The World-Relatedness of Affectivity: Heidegger and Richir

" My investigation reveals that Heidegger’s account of affectivity – though his programmatical determination included an ontical dimension or otherwise lived, personal experiences – is overshadowed by a dense ontology that cannot enable real phenomenal experience. This is why he could not account for other affective states such as emotions, feel-ings and the role of the body in affectivity. Besides, in that account we are lost when we seek to answer the question of whether moods are “one” or “many”. My aim is to point out how these deficiencies in Heidegger’s account of mood could be overcome in Richir’s account of affectivity, where indeterminate background feelings (affections) could give rise to a deter-minate and occurent emotion (affects). The advantage of this move is a rich ontic account of affectivity where not only the body but also sense/meaning of affective episodes play a robust role in an encounter of world events. If Richir reproached Heidegger for existential solipsism, one could now reproach the former for existentiell/phenomenal solipsism. In the end I suggest that these two core but opposite aspects of affectivity (the ontological and the ontic) belong to the same reality: Dasein is not just in the world (ontology), but also the world is in Dasein (ontic/phenomenological). Keywords: mood, affection, affect, Heidegger’s ontology, Richir’s Leib and sense. "

Responding to Uncertainty

There are numerous contexts, beyond disorders of consciousness, where there is a need for decisive action in the presence of unavoidable epistemic uncertainty. The ethics of uncertainty can help. This chapter examines three complex decisional contexts with intersecting, interacting epistemic and ethical uncertainty. The first is pain. Pain, like consciousness, is a subjectively phenomenal experience, the quality and quantity of which are hard to put into words. Pain sufferers encounter testimonial injustice because of the subjectivity, invisibility, and objective uncertainty of pain. The second context is vaccine research and development, and the emergency approval of COVID-19 vaccines under conditions of time pressure and uncertainty. The third context is research with conscious nonhuman animals. There are known, certain risks of harm to the animals, but the benefits of the research are epistemically uncertain. Judging the permissibility of such research requires considering inductive risks, and the principles of inductive risk.

Not All Structure and Dynamics Are Equal

The hard problem of consciousness has been a perennially vexing issue for the study of consciousness, particularly in giving a scientific and naturalized account of phenomenal experience. At the heart of the hard problem is an often-overlooked argument, which is at the core of the hard problem, and that is the structure and dynamics (S&D) argument. In this essay, I will argue that we have good reason to suspect that the S&D argument given by David Chalmers rests on a limited conception of S&D properties, what in this essay I’m calling extrinsic structure and dynamics. I argue that if we take recent insights from the complexity sciences and from recent developments in Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness, that we get a more nuanced picture of S&D, specifically, a class of properties I’m calling intrinsic structure and dynamics. This I think opens the door to a broader class of properties with which we might naturally and scientifically explain phenomenal experience, as well as the relationship between syntactic, semantic, and intrinsic notions of information. I argue that Chalmers’ characterization of structure and dynamics in his S&D argument paints them with too broad a brush and fails to account for important nuances, especially when considering accounting for a system’s intrinsic properties. Ultimately, my hope is to vindicate a certain species of explanation from the S&D argument, and by extension dissolve the hard problem of consciousness at its core, by showing that not all structure and dynamics are equal.

Fragmentation and Singular Propositions

Two puzzles are described: a problem about necessary a posteriori truths and a problem about propositional attitudes with singular propositions as their contents. Two strategies for solving them are compared. The first is the diagonalization strategy, which distinguishes possible worlds that are compatible with what is actually expressed by a given sentential clause from possible worlds that are compatible with what would be expressed by the clause if that possible world were actual. The second strategy is the fragmentation strategy, which represents the intentional states described by sentential clauses as separate nonintegrated representational states. It is argued that these are complementary, not competing, strategies. Both play a role in the solutions to the problems. In conclusion, it is suggested that these strategies can also help to clarify a number of further problems—about self-locating attitudes, about the nature of computation, and about knowledge of phenomenal experience.

The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators

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.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPLEXITY: NEUROBIOLOGICAL NATURALISM AND INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY

In this paper we take a meta-theoretical stance and aim to compare and assess two conceptual frameworks that endeavor to explain phenomenal experience. In particular, we compare Feinberg & Mallatt’s Neurobiological Naturalism (NN) and Tononi’s and colleagues Integrated Information Theory (IIT), given that the former pointed out some similarities between the two theories (Feinberg & Mallatt 2016c-d). To probe their similarity, we first give a general introduction into both frameworks. Next, we expound a ground-plan for carrying out our analysis. We move on to articulate a philosophical profile of NN and IIT, addressing their ontological commitments and epistemological foundations. Finally, we compare the two point-by-point, also discussing how they stand on the issue of artificial consciousness.

Towards Characterizing the Canonical Computations Generating Phenomenal Experience

Few people tackle the neural or computational basis of qualitative experience (Frith, 2019). Why? One major reason is that science and philosophy have both struggled to propose how we might even begin to start studying it. Here I propose that metacognitive computations, and the subjective feelings that go along with them, give us a solid starting point. Specifically, perceptual metacognition possesses unique properties that provide a powerful and unique opportunity for studying the neural and computational correlates of subjective experience, falling into three categories: (1) Metacognition is subjective: there is something it is like to feel ‘confident’; (2) Metacognitive processes are objectively characterizable: We can objectively observe metacognitive reports and define computational models to fit to empirical data; (3) Metacognition has multiple hierarchically-dependent “anchors”, presenting a unique computational opportunity for developing sensitive, specific models. I define this Metacognition as a Step Toward Explaining Phenomenology (M-STEP) approach to state that, given these properties, computational models of metacognition represent an empirically-tractable early step in identifying the generative process that constructs qualitative experience. By applying decades of developments in computational cognitive science and formal computational model comparisons to the specific properties of perceptual metacognition, we may reveal new and exciting insights about how the brain constructs subjective conscious experiences and the nature of those experiences themselves.

Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience

Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) have recently gained attention in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. They can be thought of as episodes of greatly reduced or even absent phenomenal content together with a reduced level of arousal. It has also been proposed that MPEs are cases of consciousness-as-such. Here, we present a different perspective, that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is, non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind and cannot be adequately specified by the two-dimensional model of consciousness as the arousal level plus the phenomenal content or by their mental representations. Thus, we suggest that to understand consciousness-as-such, and by extension consciousness in general, more accurately, we need to research it as a unique kind.

SUBJETIVIDAD NO EGOLÓGICA EN "EL SER Y LA NADA" DE JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

El propósito de este artículo es presentar una interpretación de la subjetividad en L’Être et le Néant de Jean-Paul Sartre centrada en su carácter prerreflexivo y no egológico. En vistas a ello, me propongo elucidar la concepción de “subjetivi-dad no egológica” que opera en la ontofenomenología existencial de Sartre, mediante un análisis minucioso de las nociones de autoconciencia prerreflexiva, presencia a sí, proyecto fundamental y circuito de la ipseidad. A partir de este análisis, argumento que Sartre logra dar cuenta de la subjetividad como una experiencia fenoménica individualizada sin necesidad de recurrir al “Yo”.In this paper I try to articulate an interpretation of subjectivity in Sartre's L’Être et le Néant focusing on its pre-reflective and non egological features. In order to do this, I suggest to elucidate the notion of "non-egological subjectivity" that takes place in Sartre's existential ontological phenomenology, through a meticulous analysis of the notions of pre-reflective self-consciousness, presence to self, fundamental project and circuit of selfness (circuit de l'ipséité). I argue that in L’Être et le Néant Sartre manages to deliver an account of subjectivity as a singularized phenomenal experience whithout having to resort to the notion of "Self"