scholarly journals From the emergent property of consciousness to the emergence of the immaterial soul or mind’s substance

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Ebadi ◽  
Mohammadmahdi Amoosoltani
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Natural Evolution ◽  
Mulla Sadra ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Religious Morality

According to property-emergentism, consciousness is an emergent property of certain aggregate neurological constructions, whereas substance-emergentism maintains that the emergence of consciousness depends on the emergence of mental substance or soul. In this article, we presented some arguments supporting substance-emergentism by analysing various properties of consciousness, including the first-person perspective, referral state, qualia, being active, causative, non-atomic, interpretative, inferential and inventive (emanative and innovative). We also explored the impossibility of representing big images on the small monitor and the incapacity of physical entities being conscious because of their intrinsic multiplicity, absence and deficiency. These arguments, which apply the philosophy of Mulla Sadra, could be considered by philosophers of mind and religion, as well as theologians who follow some religious beliefs such as the afterlife on existence and survival of the soul. Also, we attempted to respond to property-emergentists’ objections to substance-emergentism.Contribution: This research contributes to prove and accept the emergence of the immaterial soul after the stages of natural evolution of the body. It uses the basics of emergentism, including natural evolution, to link science and religion in believing the existence of the immaterial soul. Demonstrating the immaterial reality of human existence provides the ground for theological issues such as afterlife and religious morality.

scholarly journals First person experience of threat modulates cortical network encoding human peripersonal space

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.W. de Borst ◽  
M.V. Sanchez-Vives ◽  
M. Slater ◽  
B. de Gelder
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Threat Detection ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective

AbstractPeripersonal space is the area directly surrounding the body, which supports object manipulation and social interaction, but is also critical for threat detection. In the monkey, ventral premotor and intraparietal cortex support initiation of defensive behavior. However, the brain network that underlies threat detection in human peripersonal space still awaits investigation. We combined fMRI measurements with a preceding virtual reality training from either first or third person perspective to manipulate whether approaching human threat was perceived as directed to oneself or another. We found that first person perspective increased body ownership and identification with the virtual victim. When threat was perceived as directed towards oneself, synchronization of brain activity in the human peripersonal brain network was enhanced and connectivity increased from premotor and intraparietal cortex towards superior parietal lobe. When this threat was nearby, synchronization also occurred in emotion-processing regions. Priming with third person perspective reduced synchronization of brain activity in the peripersonal space network and increased top-down modulation of visual areas. In conclusion, our results showed that after first person perspective training peripersonal space is remapped to the virtual victim, thereby causing the fronto-parietal network to predict intrusive actions towards the body and emotion-processing regions to signal nearby threat.

scholarly journals Bicycle kicks and camp sites: Towards a phenomenological theory of game feel with special attention towards ‘rhythm’

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1248-1268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Kampmann Walther ◽  
Lasse Juel Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Phenomenological Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Body Subject

The goal of the article is to present a theory of game feel inspired by phenomenology. Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis and concept of time ( Sorge), as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Body-Subject including the related phenomena intentional arc, maximal grip and flow of coping, are of special interest. The aim is to move beyond the descriptive game design take on game feel by inserting the body in a first-person perspective, highlighting a sensuous approach with emphasis on rhythm and controller. We offer a methodological framework for analysing game feel consisting on three levels: ‘Dance’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Inhabit’. Finally, we arrive at an understanding of game feel explaining reasons for player sensitivity towards game feel and clues to why players care so deeply about it.

Greater sensitivity in detecting cross-modal asynchrony for body parts that are seen most often

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Adria E. N. Hoover ◽  
Laurence R. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Linear Trend ◽  
Body Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Significant Linear Trend ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Direct View ◽  
Minimum Delay ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Delayed Visual Feedback

We have previously shown that people are more sensitive at detecting asynchrony between a self-generated movement and delayed visual feedback when the perspective of the movement matches the ‘natural view’ suggesting an internal, visual, canonical body representation (Hoover and Harris, 2011). Is there a similar variation in sensitivity for parts of the body that cannot be seen in a first-person perspective? To test this, participants made movements with their hands and head (viewing their face or the back of their head) under four viewing conditions: (1) the natural (or direct) view, (2) mirror-reversed, (3) inverted, and (4) inverted and mirror-reversed. Participants indicated which of two periods (one with a minimum delay, the other with an added delay of 33–264 ms) was delayed and their sensitivity to delay was calculated. A significant linear trend was found when comparing sensitivity to detect cross-modal asynchrony in the ‘natural’ or ‘direct’ view condition across body parts; where sensitivity was greatest when viewing body parts seen most often (hands), intermediary for viewing body parts that are seen only indirectly (moving head while viewing face), and least for viewing body parts that are never seen at all (moving head while viewing back of the head). Further, dependency on viewpoint was most evident for body parts that are seen most often or indirectly, but not for body parts that are never seen. Results are discussed in terms of a visual representation of the body.

Modalization of movement: The problem of sensus communis and the limits of phenomenology

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 833-852
Author(s):  
Kasper Levin ◽  
Simo Køppe ◽  
Tone Roald
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Single Center ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Reflective Consciousness ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Relational Force ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Sense Modalities ◽  
Sensus Communis

One of the most persistent problems in accounting for the constitution of subjective experience is the question of the unity of consciousness. In the phenomenological tradition this question is often approached through concepts such as ipseity, pre-reflective consciousness, ownership, and first-person perspective. Since Aristotle, the question of unity in an experiencing subject has been associated with the notion of “common sensibles” and the concept of “ sensus communis” as that which joins the proper sense modalities in a single center. In this article it is argued that both the classical and the phenomenological solutions to the problem of unity point to the central challenge of how to account for the experience of movement and it is questioned whether a phenomenology of movement gets us closer to an understanding of sensus communis as a primordial relational force in the body–world formation.

scholarly journals Empathy or Ownership? Evidence from Corticospinal Excitability Modulation during Pain Observation

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 1760-1771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Bucchioni ◽  
Carlotta Fossataro ◽  
Andrea Cavallo ◽  
Harold Mouras ◽  
Marco Neppi-Modona ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Physiological Basis ◽  
Hand Model ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The One

Recent studies show that motor responses similar to those present in one's own pain (freezing effect) occur as a result of observation of pain in others. This finding has been interpreted as the physiological basis of empathy. Alternatively, it can represent the physiological counterpart of an embodiment phenomenon related to the sense of body ownership. We compared the empathy and the ownership hypotheses by manipulating the perspective of the observed hand model receiving pain so that it could be a first-person perspective, the one in which embodiment occurs, or a third-person perspective, the one in which we usually perceive the others. Motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) by TMS over M1 were recorded from first dorsal interosseous muscle, whereas participants observed video clips showing (a) a needle penetrating or (b) a Q-tip touching a hand model, presented either in first-person or in third-person perspective. We found that a pain-specific inhibition of MEP amplitude (a significantly greater MEP reduction in the “pain” compared with the “touch” conditions) only pertains to the first-person perspective, and it is related to the strength of the self-reported embodiment. We interpreted this corticospinal modulation according to an “affective” conception of body ownership, suggesting that the body I feel as my own is the body I care more about.

The Evolvement of the Pilates Method and its Relation to the Somatic Field

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Leena Rouhiainen
Keyword(s):  
Human Movement ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Culture ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Pilates Method ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Historical Movement

Abstract Somatics is a field of practice that consists of approaches to bodywork that aim at psycho-physical integration and enhance the well-being of an individual. This is mainly done through appreciating the first-person perspective on the body. Don Hanlon Johnson (1995; 1994) suggests that, in the Europe and North America of the 20th century, the evolvement of diverse somatic practices could be viewed as a historical movement of its own. The inter-links that the Pilates Method has with this movement are not generally known. Joseph Pilates created an exercise method that he himself called Contrology during the early and mid 20th century, while working both in Germany and the United States. This paper delineates the evolution of Contrology by linking it to the German Body Culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In so doing, it suggests that, while promoting especially functional and aesthetic efficacy of human movement, the Pilates Method shares historical roots with the somatic field. It likewise shares some principles with somatic education in that it enhances clients’ body awareness and supports the improvement of their movement patterns.

scholarly journals Differentiating Real-World Autobiographical Experiences without Recourse to Behaviour

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Erez ◽  
Marie-Eve Gagnon ◽  
Adrian M. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Brain Injuries ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Extrastriate Cortex ◽  
First Person ◽  
Autobiographical Memories ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
First Person Perspective

Investigating human consciousness based on brain activity alone is a key challenge in cognitive neuroscience. One of its central facets, the ability to form autobiographical memories, has been investigated through several fMRI studies that have revealed a pattern of activity across a network of frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobe regions when participants view personal photographs, as opposed to when they view photographs from someone else’s life. Here, our goal was to attempt to decode when participants were re-experiencing an entire event, captured on video from a first-person perspective, relative to a very similar event experienced by someone else. Participants were asked to sit passively in a wheelchair while a researcher pushed them around a local mall. A small wearable camera was mounted on each participant, in order to capture autobiographical videos of the visit from a first-person perspective. One week later, participants were scanned while they passively viewed different categories of videos; some were autobiographical, while others were not. A machine-learning model was able to successfully classify the video categories above chance, both within and across participants, suggesting that there is a shared mechanism differentiating autobiographical experiences from non-autobiographical ones. Moreover, the classifier brain maps revealed that the fronto-parietal network, mid-temporal regions and extrastriate cortex were critical for differentiating between autobiographical and non-autobiographical memories. We argue that this novel paradigm captures the true nature of autobiographical memories, and is well suited to patients (e.g., with brain injuries) who may be unable to respond reliably to traditional experimental stimuli.

scholarly journals An immersive first-person navigation task for abstract knowledge acquisition

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doerte Kuhrt ◽  
Natalie R. St. John ◽  
Jacob L. S. Bellmund ◽  
Raphael Kaplan ◽  
Christian F. Doeller
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Navigation ◽  
First Person ◽  
Abstract Space ◽  
Motion Platform ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
Spatial Domains ◽  
First Person Perspective

AbstractAdvances in virtual reality (VR) technology have greatly benefited spatial navigation research. By presenting space in a controlled manner, changing aspects of the environment one at a time or manipulating the gain from different sensory inputs, the mechanisms underlying spatial behaviour can be investigated. In parallel, a growing body of evidence suggests that the processes involved in spatial navigation extend to non-spatial domains. Here, we leverage VR technology advances to test whether participants can navigate abstract knowledge. We designed a two-dimensional quantity space—presented using a head-mounted display—to test if participants can navigate abstract knowledge using a first-person perspective navigation paradigm. To investigate the effect of physical movement, we divided participants into two groups: one walking and rotating on a motion platform, the other group using a gamepad to move through the abstract space. We found that both groups learned to navigate using a first-person perspective and formed accurate representations of the abstract space. Interestingly, navigation in the quantity space resembled behavioural patterns observed in navigation studies using environments with natural visuospatial cues. Notably, both groups demonstrated similar patterns of learning. Taken together, these results imply that both self-movement and remote exploration can be used to learn the relational mapping between abstract stimuli.

scholarly journals Experiential ownership and body ownership are different phenomena

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Liang ◽  
Wen-Hsiang Lin ◽  
Tai-Yuan Chang ◽  
Chi-Hong Chen ◽  
Chen-Wei Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Distinct Type ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
First Time ◽  
Full Body

AbstractBody ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness.

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