The Self-Awareness of the Mind: Phenomenal World and the Mind Beyond

Diogenes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-25
Author(s):  
Ja-Kyoung Han

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that perceives the world? Is it possible for us to realize the very mind that perceives the world? This article discusses the existence of the world perceived by the mind in order to deal with the existence of the mind which perceives the world and the knowability of the mind. Phenomenal world is a perceptual world which is a fictitious world constructed by our conceptual language system. And the base of the fictitious phenomenal world, the object itself, is emptiness. The emptiness is the emptiness of the mind that perceives and constructs the world. Thus, the awareness of the emptiness of the world is the self-awareness of the mind. Since the emptiness of my mind is the same emptiness of all other beings, the mind is the capacity to sympathize with the whole world, the universal mind, One-mind. Every man is aware of oneself as One-mind. “Gong-juk-young-ji” or the “original enlightenment” of Buddhism is the self-awareness of the mind as emptiness.

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-79
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith

Knowledge may be examined from the third-person perspective, as psychologists and sociologists do, or it may be examined from the first-person perspective, as each of us does when we reflect on what we ought to believe. This chapter takes the third-person perspective. One obvious source of knowledge is perception, and some general features of how our perceptual systems are able to pick up information about the world around us are highlighted. The role of the study of visual illusions in this research is an important focus of the chapter. Our ability to draw out the consequences of things we know by way of inference is another important source of knowledge, and some general features of how inference achieves its successes are discussed. Structural similarities between the ways in which perception works and the ways in which inference works are highlighted.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Umur Başdaş

Abstract Since in Hegel's view the end of philosophy coincides with its beginning, it is reasonable to expect that the end of the Encyclopaedia sheds some light on the Science of Logic. The Encyclopaedia concludes with three syllogisms in which logic, nature and spirit are related to each other in three different ways. This article analyses these three final syllogisms with an eye to how they can contribute to our understanding of the logical movement that starts from pure being. Trendelenburg and Schelling, like many others after them, think that Hegel's project in the Science of Logic is doomed from the start, because there can be no such thing as a non-temporal, purely logical movement. I argue that the three final syllogisms contain Hegel's response to this challenge. I call them ‘meta-encyclopaedic reflections’ in the sense that they take the whole encyclopaedic presentation of the Hegelian system as an object of critical inquiry and identify its limitations. The core of my approach is to examine how each one of these syllogisms situate us, namely the philosophizing subjects, vis-à-vis the world as disclosed by them. They demand that we shift from a third-person to a first-person perspective towards the world. The logical categories initially appear to move of their own accord only due to the limitations of the third-person perspective of the encyclopaedic presentation, which is to be sublated in a higher, first-person perspective. Hence, Hegel would happily admit that a purely logical movement is a mere appearance, but he would also claim that his philosophy can immanently explain the necessity of this appearance in the beginning of philosophy, and explain it better than his critics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Bomilcar ◽  
Elodie Bertrand ◽  
Robin G. Morris ◽  
Daniel C. Mograbi

The self is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing a variety of cognitive processes and psychosocial influences. Considering this, there is a multiplicity of “selves,” the current review suggesting that seven fundamental self-processes can be identified that further our understanding of the experience of dementia. These include (1) an embodied self, manifest as corporeal awareness; (2) an agentic self, related to being an agent and influencing life circumstances; (3) an implicit self, linked to non-conscious self-processing; (4) a critical self, which defines the core of self-identity; (5) a surrogate self, based on third-person perspective information; (6) an extended self, including external objects or existences that are incorporated into the self; and, finally, (7) an emergent self, a property of the self-processes that give rise to the sense of a unified self. These are discussed in relation to self-awareness and their use in making sense of the experience of dementia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 257-275
Author(s):  
Pei Wang

This paper describes the consciousness-related aspects of the AGI system NARS, discusses the implications of this design and compares it with other relevant theories and designs. It is argued that the function of consciousness is self-awareness and self-control, and the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person perspective of the same process for which the functional aspect is the third-person perspective.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang Yu

The human brain and the human language are precisely constructed together by evolution/genes, so that in the objective world, a human brain can tell a story to another brain in human language which describes an imagined multiplayer game; in this story, one player of the game represents the human brain itself. It’s possible that the human kind doesn’t really have a subjective world (doesn’t really have conscious experience). An individual has no control even over her choices. Her choices are controlled by the neural substrate. The neural substrate is controlled by the physical laws. So, her choices are controlled by the physical laws. So, she is powerless to do anything other than what she actually does. This is the view of fatalism. Specifically, this is the view of a totally global fatalism, where people have no control even over their choices, from the third-person perspective. And I just argued for fatalism by appeal to causal determinism. Psychologically, a third-person perspective and a new, dedicated personality state are required to bear the totally global fatalism, to avoid severe cognitive dissonance with our default first-person perspective and our original personality state.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahba Besharati ◽  
Paul Jenkinson ◽  
Michael Kopelman ◽  
Mark Solms ◽  
Valentina Moro ◽  
...  

In recent decades, the research traditions of (first-person) embodied cognition and of (third-person) social cognition have approached the study of self-awareness with relative independence. However, neurological disorders of self-awareness offer a unifying perspective to empirically investigate the contribution of embodiment and social cognition to self-awareness. This study focused on a neuropsychological disorder of bodily self-awareness following right-hemisphere damage, namely anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). A previous neuropsychological study has shown AHP patients, relative to neurological controls, to have a specific deficit in third-person, allocentric inferences in a story-based, mentalisation task. However, no study has tested directly whether verbal awareness of motor deficits is influenced by either perspective-taking or centrism, and if these deficits in social cognition are correlated with damage to anatomical areas previously linked to mentalising, including the supramarginal and superior temporal gyri and related limbic white matter connections. Accordingly, two novel experiments were conducted with right-hemisphere stroke patients with (n = 17) and without AHP (n = 17) that targeted either their own (egocentric, experiment 1) or another stooge patient’s (experiment 2) motor abilities from a first-or-third person (allocentric in Experiment 2) perspective. In both experiments, neurological controls showed no significant difference between perspectives, suggesting that perspective-taking deficits are not a general consequence of right-hemisphere damage. More specifically, experiment 1 found AHP patients were more aware of their own motor paralysis when asked from a third compared to a first-person perspective, using both group level and individual level analysis. In experiment 2, AHP patients were less accurate than controls in making allocentric, third-person perspective judgements about the stooge patient, but with only a trend towards significance and with no within-group, difference between perspectives. Deficits in egocentric and allocentric third-person perspective taking were associated with lesions in the middle frontal gyrus, superior temporal and supramarginal gyri, with white matter disconnections more predominate in deficits in allocentricity. This study confirms previous clinical and empirical investigations on the selectivity of first-person motor awareness deficits in anosognosia for hemiplegia and experimentally demonstrates for the first time that verbal egocentric 3PP-taking can positively influence 1PP body awareness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-158
Author(s):  
Renata Zieminska

The paper presents the concept of masculinity within the non-binary and multilayered model of gender/sex traits. Within that model, masculinity is not a simple idea, but rather is fragmented into many traits in diverse clusters. The experience of transgender men and men with intersex traits suggests that self-determined male gender identity is a mega trait that is sufficient for being a man. However, masculinity is not only psychological, as the content of the psychological feeling of being a man refers to social norms about how men should be and behave. And male coded traits are described as traits that frequently occur within the group of people identifying as men. Therefore, I claim that there are two interdependent ideas in the concept of masculinity: the self-determined male gender identity (first-person perspective) and a cluster of traits coded as male (third-person perspective). Within non-binary model the interplay between the two interdependent ideas allows to include borderline masculinities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 598-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Peter

At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This—epistemic question—has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Alexey Tumialis ◽  
Alexey Smirnov ◽  
Kirill Fadeev ◽  
Tatiana Alikovskaia ◽  
Pavel Khoroshikh ◽  
...  

The perspective of perceiving one’s action affects its speed and accuracy. In the present study, we investigated the change in accuracy and kinematics when subjects throw darts from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective with varying angles of view. To model the third-person perspective, subjects were looking at themselves as well as the scene through the virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD). The scene was supplied by a video feed from the camera located to the up and 0, 20 and 40 degrees to the right behind the subjects. The 28 subjects wore a motion capture suit to register their right hand displacement, velocity and acceleration, as well as torso rotation during the dart throws. The results indicated that mean accuracy shifted in opposite direction with the changes of camera location in vertical axis and in congruent direction in horizontal axis. Kinematic data revealed a smaller angle of torso rotation to the left in all third-person perspective conditions before and during the throw. The amplitude, speed and acceleration in third-person condition were lower compared to the first-person view condition, before the peak velocity of the hand in the direction toward the target and after the peak velocity in lowering the hand. Moreover, the hand movement angle was smaller in the third-person perspective conditions with 20 and 40 angle of view, compared with the first-person perspective condition just preceding the time of peak velocity, and the difference between conditions predicted the changes in mean accuracy of the throws. Thus, the results of this study revealed that subject’s localization contributed to the transformation of the motor program.


Author(s):  
Fredrik Svenaeus

Abstract A large slice of contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to developing an account of health and illness that proceeds from the first-person perspective when attempting to understand the ill person in contrast and connection to the third-person perspective on his/her diseased body. A proof that this phenomenological account of health and illness, represented by philosophers, such as Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, Havi Carel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kevin Aho, and Fredrik Svenaeus, is becoming increasingly influential in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics is the criticism of it that has been voiced in some recent studies. In this article, two such critical contributions, proceeding from radically different premises and backgrounds, are discussed: Jonathan Sholl’s naturalistic critique and Talia Welsh’s Nietzschean critique. The aim is to defend the phenomenological account and clear up misunderstandings about what it amounts to and what we should be able to expect from it.


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