thinking about qualia from a functional perspective. Imagery differs from perception in its function. It is not a faded copy of perception. It is less distinct than perception because (...) it is only as distinct as it needs to be, not because it is inherently indistinct. Qualia represent functionally relevant encodings whether in perception or imagery. The present approach is functionalist and quite similar to Pani's. (shrink)

This paper examines the possibility of finding evidence that phenomenal consciousness is independent of access. The suggestion reviewed is that we should look for isomorphisms between phenomenal and neural activation spaces. It is argued that the fact that phenomenal spaces are mapped via verbal report is no problem for this methodology. The fact that activation and phenomenal space are mapped via different means does not mean that they cannot be identified. The paper finishes by examining how data addressing this theoretical (...) question could be obtained. (shrink)

This paper discusses the content of agency awareness. It contrast three elements in content: what the goal is, how it is to be reached, and who is having the goal/performing the action ? Marc Jeannerod's claim that goal representations are self-other neutral is discussed. If goal representations are essentially sharable, then we do not understand other people by projecting a piece of internal knowledge on to them, as often assumed. The problem which our brain has to solve is the converse (...) problem : determining who the agent is, once a goal is identified. This view has interesting consequences on the theory of mentalization. One can plausibly speculate that observing action, with an additional simulatory component for action memory, form major building blocks in understanding other minds. Metarepresenting, in this perspective, would depend on additional executive capacities for maintaining distinct the inferences from diverse simulated contexts of action. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall offer a sketch of a dynamic theory of intentions. I shall argue that several categories or forms of intentions should be distinguished based on their different (and complementary) functional roles and on the different contents or types of contents they involve. I shall further argue that an adequate account of the distinctive nature of actions and of their various grades of intentionality depends on a large part on a proper understanding of the dynamic transitions among (...) these different forms of intentions. I also hope to show that one further benefit of this approach is to open the way for a more perspicuous account of the phenomenology of action and of the role of conscious thought in the production of action. (shrink)