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  1. The meta-problem and the transfer of knowledge between theories of consciousness: a software engineer’s take.Marcel Kvassay - manuscript
    This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis (...)
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  2. (Un)conscious Perspectival Shape and Attention Guidance in Visual Search: A reply to Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020).Benjamin Henke & Assaf Weksler - forthcoming - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities and Differences. Routledge.
    When viewing a circular coin rotated in depth, it fills an elliptical region of the distal scene. For some, this appears to generate a two-fold experience, in which one sees the coin as simultaneously circular (in light of its 3D shape) and elliptical (in light of its 2D ‘perspectival shape’ or ‘p-shape’). An energetic philosophical debate asks whether the latter p-shapes are genuinely presented in perceptual experience (as ‘perspectivalists’ argue) or if, instead, this appearance is somehow derived or inferred from (...)
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  3. Confidence in Consciousness Research.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science:e1628.
    To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, researchers need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not. This article is an introduction to a family of procedures called ‘confidence-based procedures’, which consist in interpreting metacognitive indicators as indicators of consciousness. I assess the validity and accuracy of these procedures, and answer a series of common objections to their use in consciousness research. I conclude that confidence-based procedures are valid for assessing consciousness, and, in most cases, accurate (...)
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  4. Blindsight Is Unconscious Perception.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2023 - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities, and Differences. London: Routledge. pp. 31–54.
    The question of whether blindsight is a form of unconscious perception continues to spark fierce debate in philosophy and psychology. One side of the debate holds that while the visual information categorized in blindsight is not access-conscious, it is nonetheless a form of perception, albeit a form of unconscious perception. The opposition, by contrast, holds that blindsight is just a form of degraded conscious perception that makes the categorized information harder to access because it is degraded. In this chapter, we (...)
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  5. Template Tuning and Graded Consciousness.Berit Brogaard & Thomas Alrik Sørensen - 2023 - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities, and Differences. London: Routledge. pp. 251–273.
    Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inexact categorizations of visual input (...)
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  6. Unconscious Perception and Unconscious Bias: Parallel Debates about Unconscious Content.Gabbrielle Johnson - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 87-130.
    The possibilities of unconscious perception and unconscious bias prompt parallel debates about unconscious mental content. This chapter argues that claims within these debates alleging the existence of unconscious content are made fraught by ambiguity and confusion with respect to the two central concepts they involve: consciousness and content. Borrowing conceptual resources from the debate about unconscious perception, the chapter distills the two conceptual puzzles concerning each of these notions and establishes philosophical strategies for their resolution. It then argues that empirical (...)
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  7. The Unconscious Mind Worry: A Mechanistic-Explanatory Strategy.Beate Krickel - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):39-59.
    Recent findings in different areas of psychology and cognitive science have brought the unconscious mind back to center stage. However, the unconscious mind worry remains: What renders unconscious phenomena mental? I suggest a new strategy for answering this question, which rests on the idea that categorizing unconscious phenomena as “mental” should be scientifically useful relative to the explanatory research goals. I argue that this is the case if by categorizing an unconscious phenomenon as “mental” one picks out explanatorily relevant similarities (...)
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  8. The old and new criterion problems.Matthias Michel - 2023 - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomas Marvan & Michal Polak (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality. Routledge. pp. 130-154.
    Negative subjective reports such as “I didn’t see the stimulus” can be interpreted as indicating either that the subject didn’t see the stimulus, or as indicating that, while the subject did see the stimulus, the strength of sensory signals associated with the stimulus fell below a conservative criterion for answering “seen”. Determining which of these two interpretations is correct is the criterion problem. I present two ways in which researchers can solve this problem. But there’s more. What I call the (...)
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  9. How (not) to underestimate unconscious perception.Matthias Michel - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (2):413-430.
    Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...)
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  10. Selectionism and Diaphaneity.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (Suppl 2):S361–S391.
    Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...)
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  11. Seeing colours unconsciously.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-36.
    According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...)
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  12. Default Hypotheses in the Study of Perception: A Reply to Phillips.Jacob Berger & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4):206-219.
    Some theorists have recently raised doubts about much of the experimental evidence purporting to demonstrate the existence of unconscious perception. In our (2019) in this journal, we argued some of these considerations are not decisive. Phillips (forthcoming a) replies thoughtfully to our paper, concluding that he is unconvinced by our arguments. Phillips maintains that the view that perception is invariably conscious remains, as he puts it, the “default” hypothesis both within the folk understanding and experimental study of perception. There is (...)
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  13. Separating Conscious and Unconscious Perception in Animals.Andrew Crump & Jonathan Birch - 2021 - Learning and Behavior 49 (4).
    In a new study, Ben-Haim et al. use subliminal stimuli to separate conscious and unconscious perception in macaques. A programme of this type, using a range of cognitive tasks, is a promising way to look for conscious perception in more controversial cases.
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  14. Is blindsight possible under signal detection theory? Comment on Phillips (2021).Mathias Michel & Hakwan Lau - 2021 - Psychological Review 128 (3):585-591.
    Phillips argues that blindsight is due to response criterion artefacts under degraded conscious vision. His view provides alternative explanations for some studies, but may not work well when one considers several key findings in conjunction. Empirically, not all criterion effects are decidedly non-perceptual. Awareness is not completely abolished for some stimuli, in some patients. But in other cases, it was clearly impaired relative to the corresponding visual sensitivity. This relative dissociation is what makes blindsight so important and interesting.
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  15. Unconscious Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (1817):20190689.
    Historically, mental imagery has been defined as an experiential state - as something necessarily conscious. But most behavioural or neuroimaging experiments on mental imagery - including the most famous ones - don’t actually take the conscious experience of the subject into consideration. Further, recent research highlights that there are very few behavioural or neural differences between conscious and unconscious mental imagery. I argue that treating mental imagery as not necessarily conscious (as potentially unconscious) would bring much needed explanatory unification to (...)
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  16. Unconscious perception and central coordinating agency.Joshua Shepherd & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3869-3893.
    One necessary condition on any adequate account of perception is clarity regarding whether unconscious perception exists. The issue is complicated, and the debate is growing in both philosophy and science. In this paper we consider the case for unconscious perception, offering three primary achievements. First, we offer a discussion of the underspecified notion of central coordinating agency, a notion that is critical for arguments that purportedly perceptual states are not attributable to the individual, and thus not genuinely perceptual. We develop (...)
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  17. La costruzione del sé biologico a confronto con quella del Sé junghiano.Ferruccio Vigna - 2020 - L’Ombra 14.
    This paper adopts a jungian standpoint to discuss neurobiological and psychological constructs such as neuronal groups, default network, Ego and Self. By considering several epistemological issues and adopting the emergentist perspective, this work argues that the jungian theory can enter into constructive dialogue with neuroscientific evidence.
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  18. On Scepticism about Unconscious Perception.J. Berger & M. Mylopoulos - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (11-12):8-32.
    While there seems to be much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, some theorists recently express scepticism about unconscious perception. We explore here two kinds of such scepticism: Megan Peters and Hakwan Lau's experimental work regarding the well-known problem of the criterion -- which seems to show that many purported instances of unconscious perception go unreported but are weakly conscious -- and Ian Phillips' theoretical consideration, which he calls the 'problem of attribution' -- the worry that many (...)
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  19. Gorillas in the missed (but not the unseen): Reevaluating the evidence for attention being necessary for consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (3):299-316.
    The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological observations supplemented with empirical data to argue that some subjects failing to notice the target stimulus nonetheless experience its color. Since subjects not noticing the (...)
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  20. The Rationality of Perception, by Susanna Siegel: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. xxv + 221, £45 (hardback). [REVIEW]Bence Nanay - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):202-204.
    This is a review of Susanna Siegel's The Rationality of Perception.
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  21. Naïve realism about unconscious perception.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2019 - Synthese 196 (5):2045-2073.
    Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...)
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  22. Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
    Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and (...)
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  23. Review of Human Nature Sandis and Cain eds. (2012).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017).
    Like most writing on human behavior, these articles lack a coherent framework and so I hesitate to recommend this book to anyone, as the experienced ought to have about the same perspective I do, and the naïve will mostly be wasting their time. Since I find most of these essays obviously off the mark or just very dull, I can't generate much enthusiasm for commenting on them, so after providing what I consider a reasonable precis of a framework (see my (...)
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  24. Unconscious Perception and Perceptual Knowledge.Paweł J. Zięba - 2017 - In Limbeck-Lilienau Christoph & Stadler Friedrich (eds.), The Philosophy of Perception and Observation. Contributions of the 40th International Wittgenstein Symposium August 6-12, 2017 Kirchberg am Wechsel. Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 301-303.
    It has been objected recently that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported hypothesis that unconscious perception is possible. Because epistemological disjunctivism is plausible only in conjunction with naïve realism (for a reason I provide), the objection reaches it too. In response, I show that the unconscious perception hypothesis can be changed from a problem into an advantage of epistemological disjunctivism. I do this by suggesting that: (i) naïve realism is consistent with the hypothesis; (ii) the contrast between epistemological (...)
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  25. Lost in dissociation: The main paradigms in unconscious cognition.Luis M. Augusto - 2016 - Consciousness and Cognition 42:293-310.
    Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets (...)
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  26. Relationalism and unconscious perception.Jacob Berger & Bence Nanay - 2016 - Analysis 76 (4):426-433.
    Relationalism holds that perceptual experiences are relations between subjects and perceived objects. But much evidence suggests that perceptual states can be unconscious. We argue here that unconscious perception raises difficulties for relationalism. Relationalists would seem to have three options. First, they may deny that there is unconscious perception or question whether we have sufficient evidence to posit it. Second, they may allow for unconscious perception but deny that the relationalist analysis applies to it. Third, they may offer a relationalist explanation (...)
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  27. Temporal Mental Qualities and Selective Attention.Michał Klincewicz - 2016 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 7 (2):11-24.
    This article presents an argument for the view that we can perceive temporal features without awareness. Evidence for this claim comes from recent empirical work on selective visual attention. An interpretation of selective attention as a mechanism that processes high-level perceptual features is offered and defended against one particular objection. In conclusion, time perception likely has an unconscious dimension and temporal mental qualities can be instantiated without ever being conscious.
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  28. Conscious Vision in Action.Robert Briscoe & John Schwenkler - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (7):1435-1467.
    It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis , according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious . In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, selecting (...)
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  29. Subliminal unconscious conflict alpha power inhibits supraliminal conscious symptom experience.Howard Shevrin, Michael Snodgrass, Linda A. W. Brakel, Ramesh Kushwaha, Natalia L. Kalaida & Ariane Bazan - 2013 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7.
    Our approach is based on a tri-partite method of integrating psychodynamic hypotheses, cognitive subliminal processes, and psychophysiological alpha power measures. We present ten social phobic subjects with three individually selected groups of words representing unconscious conflict, conscious symptom experience, and Osgood Semantic negative valence words used as a control word group. The unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words, presented subliminally and supraliminally, act as primes preceding the conscious symptom and control words presented as supraliminal targets. With alpha power as a (...)
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  30. Are There Unconscious Perceptual Processes?Berit Brogaard - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2):449-63.
    Blindsight and vision for action seem to be exemplars of unconscious visual processes. However, researchers have recently argued that blindsight is not really a kind of uncon- scious vision but is rather severely degraded conscious vision. Morten Overgaard and col- leagues have recently developed new methods for measuring the visibility of visual stimuli. Studies using these methods show that reported clarity of visual stimuli correlates with accuracy in both normal individuals and blindsight patients. Vision for action has also come under (...)
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  31. Historical Roots of Cognitive Science: The Rise of a Cognitive Theory of Perception from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Theo C. Meyering. [REVIEW]Gary Hatfield - 1993 - Philosophy of Science 60 (4):662-666.
    Review of THEO C. MEYERING, Historical Roots of Cognitive Science : The Rise of a Cognitive Theory of Perception from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Boston: Kluwer, xix + 250 pp. $69.00. Examines the author's interpretation of Aristotelian theories of perceptual cognition, early modern theories, and Helmholtz's theory.
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  32. On small differences in sensation.C. S. Peirce & Joseph Jastrow - 1884 - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 3:75-83.
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  33. The Dreams of Alpha-Lupi: A Trip In Virtual Reality.Francisco Valdez - manuscript
    Dreams as Virtual Reality simulations. When David Chalmers wrote “The Virtual and the Real” the argument many focused on the metaphysical and epistemic nature Virtual Reality and how it compares to waking states and dreaming sates. But one interesting segment of the paper is where he defends his thesis by claiming that dreams are not experiences. This is where I take issue and, in my paper, I claim that dreams as much as VR are epistemically similar enough to be called (...)
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