Search results for "Consciousness"
showing 10 items of 338 documents
Don’t Stress, It’s Under Control: Neural Correlates of Stressor Controllability in Humans
2021
AbstractAnimal research has repeatedly shown that experience of control over an aversive event can protect against the negative consequences of later uncontrollable stress. Neurobiologically, this effect is assumed to correspond to persistent changes in the pathway linking the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the dorsal raphe nucleus. However, it remains unclear to what extent these findings translate to humans. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, we subjected participants to controllable and uncontrollable aversive but non-painful electric stimuli, as well as to a control condition without aversive stimulation. In each trial, a symbol signalled whether participants coul…
The role of ethical attitudes in the mortality of patients with disorders of consciousness.
2022
From Focused Thought to Reveries: A Memory System for a Conscious Robot
2018
© 2018 Balkenius, Tjøstheim, Johansson and Gärdenfors. We introduce a memory model for robots that can account for many aspects of an inner world, ranging from object permanence, episodic memory, and planning to imagination and reveries. It is modeled after neurophysiological data and includes parts of the cerebral cortex together with models of arousal systems that are relevant for consciousness. The three central components are an identification network, a localization network, and a working memory network. Attention serves as the interface between the inner and the external world. It directs the flow of information from sensory organs to memory, as well as controlling top-down influences…
ONG internacionales y solidaridad global. Un análisis referido a la sociedad española (International NGOs and Global Solidarity. A Focus on Spanish S…
2007
Several analysts have pointed out the emergence of a global consciousness that is closely related to the process of globalization of social life. It has been dered that this global consciousness, which is supported on an expansion of the geographical space of responsibility from which citizens feel they are being begged for aid, is encouraged by the rev lution of information and communication technologies (ICT), the contents broadcast by the mass media and the action of international NGOs. From the context of these and starting from the data c ntained in a CIS survey (E-2419), this paper seeks to contrast empirically the hypothesis of the modifying action of the «cultural reference framewor…
Semantics for Subjective Measures of Perceptual Experience
2019
Il vincolo di affinità profonda. Verso una filosofia ambientale panpsichista
2022
The article provides some arguments in favour of a panpsychist turn in environmental philosophy. It first explains why dualism remains a favoured polemical target for many environmental activists and theorists, even though the scientific/metaphysical paradigm of reference is now generally physicalist. It then points to some of the tribulations of environmental philosophy in juggling dualism and physicalism. It goes on to describes some of the strategies adopted by environmental philosophers to establish an axiologically-relevant ontological affinity between humans and non-humans, and notes how these strategies punctually (and more or less explicitly and plausibly) return to the recognition …
A Toolbox of Phenomenological Methods
2009
In addition to a large number of misrepresentations of phenomenology,1 one can see an increasing interest in phenomenology among cognitive scientists and analytic philosophers. It is the method of phenomenology from which one expects to shed some light on the problem of consciousness. How does this approach work? What are the specific tools of phenomenology? Explanations as well as critical discussions of phenomenological methods are scattered across the literature. Moreover, the sometimes misleading or impenetrable terminology of classical phenomenology blocks easy understanding. The language of phenomenology may be an important reason why the working cognitive scientist who may be ready t…
Prenatal Music Exposure Induces Long-Term Neural Effects
2013
We investigated the neural correlates induced by prenatal exposure to melodies using brains' event-related potentials (ERPs). During the last trimester of pregnancy, the mothers in the learning group played the ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ -melody 5 times per week. After birth and again at the age of 4 months, we played the infants a modified melody in which some of the notes were changed while ERPs to unchanged and changed notes were recorded. The ERPs were also recorded from a control group, who received no prenatal stimulation. Both at birth and at the age of 4 months, infants in the learning group had stronger ERPs to the unchanged notes than the control group. Furthermore, the ERP amp…
A cognitive architecture for robot self-consciousness
2008
Objective: One of the major topics towards robot consciousness is to give a robot the capabilities of self-consciousness. We propose that robot self-consciousness is based on higher order perception of the robot, in the sense that first-order robot perception is the immediate perception of the outer world, while higher order perception is the perception of the inner world of the robot. Methods and material: We refer to a robot cognitive architecture that has been developed during almost 10 years at the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo. The architecture is organized in three computational areas. The subconceptual area is concerned with the low level processing of perceptual data comi…
Life-Space and Life-World
2000
For me, the main question is this: can a common thematic ground be found for both phenomenology and those philosophical discourses that rest on sciences of life? Or, rather, has the fundamentality of life matters perhaps put an end to phenomenology as a primary grounding discipline? What if the “direct givenness”, proposed by Husserl, cannot give us insight into that-which-lives, thus marking the impossibility of phenomenology as a universal and strict science? Could it really be that consciousness, with its constitutive activities, is exactly that-which-lives?