scholarly journals Minimal phenomenal experience

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Metzinger

This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space.

Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

Conscious attention performs two distinct roles in experience, a role of placing and a role of focusing, roles which match a distinction between selection and access endorsed in recent theories of attention. The intentionality of conscious experience consists in two sorts of attentional action, a focusing at and a placing on, the first lending to experience a perspectival categorical content and the second structuring its phenomenal character. Placing should be thought of more like opening a window for consciousness than as shining a spotlight, and focusing has to do with accessing the properties of whatever the window opens onto. A window is an aperture whose boundaries are defined by what is excluded—in this case, distractors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32
Author(s):  
Işık Sarıhan

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully representational states of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. e0253694
Author(s):  
Alex Gamma ◽  
Thomas Metzinger

Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were usable. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range: 17–88) and were evenly split between men and women (48.5% vs 50.0%). The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3%), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0%). Vipassana (43.9%) followed by Zen (34.9%) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques. German (63.4%) and English (31.4%) were by far the most frequent questionnaire languages. A solution with 12 factors explaining 44% of the total variance was deemed optimal under joint conceptual and statistical considerations. The factors were named “Time, Effort and Desire,” “Peace, Bliss and Silence,” “Self-Knowledge, Autonomous Cognizance and Insight,” “Wakeful Presence,” “Pure Awareness in Dream and Sleep,” “Luminosity,” “Thoughts and Feelings,” “Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness,” “Sensory Perception in Body and Space,” “Touching World and Self,” “Mental Agency,” and “Witness Consciousness.” This factor structure fit the data moderately well. Conclusions We have previously posited a phenomenological prototype for the experience of “pure awareness” as it occurs in the context of meditation practice. Here we offer a tentative 12-factor model to describe its phenomenal character in a fine-grained way. The current findings are in line with an earlier study extracting semantic constraints for a working definition of minimal phenomenal experience.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Metzinger

This paper sketches a new and empirically testable theory about what "pure consciousness" or the simplest form of phenomenal experience is.


Author(s):  
Joseph Levine

Another kind of representational theory of phenomenal character is higher-order theory, which identifies our awareness of our conscious states with a higher-order representation of them. One version of such a theory is the “self-representational” theory, according to which phenomenally conscious states are those that include a representation of themselves, along with whatever perceptual content they possess. I criticize this approach for not properly capturing conscious subjectivity, which is its alleged principal virtue. In particular, I argue that the kind of cognitive relation that obtains between ourselves and the contents of our conscious experience cannot be appropriately modeled on the causal relations that underlie any materialist theory of representation.


Author(s):  
Robert Van Gulick

Several concepts used in the area of consciousness and cognition are discussed. There are five distinguished types of creature consciousness. An organism may be said to be conscious is it can sense and perceive its environment and has the capacity to respond appropriately. A second sense of creature consciousness requires not merely the capacity to sense or perceive, but the current active use of those capacities. Another notion of creature consciousness requires that organisms be not only aware but also self-aware. Self-awareness comes in degrees and varies along multiple dimensions. The conscious creatures might be defined as those that have an experiential life. Organisms are sometimes said to be conscious of various items or objects. Consciousness in this sense is understood as an intentional relation between the organism and some object or item of which it is aware. The conscious states might be regarded as those that have phenomenal properties or phenomenal character. The representationalist theories claim that conscious states have no mental properties other than their representational properties. Higher-order theories analyze consciousness as a form of self-awareness. Higher-order theories come in several forms. Some treat the requisite higher-order states as perception-like, and thus the process of generating such states is a kind of inner perception or perhaps introspection. The intermediate level representation model focuses on the contents of conscious experience.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adélaïde de Heering ◽  
Arnaud Beauny ◽  
Laurène Vuillaume ◽  
Leila Salvesen ◽  
Axel Cleeremans

ABSTRACTThis study is part of a larger attempt to explore how the brain produces conscious experience. Our main objective here was to take advantage of a neural signature conveyed by the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) technique (1) to explore the extent to which complex visual images can be processed in the absence of consciousness and (2) to determine whether this tool can be used to shed light on participants’ phenomenal experience of these images. To this end, we embedded faces within sequences of non-face stimuli and manipulated their contrast to create a subliminal condition. Our results were threefold. First, we show that a significant brain activation can be delineated with the SSVEP tool even when participants report being unable to see the stimuli. In this subliminal condition, the brain response was confined to the back of the scalp. Second, we observe that the face signal increases in magnitude and propagates bilaterally along a posterior-to-anterior axis as image contrast increases. Third, we suggest that SSVEP could be used as a novel instance of a no-report paradigm because it requires no overt behavioural response, and because at some contrast levels and electrodes, its outputs (signal magnitude and scalp topography) predict people’s self-reported phenomenal experience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (83) ◽  
pp. 5-35
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Furman

The goal of the proposed study is a radical reorganization on a cyclical-deed basis of the stages of the historical formation of methodological concept of consciousness in the theory of activity and STA(system-thought-activity)-methodology as a well-known domestic philosophical trend of the second half of the XX century. (G.P. Shchedrovitsky and his school). The process of updating the principles and norms of the STA-approach to understanding the category and mechanism of consciousness became possible due to metatheoretical guidance in its interpretation as an attributive invariant-way of human existence in interpenetration and unity of its modalities such as noumenal and phenomenal, transcendent and immanent, unknowable and cognizable, speechless and speechful, indefinite (unnamed) and signified (named). To solve this supertask, three search steps were performed, which reveal as the author’s vision of the problematic context of philosophical methodologization in working with consciousness and the main modes of its comprehension (consciousness-phenomenon, consciousness-noumen, consciousness-category, conscious experience, consciousness of being) in the format of integral directions of philosophy development (ontology, metaphysics, phenomenology, polymethodology), as well as principles, conditions and features of system-thought-activity ideas about consciousness as a conceptual means of methodological work and intellectual basis and, at the same time a resource of collective and individual thinking activity. First of all, starting from the reasoned distinction of two research strategies of cognition-construction of reality (scientific-natural and metaphysical), which form essentially different ontological pictures of consciousness, it is concluded about the extensiveness and even deadlock of the first and heuristics and productivity of the second. The last one requires not only the critical-reflexive usage of the existing scope of philosophical knowledge, but also the implementation of competent philosophical methodologization on the way to creating a metatheory of consciousness. In fact, such work, within the defined range of goals and tasks and carried out in the format of this study: according to the principle of quintessence, the optimal number of modes of consciousness understanding is singled out, where each of them is subject to meta-description by definition, essential features and functional characteristics, and constructed a fivefold thought-scheme, which in the post-non-classical style mutually reconciles these understanding modes. In the main part of the semantic metaconsideration of the raised methodological issues it is proved that the cultural achievements of STA-methodology in comprehension of the resource potential of human consciousness are unique, firstly, considering the departure of its representatives from the scientific-subject consideration of the phenomenon of consciousness, and the implementation of a purely methodological approach, secondly, considering the peculiarities of their advocated way of using the category of consciousness, namely as a conceptual means, thought-toolkit. Yes, there is every reason to believe that G.P. Shchedrovitskiy and his circle members carried out a full-fledged act of collective thinking activity, particularly in joint understanding work with the sphere of consciousness, which we reconstructed at the stages of canonical thinking-deed: 1) s i t u a t i o n a l stage – conceptual and categorical elaboration of the problem of consciousness is carried out on the achievements of logic, and later methodology, with their main subject – thinking and setting for the creation of its content-genetic theory by means of activity approach; 2) m o t i v a t i o n a l – consciousness, starting from the generalizations of the cultural-historical theory of the development of higher psychic functions of L.S. Vygotskiy, was comprehenced as an intellectual means of domestication and socialization of the person through the mastery of signs as an instrument of determining influence of intersubjective cooperation with others as opposed to the secondary value of knowledge, the functionalities of consciousness; 3) a c t i o n – a wide sign-instrumental use of the concept and category of consciousness in collective and individual thinking activity, especially in such conceptual organizations as “scoreboard of consciousness”(the flow of consciousness, which is intended for both objective actions and on knowledge), “mechanisms of consciousness” (generate thinking in sensual form as images or objective perceptions, or sign form), “pure consciousness” (spontaneous, meaningless, unstructured, self-causal – independent of the experience of sensual perception, from the action of any empiricism), “organized consciousness” (rhythmically balanced in functioning, filled with psychocultural formations, although not durable, fluid, requires considerable internal (motivational, intellectual, volitional, etc.) efforts of the person for its maintenance, harmonization of all available material which has got to its spherical flow of life), herewith pure consciousness, organizing, loses its spontaneity, is freed; 4) a f t e r-a c t i o n – substantiation of reflexivity as one of the main determinants of the cooperation effectiveness of several acts of activity, and at the same time maturity and perfection of consciousness; reflection is responsible for the organization of consciousness, which, however, itself structurally determines the reality of reflection; only in the reflexively enriched, thought-communicative organizational space of methodological seminars and sessions, organizational and organizational-action games do the functionalities of consciousness find their sign-semantic shelter, witness settlement (primarily in texts, formulas, schemes, models, drawings).


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