Search results for "Consciousness"

Spin as Primordial Self-Referential Process Driving Quantum Mechanics, Spacetime Dynamics and Consciousness

2007

We have recently theorized that consciousness is intrinsically connected to quantum mechanical spin since said spin is embedded in the microscopic structure of spacetime and is more fundamental than spacetime itself, that is, spin is the “mind-pixel.” Applying these ideas to the particular structures and dynamics of the brain, we have developed a qualitative model of quantum consciousness. In this paper, we express our fundamental view that spin is a primordial self-referential process driving quantum mechanics, spacetime dynamics and consciousness. To justify such a view, we will draw support from existing literatures, discuss from a reductionist perspective the essential properties said s…

Dialogue sur le handicap : réciprocité et altérité

2017

This dialogue is not one between a lecturer in philosophy (Pierre Ancet) questioning a person in a situation of physical dependency (Marcel Nuss), but a dialogue between two full-fledged authors. In this exchange the organic deficiency constitutes only the specific character of an individual’s experience, which is to be described without making it a pathology. Disability is considered in its organic, psychological and social dimension, as an incapacitating constraint, but also as a potential vector to discover nonstandard capacities. Among these capacities, the authors stress the consciousness of time and of the body, particularly unexpected as this consciousness is examined by an entirely …

Planning by imagination in Cicerobot, a robot for museum tours

2005

More Than Meets the Eye: Toward a Post-Materialist Model of Consciousness.

2015

Commonly accepted models of human consciousness have substantial shortcomings, in the sense that they cannot account for the entire scope of human experiences. The goal of this article is to describe a model with higher explanatory power, by integrating ideas from psychology and quantum mechanics. In the first part, the need for a paradigm change will be justified by presenting three types of phenomena that challenge the materialistic view of consciousness. The second part is about proposing an alternative view of reality and mind–matter manifestation that is able to accommodate these phenomena. Finally, the ideas from the previous parts will be combined with the psychological concepts deve…

Symptoms and the body: Taking the inferential leap

2017

The relationship between the conscious experience of physical symptoms and indicators of objective physiological dysfunction is highly variable and depends on characteristics of the person, the context and their interaction. This relationship often breaks down entirely in the case of "medically unexplained" or functional somatic symptoms, violating the basic assumption in medicine that physical symptoms have physiological causes. In this paper, we describe the prevailing theoretical approach to this problem and review the evidence pertaining to it. We then use the framework of predictive coding to propose a new and more comprehensive model of the body-symptom relationship that integrates ex…

Do Men and Women Differ When Purchasing Private Label Goods?

2014

In the context of shopping goods, this paper analyzes the key variables in men and women when they have to face private label purchase decision: attitude towards private label, value consciousness, brand consciousness, involvement with the product and private label purchase intention. The moderating role of gender in the relationship between those variables is also analyzed. On a sample of 433 individuals, and considering two different shopping goods, results showed differences between men and women in all the variables, except in the value consciousness. Furthermore, due to a multigroup analysis technique, we found more differences between the variables affecting PL purchase intention. Acc…

Attitude, Quality and Satisfaction Toward Distributor Brands in Durable Goods: The Influence of Consumers’ Price Consciousness

2015

This study analyzes how consumers’ general attitude towards distributor brands, the perception held by the individual on the quality differences between distributor and manufacturer brands, as well as the anticipated satisfaction with the product are key variables for explaining the intention to purchase durable goods with distributor brands. As a significant contribution the influence of consumers’ price consciousness as a moderating variable is tested.

Beyond free will : The embodied emergence of conscious agency

2019

Is it possible to reconcile the concept of conscious agency with the view that humans are biological creatures subject to material causality? The problem of conscious agency is complicated by the tendency to attribute autonomous powers of control to conscious processes. In this paper, we offer an embodied process model of conscious agency. We begin with the concept of embodied emergence – the idea that psychological processes are higher-order biological processes, albeit ones that exhibit emergent properties. Although consciousness, experience, and representation are emergent properties of higher-order biological organisms, the capacity for hierarchical regulation is a property of all livin…

The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness

2017

The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness, and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is offered as a possible starting point for building artificial consciousness. Given current technology, it should be possible to build a machine that contains a rich internal …

Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought

2020

It is well known that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960–1961. More precisely, through a self-criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness – which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome – to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the “element” of Being, and on Being itself as “true negative,” or as “Being of deflection” and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this t…