Download or read book The Caldron of Consciousness written by Ralph D. Ellis and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These new studies by prominent neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general, as an aspect of self-organizing, embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities, and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness, which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for 'agency'; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious, behaving organism. (Series B)

Download or read book The Reflexive Nature of Consciousness written by Greg Janzen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, “implicit” awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or “what-it-is-like,” dimension of conscious experience, defending the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (Series A)

Download or read book Curious Emotions written by Ralph D. Ellis and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. (Series A)

Download or read book Mind that Abides written by David Skrbina and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Panpsychism is the view that all things, living and nonliving, possess some mind like quality. It stands in sharp contrast to the traditional notion of mind as the property of humans and (perhaps) a few select 'higher animals'. Though surprising at first glance, panpsychism has a long and noble history in both Western and Eastern thought. Overlooked by analytical, materialist philosophy for most of the 20th century, it is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts in several areas of inquiry. A number of recent books – including Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West (2005) and Strawson et al's Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2006) – have established panpsychism as respectable and viable. Mind That Abides builds on these works. It takes panpsychism to be a plausible theory of mind and then moves forward to work out the philosophical, psychological and ethical implications. With 17 contributors from a variety of fields, this book promises to mark a wholesale change in our philosophical outlook. (Series A)

Download or read book Consciousness Emerging written by Renate Bartsch and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the workings of neural networks in perception and understanding of situations and simple sentences shows that, and how, distributed conceptual constituents are bound together in episodes within an interactive/dynamic architecture of sensorial and pre-motor maps, and maps of conceptual indicators (semantic memory) and individuating indicators (historical, episodic memory). Activation circuits between these maps make sensorial and pre-motor fields in the brain function as episodic maps creating representations, which are expressions in consciousness. It is argued that all consciousness is episodic, consisting of situational or linguistic representations, and that the mind is the whole of all conscious manifestations of the brain. Thought occurs only in the form of linguistic or image representations. The book also discusses the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. Four recent controversies in consciousness research are discussed and decided along this model of consciousness: • Is consciousness an internal or external monitoring device of brain states? • Do all conscious states involve thought and judgement? • Are there different kinds of consciousness? • Do we have a one-on-one correspondence between certain brain states and conscious states. The book discusses also the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. (Series A)

Download or read book On Becoming Aware written by Natalie Depraz and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian a priori 'new theory' of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we become aware of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

Download or read book The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory written by Carolyn K. Rovee-Collier and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only book that examines the theory and data on the development of implicit and explicit memory. It first describes the characteristics of implicit and explicit memory (including conscious recollection) and tasks used with adults to measure them. Next, it reviews the brain mechanisms thought to underlie implicit and explicit memory and the studies with amnesics that initially prompted the search for different neuroanatomically-based memory systems. Two chapters review the Jacksonian (first in, last out) principle and empirical evidence for the hierarchical appearance and dissolution of two memory systems in animal models (rats, nonhuman primates), children, and normal/amnesic adults. Two chapters examine memory tasks used with human infants and evidence of implicit and explicit memory during early infancy. Three final chapters consider structural and processing accounts of adult memory dissociations, their applicability to infant memory dissociations, and implications of infant data for current concepts of implicit and explicit memory. (Series B)

Download or read book Exploring the Self written by Dan Zahavi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this volume is to discuss recent research into self-experience and its disorders,and to contribute to a better integration of the different empirical and conceptual perspectives. Among the topics discussed are questions like 'What is a self?,' 'What is the relation between the self-givenness of consciousness and the givenness of the conscious self?','How should we understand the self-disorders encountered in schizophrenia?' and 'What general insights into the nature of the self can pathological phenomena provide us with?' Most of the contributions are characterized by a distinct phenomenological approach. The chapters by Butterworth, Strawson, Zahavi, and Marbach are general in nature and address different psychological and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a self. Next Eilan, Parnas, and Sass turn to schizophrenia and ask both how we should approach and understand this disorder, and, more specifically,what we can learn about the nature of selfhood and existence from psychopathology. The chapters by Blakemore and Gallagher present a defense and a criticism of the so-called model of self-monitoring, respectively. The final three chapters by Cutting, Stanghellini, Schwartz and Wiggins represent anthropologically oriented attempts to situate pathologies of self-experience. (Series B)

Download or read book Caging the Beast written by Paula Droege and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major obstacle for materialist theories of the mind is the problem of sensory consciousness. How could a physical brain produce conscious sensory states that exhibit the rich and luxurious qualities of red velvet, a Mozart concerto or fresh-brewed coffee? Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness offers to explain what these conscious sensory states have in common, by virtue of being conscious as opposed to unconscious states. After arguing against accounts of consciousness in terms of higher-order representation of mental states, the theory claims that sensory consciousness is a special way we have of representing the world. The book also introduces a way of thinking about subjectivity as separate and more fundamental than consciousness, and considers how this foundational notion can be developed into more elaborate varieties. An appendix reviews the connection between consciousness and attention with an eye toward providing a neuropsychological instantiation of the proposed theory. (Series A)

Download or read book Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry written by Peter Zachar and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary work addresses the question, "What role should psychological conceptualization play for thinkers who believe that the brain is the organ of the mind?" It offers readers something unique both by systematically comparing the writings of eliminativist philosophers of mind with the writings of the most committed proponents of biological psychiatry, and by critically scrutinizing their shared anti-anthropomorphism from the standpoint of a diagnostician and therapist. Contradicting the contemporary assumption that common sense psychology has already been proven futile, and we are just waiting for an adequate scientifically-based replacement, this book provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments showing why, if they did not already have both cognitive and psychodynamic psychologies, philosophers and scientists would have to invent them to better understand brains. (Series A)

Download or read book Beyond Dissociation written by Yves Rossetti and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis and dissociation have proved to be useful tools to understand the basic functions of the brain and the mind, which therefore have been decomposed to a multitude of ever smaller subsystems and pieces by most scientific approaches. However, the understanding of complex functions such as consciousness will not succeed without a more global consideration of the ways the mind-brain works. This implies that synthesis rather than analysis should be applied to the brain. The present book offers a collection of contributions ranging from sensory and motor cognitive neuroscience to mood management and thought, which all focus on the dissociation between conscious (explicit) and nonconscious (implicit) processing in different cognitive situations. The contributions in this book clearly demonstrate that conscious and nonconscious processes typically interact in complex ways. The central message of this collection of papers is: In order to understand how the brain operates as one integrated whole that generates cognition and behaviour, we need to reassemble the brain and mind and put all the conscious and nonconscious pieces back together again. (Series B)

Download or read book The Evolution of Human Language written by Wolfgang Wildgen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-06-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wolfgang Wildgen presents three perspectives on the evolution of language as a key element in the evolution of mankind in terms of the development of human symbol use. (1) He approaches this question by constructing possible scenarios in which mechanisms necessary for symbolic behavior could have developed, on the basis of the state of the art in evolutionary anthropology and genetics. (2) Non-linguistic symbolic behavior such as cave art is investigated as an important clue to the developmental background to the origin of language. Creativity and innovation and a population's ability to integrate individual experiments are considered with regard to historical examples of symbolic creativity in the visual arts and natural sciences. (3) Probable linguistic 'fossils' of such linguistic innovations are examined. The results of this study allow for new proposals for a 'protolanguage' and for a theory of language within a broader philosophical and semiotic framework, and raises interesting questions as to human consciousness, universal grammar, and linguistic methodology. (Series B)

Download or read book Touching for Knowing written by Yvette Hatwell and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominance of vision is so strong in sighted people that touch is sometimes considered as a minor perceptual modality. However, touch is a powerful tool which contributes significantly to our knowledge of space and objects. Its intensive use by blind persons allows them to reach the same levels of knowledge and cognition as their sighted peers.In this book, specialized researchers present the recent state of knowledge about the cognitive functioning of touch. After an analysis of the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of touch, exploratory manual behaviors, intramodal haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) abilities and cross-modal visual-tactual coordination are examined in infants, children and adults, and in non-human primates. These studies concern both sighted and blind persons in order to know whether early visual deprivation modifies the modes of processing space and objects. The last section is devoted to the technical devices favoring the school and social integration of the young blind: Braille reading, use of raised maps and drawings, “sensory substitution” displays, and new technologies of communication adapted for the blind. (Series B)

Download or read book Sisyphus s Boulder written by Eric Dietrich and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness lies at the core of being human. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we need a theory of consciousness. In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that prevents it from ever being explained. Consequently, philosophical debates over materialism and dualism are a waste of time. Scientific explanations of consciousness fare no better. Scientists do study consciousness, and such investigations will continue to grow and advance. However, none of them will ever reveal what consciousness is. In addition, given the centrality of consciousness in philosophy, Dietrich and Hardcastle claim that philosophy itself needs to change. That the central problems of philosophy persist is actually a profound epistemic fact about humans. Philosophy, then, is a limit to what humans can understand. (Series A)

Download or read book Language Vision and Music written by Paul Mc Kevitt and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, vision and music: what common cognitive patterns underlie our competence in these disparate modes of thought? Language (natural & formal), vision and music seem to share at least the following attributes: a hierarchical organisation of constituents, recursivity, metaphor, the possibility of self-reference, ambiguity, and systematicity. Can we propose the existence of a general symbol system with instantiations in these three modes or is the only commonality to be found at the level of such entities as cerebral columnar automata? Answers are to be found in this international collection of work which recognises that one of the basic features of consciousness is its MultiModality, that there are possibilities to model this with contemporary technology, and that cross-cultural commonalities in the experience of, and creativity within, the various modalities are significant. With the advent of Intelligent MultiMedia this aspect of consciousness implementation in mind/brain acquires new significance. (Series B)

Download or read book Face Recognition written by Sam S. Rakover and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation In 1997, Rakover (U. of Haifa) and Cahlon (Oakland U, Michigan) won an award from the Minister of Internal Security of the State of Israel for developing the Catch model for face recognition. Since then they have proposed the law of Face Recognition by Similarity. Here they describe the computer and mathematical research they have conducted and some of their results. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book My Double Unveiled written by Giuseppe Vitiello and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the dissipative quantum model of brain and to its possible implications for consciousness studies is addressed to a broad interdisciplinary audience. Memory and consciousness are approached from the physicist point of view focusing on the basic observation that the brain is an open system continuously interacting with its environment. The unavoidable dissipative character of the brain functioning turns out to be the root of the brain's large memory capacity and of other memory features such as memory association, memory confusion, duration of memory. The openness of the brain implies a formal picture of the world which is modeled on the same brain image: a sort of brain copy or “Double”, where world objectiveness and the brain implicit subjectivity are conjugated. Consciousness is seen to arise from the permanent “dialogue” of the brain with its Double. The author's narration of his (re-)search gives a cross-over of the physics of elementary particles and condensed matter, and the brain's basic dynamics. This dynamic interplay makes for a “satisfying feeling of the unity of knowledge”. (Series A)