scholarly journals Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 239821281881601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil K. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Neurological Disorders ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Neuronal Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Global States

The mind and brain sciences began with consciousness as a central concern. But for much of the 20th century, ideological and methodological concerns relegated its empirical study to the margins. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and momentum befitting its status as the primary feature of our mental lives. Nowadays, consciousness science encompasses a rich interdisciplinary mixture drawing together philosophical, theoretical, computational, experimental, and clinical perspectives, with neuroscience its central discipline. Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms. Such progress will help reframe our understanding of our place in nature and accelerate clinical approaches to a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

scholarly journals The fall and rise of consciousness science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil Seth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Neurological Disorders ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Universe

At the birth of psychology as a science, consciousness was its central problem. But throughout the twentieth century, ideological and methodological concerns pushed the explicit empirical study of consciousness to the sidelines. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and impetus befitting its status as the central feature of our mental lives. Nowadays consciousness science encompasses a rich interdisciplinary mixture drawing together philosophical, theoretical, computational, experimental, and clinical perspectives. While solving the metaphysically ‘hard’ problem of why consciousness is part of the universe may seem as intractable as ever, scientists have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying conscious states. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third person objective) descriptions of biological and physical processes. Such progress will help reframe our understanding of our place in nature, and may also accelerate clinical approaches to a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

The contents of consciousness during sleep: Some theoretical problems

2000 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 995-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Revonsuo
Keyword(s):  
Rem Sleep ◽  
Memory Functions ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Global States

The approach of Hobson et al. is limited to the description of global states of consciousness, although more detailed analyses of the specific contents of consciousness would also be required. Furthermore, their account of the mind-brain relationship remains obscure. Nielsen's discussion suffers from conceptual and definitional unclarity. Mentation during sleep could be clarified by reconceptualizing it as an issue about the contents of consciousness. Vertes & Eastman do not consider the types of memory (emotional) and learning (implicit) that are relevant during REM sleep, and therefore dismiss on inadequate grounds the possibility of memory functions associated with REM sleep.[Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Vertes & Eastman]

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 277-280
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Ongoing Study ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind

This concluding chapter reflects on the lessons presented by this volume as a whole and considers the ongoing study into the origins of humanity in the post-1970s era. In the decades after, readers have not lost their passion for epic evolutionary dramas in which the entirety of human history unfolds before their eyes. Yet when students today respond to the question “What makes us human?” they are far more likely to invoke neurological facts than paleontological ones. The public battlefield over violence and cooperation has since shifted to new ground in the mind and brain sciences. Despite the apparent polarization of scientists writing about human nature into culture- and biology-oriented positions, the intellectual landscape defined by scientists working on the interaction between culture and biology has continued to flourish.

scholarly journals ‘It’s All Done With Mirrors’: V.S. Ramachandran and the Material Culture of Phantom Limb Research

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Phantom Limb ◽  
Mirror Therapy ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mirror Box ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Dualistic Ontology ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Phantom Limbs

This article examines the material culture of neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s research into phantom limbs. In the 1990s Ramachandran used a ‘mirror box’ to ‘resurrect’ phantom limbs and thus to treat the pain that often accompanied them. The experimental success of his mirror therapy led Ramachandran to see mirrors as a useful model of brain function, a tendency that explains his attraction to work on ‘mirror neurons’. I argue that Ramachandran’s fascination with and repeated appeal to the mirror can be explained by the way it allowed him to confront a perennial problem in the mind and brain sciences, that of the relationship between a supposedly immaterial mind and a material brain. By producing what Ramachandran called a ‘virtual reality’, relating in varied and complex ways to the material world, the mirror reproduced a form of psycho-physical parallelism and dualistic ontology, while conforming to the materialist norms of neuroscience today.

Integrating Mind and Brain Science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Primary Strategy

There is growing appreciation that understanding the complex relationship between neuroscience and psychological science is of fundamental importance to achieving progress across these scientific domains. One primary strategy for addressing this issue centers around understanding the nature of explanation in these different domains. This chapter provides a field guide to some of the core topics that have shaped and continue to influence the debate about explanation and integration across the mind and brain sciences. In addition to surveying the overall intellectual terrain, it also introduces the main proposals defended in the individual chapters included in the volume and highlights important similarities and differences between them.

Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Stephen T. Casper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
American Science ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Epistemic Culture ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Recent Tendency

What role does context play in the mind and brain sciences? This introductory article, “Of Means and Ends,” explores that question through its focus on the ways scientists and physicians engaged with and constructed technology in the mind and brain sciences in the twentieth century. This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman's revisionist and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves.

scholarly journals You can't always get what you want

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Schlicht ◽  
Krzysztof Dolega
Keyword(s):  
Computational Models ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Neural Correlates Of Consciousness ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Processing Framework

The predictive processing framework has gained significant popularity across disciplines investigating the mind and brain. In this article we critically examine two of the recently made claims about the kind of headway that the framework can make in the neuroscientific and philosophical investigation of consciousness. Firstly, we argue that predictive processing is unlikely to yield significant breakthroughs in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness as it is still too vague to individuate neural mechanisms at a fine enough scale. Despite its unifying ambitions, the framework harbors a diverse family of competing computational models which rely on different assumptions and are under-constrained by neurological data. Secondly, we argue that the framework is also ill suited to provide a unifying theory of consciousness. Here, we focus on the tension between the claim that predictive processing is compatible with all of the leading neuroscientific models of consciousness with the fact that most attempts explaining consciousness within the framework rely heavily on external assumptions.

Human and Animal Minds

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Report ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
First Person ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Mind

The book offers solutions to two related puzzles. One is about the place of phenomenal—or felt—consciousness in the natural order. Consciousness is shown to comprise fine-grained nonconceptual contents that are “globally broadcast” to a wide range of cognitive systems for reasoning, decision making, and verbal report. Moreover, the so-called “hard” problem of consciousness results merely from the distinctive first-person concepts we can use when thinking about such contents. No special non-physical properties—no qualia—need to be introduced. The second puzzle concerns the distribution of phenomenal consciousness across the animal kingdom. Here the book shows that there is, in fact, no fact of the matter. This is because thinking about phenomenal consciousness in other creatures requires us to project our first-person concepts into the mind of another; but such projections fail to result in determinate truth-conditions when the mind of the other is significantly unlike our own. This upshot, however, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for science, because no additional property enters the world as one transitions from creatures that are definitely incapable of phenomenal consciousness to those that definitely are (namely, ourselves). And on many views it doesn’t matter for ethics, either, since concern for animals can be grounded in sympathy, which requires only third-person understanding of the desires and emotions of the animal in question, rather than in first-person empathy

A chronology of Distributed Adaptive Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Control ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Integration Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distributed Adaptive Control ◽  
Core Components ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Convergent Validation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter presents the Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) theory of the mind and brain of living machines. DAC provides an explanatory framework for biological brains and an integration framework for synthetic ones. DAC builds on several themes presented in the handbook: it integrates different perspectives on mind and brain, exemplifies the synthetic method in understanding living machines, answers well-defined constraints faced by living machines, and provides a route for the convergent validation of anatomy, physiology, and behavior in our explanation of biological living machines. DAC addresses the fundamental question of how a living machine can obtain, retain, and express valid knowledge of its world. We look at the core components of DAC, specific benchmarks derived from the engagement with the physical and the social world (the H4W and the H5W problems) in foraging and human–robot interaction tasks. Lastly we address how DAC targets the UTEM benchmark and the relation with contemporary developments in AI.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document