Multilayer networks as embodied consciousness interactions. A formal model approach.

An algebraic interpretation of multilayer networks is introduced in relation to conscious experience, brain and body. The discussion is based on a network model for undirected multigraphs with coloured edges whose elements are time-evolving multilayers, representing complex experiential brain-body networks. These layers have the ability to merge by an associative binary operator, accounting for biological composition. As an extension, they can rotate in a formal analogy to how the activity inside layers would dynamically evolve. Under consciousness interpretation, we also studied a mathematical formulation of splitting layers, resulting in a formal analysis for the transition from conscious to non-conscious activity. From this construction, we recover core structures for conscious experience, dynamical content and causal efficacy of conscious interactions, predicting topological network changes after conscious layer interactions. Our approach provides a mathematical account of coupling and splitting layers co-arising with more complex experiences. These concrete results may inspire the use of formal studies of conscious experience not only to describe it, but also to obtain new predictions and future applications of formal mathematical tools.

“No Pain and No Consciousness”

This chapter examines pain’s importance to the sensitized, embodied consciousness valued by William, Henry, and Alice James. All three siblings disdained what Henry once called “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” Yet William insisted that an individual’s higher capacities along with a more profound reality could best be accessed while physicality was numbed and waking consciousness was suppressed. For him anesthesia provided a gateway to the higher reaches of consciousness that his two siblings typically anchored in the feeling, suffering body. Henry and Alice repeatedly represent pain as comparable to an intense aesthetic experience in that it arouses the senses, increases responsiveness to stimuli, and heightens consciousness while still tethering the sufferer to the material world. They both count themselves among the rare few who possess this capacity for an aesthetic aliveness to suffering, which distinguishes them from purportedly less animate humans who in their assessment suffer less and hence invariably live less. Both siblings simultaneously stage the reconciliation of physical discomfort with material comfort at a time when their peers tended to view the two conditions as fundamentally antagonistic.

The Normality of the Consciousness and the Normality of the Body. Husserl’s View on Normality

"In the following paper, I’ll try to summarize Husserl’s view on normality. I will claim that there is a contradiction between his early, transcendental conception, which claims the absolute normality of the transcendental consciousness, and his late genetic-generative analyzes that lead back the normality of experience to the normality of the psychophysical body. I will argue that his contradiction can be resolved from the perspective of the embodied consciousness which, according to Anthony Steinbock is also present in the late writings of Husserl. Keywords: normality, abnormality, transcendental phenomenology, genetic phenomenology "

Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise

Decolonial thinking has introduced border thinking as an epistemological position that contributes to a shift in the forms of knowing in which the world is thought from the concrete incarnated experiences of colonial difference and the wounds left. In this chapter, Argentinean feminist philosopher Maria Lugones’ (1992) interpretation of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands foregrounds its main argument: border thinking as an embodied consciousness in which dualities and vulnerability are central for a decolonisation of how we think about the geo and body politics of knowledge, coloniality, political economy and of course, gender in International Relations and Global Politics.

“Living on the world”: rethinking justice by reconsidering vulnerability and autonomy

In this article, I propose a unitary vision that links vulnerability and autonomy together. The aim is to rethink a number of crucial issues related to justice. Firstly, I undertake an in-depth consideration of human vulnerability. By human beings, I understand instances of “embodied consciousness”, who inhabit the placedness of the world not simply by living in it but also by living on it. Openness, exposure and exchange are ontological features through which human beings both receive and cause harm and injuries, but also receive and cause enjoyment and fulfillment. Secondly, I point out that the condition of human interdependency does not require us to give up the demand to pursue “autonomy”. On the contrary, autonomy needs to be rethought, by presenting it as something that is constitutively relational. Finally, I argue for the centrality of issues concerning justice, for human beings develop by constantly establishing relations with human and non-human alterities. The model of subordination, though, should be avoided. My aim is to go beyond the sterile opposition between context perspectives emphasized by care ethics and universalistic approaches endorsed by the ethics of rights. The goals are to build a world where everyone can live one’s ontological inter-dependency without paternalism or subordination, can be protected from avoidable vulnerabilities and have the opportunity to develop and to perform one’s autonomy. This raises issues about the distribution of goods in the social-economic sphere, but also on the management of social infrastructures and the recognitional practices in societies: which are all always placed.

Context and event-based cognitive memory constructs for embodied intelligence machines

Any algorithm that needs to "understand" information to be capable of taking "intelligent" decisions, needs to access a lifetime of memories and experience the world as an embodied consciousness. This paper emphasizes these concepts and proposes a few fundamental constructs that provide algorithms with the capability to understand the human world, build larger sets of cooperative machines and perform causal inferences without requiring human intervention.<br>

Context and event-based cognitive memory constructs for embodied intelligence machines

Any algorithm that needs to "understand" information to be capable of taking "intelligent" decisions, needs to access a lifetime of memories and experience the world as an embodied consciousness. This paper emphasizes these concepts and proposes a few fundamental constructs that provide algorithms with the capability to understand the human world, build larger sets of cooperative machines and perform causal inferences without requiring human intervention.<br>

Embodied Consciousness

The question of whether consciousness is embodied has been vitiated by a failure to ask a more basic, and possibly obvious, question: what is the body? This chapter argues that the body you see in the mirror, the hands that you hold up in front of you, are instances of the body as object. But the body is more than the body as object. There is also the body as subject; the body as lived. You cannot see the lived body by looking in the mirror. The body as lived is that in virtue of which you see the body as object (and many other things also, of course). There is no question concerning whether consciousness is embodied in the lived body. Consciousness is the lived body; they are one and the same thing; the body as object has no trace of consciousness in it.

The Flourishing Folds

The Flourishing Folds is a solo video-art project, which re-negotiates the author’s relationship with ageing through creating intimate skin-portraits in near-touch close-up. The article reflects on these processes of re-possessing and re-purposing images of ageing skin and shares affirming experiences of embodied, sensory-perceptual video making. Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices inform the project and the article shares reflective writing on deep body meditations that dwell in locations where creasing skin offers pockets for holding spiritual humility and where folds form valleys that map sacred sites of vulnerability, self-acceptance and self-esteem. Writings by Stephen Connor, Claudia Benthien and Michel Serres illuminate the text with reflections on skin and embodied consciousness. New paradigms for dancing into maturity and the visual artwork of Helen Chadwick, Pipilotti Rist, Marna Clarke and Faith Wilding inform the project. The article writes into locales where creasing skin may increase skin-on-skin contact and offer sites of sensual, sensed soul, consciousness.