Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study, law, education and psychological science research.
Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study, law, education and psychological science research.
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This chapter argues that the concepts and methods needed to study some subjective experiences objectively are already available. It shows how results from studies exploring conscious awareness in schizophrenia using first- and third-person perspective approaches provide new evidence for the validity of using first-person perspective approaches. A set of studies using the remember/know procedure to assess subjective states of awareness in patients with schizophrenia showed that autonoetic awareness is impaired. In conclusion, and it explores some outstanding questions that first-person perspective approaches have opened up in the research field of psychiatry and clinical psychology. Realism and idealism lead to diametrically opposed views of psychopathological manifestations, as illustrated by hallucinations. According to realism, hallucinations are false perceptions that arise in the absence of an external object or event. According to transcendental idealism, both normal perceptions and hallucinations are subjective experiences subserved by the same internal process.
Consciousness is only marginally relevant to artificial intelligence (AI), because to most researchers in the field other problems seem more pressing. The purpose of consciousness, from an evolutionary perspective, is often held to have something to do with the allocation and organization of scarce cognitive resources. This chapter describes Daniel Dennett's idea of the intentional stance, in which an observer explains a system's behavior by invoking such intentional categories as beliefs and goals. The computationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness ends up looking like a spoil-sport's explanation of a magic trick. The chapter focuses on critiques that are specifically directed at computational models of consciousness, as opposed to general critiques of materialist explanation. The contribution of artificial intelligence to consciousness studies has been slender so far, because almost everyone in the field would rather work on better defined, less controversial problems.
This chapter traces the development of the problem of consciousness in Western philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks to the middle of the 20th century. The core problem of consciousness focuses on the nature of subjectivity. The chapter focuses on what has become the central issue in consciousness studies, which is the problem of integrating subjectivity into the scientific view of the world. The mainstream view has not long been mainstream, for the problem of consciousness cannot strike one at all until a fairly advanced scientific understanding of the world permits development of the materialism presupposed by the mainstream view. It was the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries that forced the problem of the Christian dogma into prominence. In philosophy, the 1950s saw the beginning of a self-conscious effort to understand the mind and, eventually, consciousness as physical through and through in essentially scientific terms.
This chapter focuses on two distinct, linguistically oriented approaches to language and consciousness taken by Ray Jackendoff and Wallace Chafe. Jackendoff identifies three basic levels of information processing. One can be conscious of both thoughts and sounds. Language provides evidence of several kinds that consciousness of thoughts has priority over consciousness of sounds in ordinary mental life. It enhances the power of thought in three ways: by allowing thought to be communicated, by making it possible to focus attention on selected aspects of thought, and by providing access to valuations of thought. Chafe distinguishes between immediate and displaced consciousness, the former engaged in direct perception and the latter in experiences that are recalled or imagined. The imagistic and the ideational components of consciousness are held to be central components of thought, as thought is ordinarily understood.
The normal and abnormal variations in conscious state operate through three fairly well-understood physiological processes: activation (A), input-output gating (I), and modulation (M). This chapter provides an account of the phenomenology of the variations in conscious state, and shows how three mediating brain processes, activation, input-output gating, and modulation, interact over time so as to account for those variations in a unified way. It focuses on variations in consciousness during the sleep-wake cycle across species and draws on evidence from lesion, electrophysiological, and functional neuroimaging studies. By studying the way that consciousness is normally altered when we fall asleep and when we dream, it is possible to obtain insights about how the brain mediates consciousness. Armed with the AIM model, it is possible to obtain a unified view of the genesis of a wide variety of normal and abnormal changes in conscious experience.
This chapter provides an introduction to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and its way of approaching issues about consciousness. Phenomenology grows out of the recognition that we can adopt, in our own first person case, different mental attitudes or stances toward the world, life, and experience. One can discern certain ambivalence in the phenomenological tradition regarding the theoretical and practical or existential dimensions of the epoche. According to Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is intentional, in the sense that it aims toward or intends something beyond itself. Phenomenologists distinguish different types of intentionality. Another important part of the phenomenological account of intentionality is the distinction among signitive, pictorial, and perceptual intentionalities. In contemporary philosophy of mind the term 'phenomenal consciousness' refers to mental states that have a subjective and experiential character. The phenomenological analyses of embodiment and perception are relevant to current trends in cognitive science.
This chapter describes two empirical movements that have shaped the recent study of consciousness in relation to memory. The first breakthrough can be traced to the reports of implicit memory in severely amnesic individuals. The second impetus came from the distinction Endel Tulving introduced between remembering and knowing. The chapter adopts Tulving's tripartite distinction among three states of consciousness to provide coherence to the review of the literature. Tulving distinguished among autonoetic (remembering), noetic (knowing), and anoetic forms of consciousness, which refer, respectively, to self-knowing, knowing, and non-knowing states of consciousness. One of the most compelling findings from recent studies is that subjects sometimes report vivid conscious experiences (Remember responses) for events that never occurred. This phenomenon has been termed false remembering, illusory recollection, or phantom recollection. Research on remembering, knowing, and priming reveals the systematic responsiveness of these measures to the influence of specific independent and subject variables.
This chapter surveys current approaches to consciousness in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The five approaches discussed here include: mysterianism, dualism, representationalism, higher-order monitoring theory (HOMT), and self-representationalism. The chapter introduces a conceptual distinction between two kinds of mysterianism, an ontological one and an epistemological one. At the center of McGinn's theory is the concept of cognitive closure. Traditionally, approaches to the ontology of mind and consciousness have been divided into two main groups: monism and dualism. Most of the arguments that have been marshaled against representationalism are arguments by counter-example. HOMT tends to anchor consciousness in the operation of a monitoring device. One problem that does persist for the self-representational theory is the problem of animal consciousness. The ability to have self-representing states presumably requires all the conceptual sophistication that the ability to have higher-order monitoring states does, and perhaps even greater sophistication.
This chapter describes a theory of the nature of emotion and the functions of emotions. It addresses the issue of consciousness, especially of qualia, in relation to emotional feelings and actions. It highlights that what is written cannot be regarded as being establishable by the normal methods of scientific enquiry. It may be noted that the ability to recall previous steps in a plan and bring them into the conscious, higher-order thought system is an important prerequisite for long-term planning that involves checking each step in a multi-step process. According to the present formulation, there are two types of route to action performed in relation to reward or punishment in humans. This discussion of dual routes to action has been with respect to the behaviour produced. The chapter provides a short specification of what might have to be implemented in a neural network to implement conscious processing.
This chapter provides an overview of existing computational (mechanistic) models of cognition in relation to the study of consciousness, on the basis of psychological and philosophical theories and data. It begins by examining some foundational issues concerning computational approaches toward consciousness. Then, various existing models and their explanations of the conscious/unconscious distinction are presented. Work in the area of computational modeling of consciousness generally assumes the sufficiency and the necessity of mechanistic explanations. The chapter looks into some details of two representative computational models, exemplifying either two systems or one-system views. Various related issues, such as the utility of computational models, explanations of psychological data, and potential applications of machine consciousness, have been touched on in the process. Based on existing psychological and philosophical evidence, existing models were compared and contrasted to some extent.
This chapter discusses the theory and research on psychodynamic processes that may contribute to the current understanding of conscious and unconscious processes. It describes the models of consciousness that emerged from psychoanalytic clinical observation at the turn of the last century. The chapter argues that these models were not only prescient in multiple respects but that they also point to phenomena that would be important to integrate with contemporary views of consciousness that have their roots in the laboratory. Then, it describes two areas of psychoanalytically influenced research that bear on contemporary concepts of consciousness: unconscious (subliminal) activation and unconscious affect-regulation processes that affect judgment and decision making. In conclusion, the chapter discusses two ways that the psychodynamic theory and research might inform contemporary accounts of consciousness, by distinguishing among different meanings of activation and between implicit/explicit and declarative/non-declarative processes.
This chapter considers three distinct but related classes of evidence: behavioral studies, neuroimaging, and brain-damaged patient case studies. It discusses recent advances in the study of implicit perception, considering the ways in which they do and do not improve on earlier approaches. The chapter highlights claims for implicit perceptual or semantic processing of discrete stimuli, largely overlooking implicit skill learning, artificial grammar learning, or other forms of procedural knowledge that might well be acquired without awareness. It also considers recent arguments about how best to study implicit perception. Claims for and against implicit perception received extensive empirical attention starting in the late 1950s, with sentiment in the field vacillating between acceptance and skepticism. Finally, the chapter discusses how qualitative differences in the nature of perceptual processing may be of theoretical significance even without a clear demonstration that processing occurs entirely outside of awareness.
This chapter provides an introduction to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and its way of approaching issues about consciousness. Phenomenology grows out of the recognition that we can adopt, in our own first person case, different mental attitudes or stances toward the world, life, and experience. One can discern certain ambivalence in the phenomenological tradition regarding the theoretical and practical or existential dimensions of the epoche. According to Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is intentional, in the sense that it aims toward or intends something beyond itself. Phenomenologists distinguish different types of intentionality. Another important part of the phenomenological account of intentionality is the distinction among signitive, pictorial, and perceptual intentionalities. In contemporary philosophy of mind the term 'phenomenal consciousness' refers to mental states that have a subjective and experiential character. The phenomenological analyses of embodiment and perception are relevant to current trends in cognitive science.