Tags / 126 quotes from 15 sources
#consciousness
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Consciousness is the key issue for superintelligence
There are a few who argue that consciousness is a result of the fundamental organizational principle of the brain and therefore that we cannot call any machine truly intelligent without it. In other words, human consciousness is not a useless phenomenon but confers some real…
Intelligence derives from being conscious
Within contemporary cognitive science there is a blurry and awkward line between intelligence and consciousness. However, it seems clear to me that much of our intelligence derives from the fact that we are conscious. This is despite the fact that it is well known that most of…
Consciousness is a useful hallucination
Neither brains nor computers carry out computations. Consciousness is a hallucination, albeit a very useful one. And information is an epistemic tool that is a cultural invention rather than a natural entity. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that the brain doesn’t…
Hoping to leave readers more confused
than a year, and thinking about some for at least fifteen, I am more confused now about digital technology and consciousness than when I started writing. Likewise, after you read this book I hope you are more confused about computers, numbers, mathematics, the Internet…
Is the brain computable?
One fundamental problem is that we do not understand human consciousness. Many in science and artificial intelligence assume that human consciousness is based on information or computations. Several writers have tried to tackle this assumption, most notably the British…
Irreducible subjectivity
As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory…
Does LSD sharpen perception?
Does LSD actually enhance the accuracy of our perceptions? Do we see, think, or hear better on LSD? The question has not been scientifically investigated. In an email exchange, the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti wrote me, “I do not believe that because of drugs one is more…
Strong AI would have to be conscious
Rather than just a model or smart system, a strong AI system would be an entirely autonomous computer system in no way controlled or influenced by human operators. It could successfully adapt to its environment or even be part of its environment, making intelligent decisions…
The hard problem of consciousness
Many researchers in AI and neuroscience choose not to grapple with what philosopher David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. The hard problem refers to subjective or phenomenal experience. Chalmers argues that solving perception or cognition is easy because we…
Explaining consciousness away
This indifference to consciousness in practical AI research among those who are actually writing code and coming up with algorithms (and for whom, to be absolutely clear, I have a great deal of respect) is inherited from a long tradition in cognitive science and the philosophy…
Mind, consciousness and hallucination are linked
One of the goals of current AI research is to create “machines with minds in the full and literal sense,” according to Google’s Peter Norvig. Authors like Kurzweil, Rothblatt, and Bostrom think that machines with minds are inevitable, even if the problem of consciousness might…
Confusing experience with knowledge
Again in an email correspondence with Riccardo Manzotti he says: There is a confusion between experience and knowledge, which is the same as saying that there is a confusion between phenomenology and epistemology. Since we do both with our minds, a lot of people confuse the…
Concepts describe the world, experience is of it
One may be aware of one’s concepts and mental operations but that is the result of one’s capability of being conscious of the world (and thus also of certain internal tools to describe the world). In other words, we should not mix the concepts that we use to describe the world…
Koch's caveat on definitions
However, as neuroscientist Christof Koch has remarked:
Computations are not like gravity
“Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current flow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by…
Dehaene studies mathematics in the brain
Compared to Penrose, Dehaene’s approach to the issues of consciousness and math is much more empirical. Dehaene uses the tools of cognitive psychology and the latest brain imaging techniques to isolate precise brain regions, and to analyze exactly what these regions are doing…
Searle against functionalism
John Searle’s examination of social ontology. A professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, Searle specializes in consciousness, philosophy of language, and what he calls “social facts.” For example, what kinds of things are corporations and money? They exist…
Observer-independent and observer-relative facts
Searle makes a distinction between observer-independent features and observer-relative features. Observer-independent features are things like gravity, mass, chemical bonds,48 the solar system, and mountains. These things exist even in the absence of human minds…
Waking perception is dreamlike
“The nature and phenomenology of hallucinations can be explained more fruitfully within a framework that accepts that, similarly to hallucinations and dream imagery, normal conscious awareness of the world during wakefulness is a fundamentally subjective and dreamlike…
Top-down attention and the invisible gorilla
In cognitive science Kant and Nietzsche are mostly ignored and the view of the mind as representational prevails.51 The closest we might find to Kant’s idea is sometimes referred to as top-down and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing includes our expectations, our…
Back pain is ontologically subjective
Kant argued that all the things we think of as being objects in the world are only objects in our heads. And, as Searle would say in more modern philosophical language, these things have an ontologically subjective mode of existence. Another example could be your back pain. It…
How do brains achieve useful hallucinations?
how do our brains achieve useful hallucinations? This is one of the outstanding questions for neuroscience in the coming decades. Changing the underlying assumption that the role of human intelligence is to translate information about the world into veridical representations of…
Huxley's reducing valve
Human perception and consciousness often hide the true complexity of the world. Aldous Huxley, after his experiences with mescaline and LSD, saw the brain like a “reducing valve” that is actually protecting us from the vast amount of information that might otherwise flood and…
The self-model model of consciousness
The current thinking in AI is that consciousness is a self-model, which is a device (or mental model) that a machine or human uses to answer questions about how it interacts with the world. Dennett, for example, argues that the evolution of the self-model was driven by the…
Consciousness anticipates the environment
Human consciousness then is something that the brain does, but not in response to the environment. Consciousness anticipates the environment. The environment only sets certain limits on the contents of our waking consciousness—or biases us to experience our representations in a…
The mysterious flame of consciousness
The fundamental problem arises because all our current physics, including the Theory of Everything, has no prediction for, or understanding of, how subjective states can be objective states—or even how subjective states could be based in an objective state. Here we can see the…
Chalmers's third way on consciousness
third way proposed by David Chalmers, which is somewhat between the ideas of the functionalist and biological theorists. Chalmers proposes that consciousness is itself a fundamental property of the universe—just like
Consciousness as a fundamental force
gravity. In other words, consciousness in this theory is a fundamental force in the universe, instead of a phenomenon caused by lower-level physics. We say that gravity, for example, is a fundamental force in the universe and that it is not really composed of even more…
The global neuronal workspace
the global neuronal workspace, which was developed by cognitive scientist Bernard Baars.
Long-range connections behind the global workspace
The idea of the global workspace is motivated by the fact that the frontal areas of the brain and the sensory areas at the back of the brain are long-range connections.
Global neural ignition
Global neural network “ignition,” as it is sometimes called, means that neurons across your entire brain become active in response to a stimulus. This is in contrast to when a stimulus is flashed for only twenty milliseconds, for example.
Tononi's integrated information theory
Another prominent theory is the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness put forth by University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Giulio Tononi. This theory expands on the classical information theory of Claude Shannon and
Consciousness as integrated information
applies it to consciousness. In a nutshell, the idea is that the level of consciousness you have is related to how many possible states your brain could be in and how tightly integrated those states are. Consciousness is, according to the IIT, the same thing as the brain…
Biological versus functionalist views of consciousness
Without going into the mathematical details here, Maguire shows that if we do in fact have completely integrated experiences, this form of information integration cannot be modeled computationally. Both the global workspace theory and the integrated information theory can in…
Intelligence as an invention of each brain
What does the notion of consciousness-as-useful-hallucination imply for artificial intelligence? It requires a paradigm shift within artificial intelligence, from seeing intelligence and consciousness as being about perceiving objective truth with a “view from nowhere” in…
The physicalist starting point
Again, Searle lays out in very clear terms the basic issue about foundational ontology as it relates to consciousness: We know independently that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force (or whatever the ultimately correct physics tell us are the…
Physicalism and how neurons create meaning
Physicalism in its most general form is the belief that the only things in the universe that are observer-independent are physical. This is also what ontological objectivity means: once again, what things in the Universe exist without human observers? Physicalism further…
Dissolving the divide between subjective and objective
But the divide between subjective and objective could also turn out to be an illusion of our own creation. This division goes to the core of our scientific worldview. If some form of physicalism is true, then the division between the inner subjective worlds will have to…
The computational move
The real bone of contention between computationalists and others is whether to include computations in the list of observer-independent phenomena. Are computation and information like mass or the elementary particles? Or more dramatically, are computations even more fundamental…
Dennett's Cartesian Theater and multiple drafts
Dennett does not share the view that consciousness is decomposable. In other words, he thinks that our feeling that we have a unitary conscious experience is an illusion. He calls this feeling the “Cartesian Theater”—the place in the brain where all of the information…
Consciousness without central organization
organization.
LSD reveals consciousness as part of the universe
Hofmann thought LSD could do is allow us to become aware of the ontologically objective existence of consciousness as part of the universe.
Can LSD glimpse the view from nowhere?
There is no doubt that we each have private, uniquely subjective experiences that exist only in our heads. Furthermore, we can only perceive the world from our first-person perspectives, as separate from the world. This may follow from the fact that consciousness and its…
Psychedelics as tools to study consciousness
Despite revolutionary advancements in brain imaging over the last twenty years, there exist few studies on LSD and hallucinogens using modern neuroscience techniques. Researchers are now able to measure various aspects of the neural mechanisms of LSD action using objective…
Can A Robot, An Insect Or God Be Aware?: Scientific American
Experimental philosophy: a new approach?
The study of consciousness (see here and here) has long played a crucial role in the discipline of philosophy, where facts about such intuitions form the basis for some complex and influential philosophical arguments. But, traditionally, the study of these intuitions has…
Consciousness Debates
Can consciousness be explained?
Can consciousness be explained?
Edge.org
Consciousness and subjective experience
Our usual rule of thumb for the presence of consciousness is to assess, based on superficial cues, how similar to ourselves something appears to be. Thus a dog is more conscious than a duck, which in turn is more conscious than a daffodil. But our intuitions about so many…
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
Ketamine and the new neuro-reductionism
Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes…
Guidelines For The Construction, Format, And Management Of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. American National Standards Institute
Synonymy and the single preferred term
Synonymy occurs when a concept can be represented by multiple terms having the same or similar meanings. The desired content may be difficult to retrieve because it can be described by different but equivalent terminology. Words: Artificial consciousness, Biocomputers…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
The mystery of conscious machinery
For Searle, the nature of the machinery required for consciousness is a mystery. He makes no claim to have an answer explaining why computers cannot support properties such as understanding and consciousness, but brains can. In contrast, Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist…
Penrose: conventional computers cannot be conscious
Like Searle, Penrose argues that conventional computing machinery cannot support consciousness. A conscious mind requires very specific physical characteristics.
Quantum gravity and the conscious mind
If human thought comprises non-computational processes, then how is the brain supporting these processes? To answer this question, Penrose appeals to physics, and claims that the theory of quantum gravity is likely to be the kind of physics required to explain a conscious mind.
Microtubules as the seat of consciousness
The idea that quantum gravity may prove important to our understanding of consciousness predates Penrose, but he has stuck his neck out and specifically proposed that quantum gravity effects in the brain are likely to rely on microtubules – conveyor-belt-like structures inside
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Il maestro va usato e gettato via
RIALZATEVI! Il mondo là fuori ve lo sta maledettamente SPECCHIANDO! Ma solo ""chi avrà orecchie per udire e occhi per vedere"" saprà coglierlo.. Questo è il periodo in cui bisogna dire tutto in tutti i modi possibili per svegliare le persone... ◊◊◊◊◊◊ Il lavoro di risveglio…
Siamo l'immaginazione di noi stessi
" Tutta la materia è semplicemente energia condensata a lenta vibrazione ... Noi siamo tutti un'unica Coscienza che ha esperienza di sé soggettivamente ... La morte non esiste ... La vita è solo un sogno ... E noi siamo l'immaginazione di noi stessi..." ( Bill Hicks)
Ricordarsi di se stessi
Diventare consapevoli di noi stessi, anche solo per pochi momenti, è la tecnica che può aiutarci ad uscire dallo stato di alienazione in cui ci troviamo abitualmente... Deve essere accompagnato da uno sforzo di riduzione del troppo parlare, del mentire a noi stessi e del dare…
La separazione come illusione ottica della coscienza
L’essere umano è una parte del tutto chiamato universo, una parte limitata nello spazio e nel tempo. Fa esperienza di se stesso, dei suoi pensieri e sentimenti come di qualcosa di separato dal resto. Un tipo di illusione ottica della coscienza, questa illusione è una specie di…
Tu non sei colui che pensa
L’inizio della libertà è la realizzazione che tu non sei”colui che pensa”. Il momento in cui cominci ad osservare colui che pensa, si attiva un livello di coscienza più alto. Incominci a renderti ◊◊◊◊◊◊ conto che esiste un vasto regno di una intelligenza al di là del pensiero,e…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Il buddhismo come scienza del mentale
Il buddhismo è una scienza del mentale di antica derivazione, sorta in India intorno al VI secolo a.C. grazie alla predicazione di Gautama Siddhartha, il Buddha storico. Assunse aspetti cultuali già in India, per poi diffondersi in una vasta area dell’Asia; tra l’altro, in Cina…
Le tappe della coscienza nello Shingon
Nello Zen e nel Grande Veicolo in generale si invalida la distinzione tra l’uomo comune e l’illuminato; qui la si ripropone, persino enfatizzandola. Il percorso che porta alla buddhità è complesso e denso di asperità. Lo Shingon delinea una cartografia degli stati di coscienza…
Ryoshin, la coscienza innata
Cosa propone Onishi, dopo essersi sbarazzato di tutte le etiche fasulle? Egli si appella al ryoshin, termine confuciano dalla lunga storia. Meng-tzu fu il primo a usarlo, ma soltanto da Wang Yang-ming in poi gli si attribuisce una rilevanza etica centrale. Di solito lo si…
Shin, cuore e mente (definizione)
Shin. Designa il cuore/mente, le facoltà psichiche ed emotive dell’uomo, mai disgiunte. In certe scuole buddhiste acquista il senso di «coscienza percettiva». Nella psicologia cognitiva contemporanea si può rendere con «coscienza».
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Experiences versus objects without qualitative feel
So far you have had three types of conscious experiences: thinking about something, intentionally doing something, and feeling a sensation. What is the problem? Well, now look at the objects around you, the chairs and tables, houses and trees. These objects are not in any sense…
Conscious agents in a world of mindless particles
A third reason for the centrality of the mind is that, for many of us, myself included, the central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and…
The ghost in the machine
Each mind is an immortal soul. Bodies, as physical entities, are determined by the laws of physics; but minds have free will. Each of us as a self is identical with his or her mind. As living human beings we are composite entities, comprising both a mind and a body, but for…
For Descartes no material object is conscious
The problem for Descartes was not the general question of how a mental substance can arise out of neurobiology, because for him it cannot. His question was rather how specific mental contents such as feeling a pain can arise from the impact of an injury to my body. We think the…
Epiphenomenalism: consciousness as froth on the wave
Some philosophers who think that we could explain how consciousness is caused by brain processes cannot see how consciousness could have any causal powers of its own. Granted that somehow or other consciousness, and mental phenomena generally, are dependent on brain processes…
How I know my dog is conscious
I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine…
The insight that drives dualism
My guess is that dualism, in spite of being out of fashion, will not go away. Indeed in recent years dualism, at least property dualism, has been making something of a comeback, partly due to a renaissance of interest in consciousness. The insight that drives dualism is…
Materialism leaves something out
In this chapter I will present the most common arguments against materialism, concentrating on functionalism, because it is currently the most influential version of materialism. In general, these attacks have the same logical structure: the materialist account leaves out some…
Qualia: the qualitative feel of experience
Conscious experiences have a qualitative aspect. There is a qualitative feel to drinking beer, which is quite different from the qualitative feel of listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Several philosophers have found it useful to introduce a technical term to describe this…
What is it like to be a bat
One of the earliest well-known arguments against functionalist types of materialism was advanced in an article by Thomas Nagel called, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?”1 According to Nagel, the really difficult part of the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness. Suppose…
Biological naturalism
Suppose an animal gets a shortage of water in its system. The shortage of water will cause “saline imbalances” in the system, because the ratio of salt to water is excessive in favor of salt. This triggers certain activities in the kidneys. The kidneys secrete rennin, and the…
Consciousness as a system-level biological feature
The worst mistake is to suppose that the common-sense distinction between mental states naïvely construed and physical states naïvely construed is an expression of some deep metaphysical distinction. On the view that I am presenting, it is not. Consciousness is a system-level…
Mud, Beethoven and surface features
So consciousness differs from other phenomena such as liquidity and solidity that have surface features, in that we are reluctant to carve off the surface feature and redefine the notion in terms of the causes of the surface feature, because the point of the concept is to…
Pain and our definitional practices
there is an asymmetry between colors on the one hand and pains and consciousness on the other, because we would lose the point of having the concepts of consciousness if we carved off the first-person ontology and redefined the words in third-person terms. In that sense the…
For consciousness, appearance is reality
But why couldn’t we show that consciousness was an illusion like sunsets and thus do an eliminative reduction? Eliminative reductions rest on the distinction between appearance and reality. But we cannot show that the very existence of consciousness is an illusion like sunsets…
Causal reduction without ontological reduction
On the dualist’s conception, consciousness is definitely something over and above its material substrate. Indeed the dualist supposes that the irreducibility of consciousness already implies that consciousness is something over and above its neurobiological base. I deny that…
Consciousness and neurons, solidity and pistons
Think of it this way: roughly speaking, consciousness is to neurons as the solidity of the piston is to the metal molecules. Both consciousness and solidity function causally. But neither is “over and above” the systems of which they are a part.
Consciousness is qualitative, subjective and unified
I used to think that these three features, qualitativeness, subjectivity, and unity, could be described as distinct features of consciousness. It now seems to me that that is a mistake; they are all aspects of the same phenomenon. Consciousness is by its very essence…
Split-brain patients and two conscious fields
One of the ways to study consciousness is to study the pathological or degenerate forms of consciousness, and this is a method that I will use several times in this book. The split-brain patients suffered from terrible forms of epilepsy that could not be treated by the normal…
Not all consciousness is intentional
This feature, whereby many of my experiences seem to refer to things beyond themselves, is the feature that philosophers have come to label “intentionality.” Not all consciousness is intentional, and not all intentionality is conscious, but there is a very serious and important…
The gestalt structure of consciousness
Our conscious experiences do not just come to us as a disorganized mess; rather they typically come to us with well-defined, and sometimes even precise, structures. We do not, for example, in normal vision see undifferentiated blurs and fragments; rather, we see tables, chairs…
Mysterians and the mystery of consciousness
Mysterians think that consciousness is a mystery that cannot be solved by our existing scientific methods; and some mysterians think we will never be able to understand how consciousness could be explained by brain processes. Thomas Nagel5 thinks it might be possible one day to…
Panpsychism: consciousness is everywhere
Pan-psychism is the view that consciousness is everywhere. This view is seldom stated explicitly, but it is implicit in several authors particularly among the mysterians who think that if we are going to explain consciousness in terms of microprocesses, then, somehow or other…
The building-block approach to consciousness
our present era is remarkable in that there is a large number of very able neurobiologists attempting to figure out exactly how brain processes cause conscious states. Ideally, such a research project proceeds in the three stages I mentioned earlier. First, find the neuronal…
The unified-field approach to consciousness
The second approach to the problem of consciousness, the unified-field approach, begins by taking seriously the feature of qualitative subjective unity that I mentioned earlier. For this approach, the paradigm of consciousness, the initial target of the investigation, is not…
Intentionality is the structure of our mental life
The formal structure of the intentionality that I have described is no trivial matter. This is in fact the structure of our conscious life. Indeed, it is the structure of our mental life, both conscious and unconscious. When we come to understand a social situation we are in…
Consciousness anchors intentionality
The next step in nailing this whole account down to the real world is to point to the central role of consciousness. To have an intentional state consciously, for example to think consciously that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, is to be consciously aware of the conditions of…
Conscious thought makes content easy to explain
If you ask, How can a state of my brain have the content that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? it seems an impossibly difficult question. But if you ask, How can my conscious thought “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” have the content that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Then it is no longer…
Consciousness coordinates vast amounts of information
I will spell out the relations between consciousness and intentionality in chapter 9. For the moment, just this: one huge evolutionary advantage of human consciousness is that we can coordinate a large amount of intentionality (“information”) simultaneously in a single unified…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
Self-awareness: knower and known are one
The self-reflection known as self-consciousness or self- awareness (jikaku) provides an answer. There is a form of consciousness that inherently reflects or mirrors itself within itself, so that there is no difference between that which reflects and what is reflected. In…
Nishida's logic of place
If judgments describe things and states of affairs and thus would give us access to reality by setting themselves over-against that reality, we must step back as it were and consider a wider reality that includes judgments. In other words, we must place judgments that predicate…
The world mirrors itself in everything
In a sense awareness is irreducible, but it has a logical structure that accounts for its connection to a world of objects. Structurally, awareness mirrors itself in itself, in a manner analogous to the way an infinite set mirrors itself in its equivalent subsets, or to the way…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
Consciousness and matter
‘What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter,’ Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. ‘This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Self-awareness is uniquely human
Think about the mood you are now in. Can you identify it? What are you feeling? How would you describe your present mental state? Now think for a minute about how your mind is working. Is it quick and alert? Do you sense that you are torn between doing this mental exercise and…
Four uniquely human endowments
Within the freedom to choose are those endowments that make us uniquely human. In addition to self-awareness, we have imagination—the ability to create in our minds beyond our present reality. We have conscience—a deep inner awareness of right and wrong, of the principles that…
Self-awareness is the root of proactivity
proactivity is based on the unique human endowment of self-awareness. The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Mind at Large and the reducing valve
Earlier in his essay he had referred to possibilities broached by the English philosopher C. D. Broad. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has…
Everyone you see is asleep
Personally, as a young Marxist, religion had always been anathema to me, and it was only because I was ill in bed and couldn’t find anything else to read that I opened Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a book I had been sedulously avoiding for years. But the psychology I…
Self-remembering and the thrill of direct action
To say I had briefly “woken up” would express perfectly what had happened. And as I read more of Ouspensky’s book, I realized I had known this strange state before. Falling in love had taken me there; so had Third World travel; so had political activism when it involved crime…
The witness as pure consciousness
To what natural state will we revert? To the detached purely attentive consciousness, which has always registered everything we have ever experienced. To what Indian religion calls the witness—that is, the presence of consciousness itself in each individual. Pure consciousness…
The culture-wide denial of death
When my mind cleared I was sitting quietly, leaning up against the beech trunk, thinking about death. Gurdjieff used to speak of two higher “centers” in us, a higher emotional center and a higher intellectual one; and I know that on several trips I have touched on a…
Standing apart as the pure witness
Again I found a luminously clear reflection of what had happened in Nisargadatta Maharaj. Consciousness coming apart from its identification with matter plays a crucial role in I Am That. Speaking of meditation, Nisargadatta says: When the mind is quiet, we come to know…
I am everything I behold
“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been…
Who are you?
Who are you? Ramana asked. Just that. Who are you? Find the quick of your sense of identity, of your most intimate sense of you-ness, and see what you consist of for yourself. “You are awareness,” he said. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
A sudden disappearance of the personal self
‘In one moment, everything that I had ever taken to be my personal self completely disappeared,’ she later recalled. ‘It was just gone. As I waited for the bus to approach, something in consciousness was loosening somehow. And when it got there … this reference point of an “I”…
An inner experiencer can't explain unity
You cannot explain the unity of experience by simply positing an inner, unified experiencer. That simply begs the question: how is unity of experience possible in the first place?
The self as a nested hierarchy
functionally, the self is indeed a nested hierarchy. This is because the higher functions of self, such as self-consciousness, are not independent of lower functions, such as basic awareness of…
Minimal self and autobiographical self
Different theorists use different descriptions, but most distinguish between what is variously called a ‘minimal’, ‘core’ or ‘implicit’ self and the ‘extended’ or ‘autobiographical’ self.8 The minimal self is the most primitive kind of self-awareness. Any creature which is able…
Split brains and two centres of awareness
Because normally the corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres to communicate, this presents no practical difficulty for most people. But the corpus callosum had been severed in Sperry and Gazzaniga’s patients, so this information exchange could not occur. That meant that if…
We don't miss what we can't access
Michael Gazzaniga explains one aspect of this when he discusses why it is that a split-brain patient ‘does not find one side of the brain missing the other’. His simple answer is that ‘we don’t miss what we no longer have access to’.
Damasio: a changing self and a permanent self
Damasio believes that his view ‘resolves the apparent paradox identified by William James – that the self in our stream of consciousness changes continuously as it moves forward in time, even as we retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence continues’…
Locke's memory criterion of personal identity
Similar thoughts informed one of the first modern advocates of psychological continuity as the key to personal identity, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. Such was the emphasis he placed on memory that he has been widely attributed with holding a ‘memory…
Brains and bodies suffice for consciousness
To this we need to add another compelling fact: if you have a sufficiently complex brain and body, you will be conscious. Combined with the first fact, most people would conclude that brains and bodies are both necessary and sufficient for human consciousness: you can’t think…
Locke's definition of a person
John Locke’s definition of a person as a ‘thinking intelligent being that has reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’.
Souls preserve identity only with consciousness
Locke continues, ‘He is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body.’ In itself, having the soul of someone now dead no more makes you that person…
The systematic elusiveness of I
We do not observe the self in the same way that we observe the yellowness of a tulip, the smell of coffee or the thought that I really must book my train. The self is what is having those thoughts and perceptions – it is not itself a perception. And when you introspect, you…
Kant's transcendental unity of apperception
Cassam follows in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, who argued that for experience of the world to be possible, there has to be a fundamental unity within the subject of experience which allows the world to be perceived. Kant calls this the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’…
Neural correlates are not experiences
The second truth is that whatever thoughts and feelings are, they are not straightforwardly physical. You can’t see a memory under a microscope, and an emotion has no mass or velocity. It is true that with fMRI scanners you can see the brain activity associated with such…
Consciousness emerges from the working brain
what does seem to be true is that consciousness does indeed emerge from complex physical events in the brain, even if we don’t know how it does so. Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there’s something…
The unconscious matters through the conscious
It’s also worth saying something at this point about the role of the unconscious. Many of a psychoanalytic bent also criticise the kind of analytic, philosophical account of personal identity I have presented for neglecting that of which we are not conscious. It would indeed be…
Ātman and brahman
what is being negated in the word attā? To understand that, argues Batchelor, you have to appreciate the context of the Buddha’s time, fourth-century BCE India, where attā or ātman was very much the central idea of the brahmanic tradition. That tradition thought of brahman as…
Habitual tendencies and the mindstream
That which continues from one life to the next is not the contents of consciousness, such as memories or knowledge of people and places, but the mind’s ‘habitual tendencies’. So if, for example, you have practised mindfulness enough to have extreme mental clarity, then that…
Being Nobody: losing the self in ecstasy
We also sometimes live life under the third scenario, as Nobodies. ‘Human beings have stalked this planet for 100,000 years, [and] we have from time to time indulged in wine, women and song; or, drugs and sex and rock and roll, the modern equivalent. There are moments in most…