Search results for "consciousne"
showing 10 items of 351 documents
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?
Radical disruptions of self-consciousness
2020
This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.
Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals
2021
Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtainin…
2013
This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of "minimal phenomenal selfhood," which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and ful…
Beyond Conceptual Dualism
2008
Francesc Forn I ARGIMON: Editorial Foreword: Special Series in Cognitive Science John R. SEARLE: Guest Foreword Preface Introduction One: Problems and Theories: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Philosophical Debate Two: Biological Naturalism: A Naturalistic and Non-Reductive Ontology of Consciousness Three: Functionalistic Models of Consciousness: Dennett, Chalmers, and the Desubstantialization of Mind Four: Holism and Mental Causation in the Theory of Intentionality Five: John Searle and Contemporary Neuroscience. Holism, Mental Causation, and the Roots of Subjectivity Conclusion Works Cited About the Author Index