Gray mistakenly thinks I have rejected the sort of theoretical enterprise he is undertaking, because, according to him, I think that "more data" is all that is needed to resolve all the issues. Not at all. My stalking horse was the bizarre (often pathetic) claim that no amount of empirical, "third-person point-of-view" science (data plus theory) could ever reduce the residue of mystery about consciousness to zero. This "New Mysterianism" (Flanagan, 1991) is one that he should want to combat as (...) vigorously as I have done. (shrink)

Integrated information theory of consciousness proposes an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology. Through this assertion, IIT aims to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, despite its phenomenology-first stance, developments in IIT have overlooked temporality. As such, we argue that at present IIT’s phenomenological analysis is incomplete. In this critique, we show how IIT takes a non-identical illusionist stance towards the experiences of continuity, flow, and extent of our experiences. Moreover, in isolating temporal grains of experience to a (...) single timescale, IIT misses out on capturing the multi-scale nested nature of temporal phenomena. Hence, we contend that IIT needs an axiom for time, through which its causal structure can be refined to account for temporal experiences. Here, we propose an axiom to address these concerns. We conclude by discussing how IIT may need to be revised if our concerns hold true. (shrink)

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property through specialized mechanisms or that time is represented through the temporality of experiences themselves. To add to this debate, we investigate alterations in felt time in conditions where only conscious visual experience is altered through perceptual switches while a bistable figure remains physically unchanged. We predicted that if perceived time (...) is a function of temporally evolving conscious content, then a break in it (here via a perceptual switch) would also lead to a break in felt time. In three experiments, we showed participants a Necker cube that was manipulated to induce a perceptual switch (experiments 1(a) and 1(b)) or left to switch on its own (experiment 2). We asked participants to report both perceptual switches and felt durations (experiments 1(a) and 2) or only estimate time (experiment 1(b)). Over these three experiments, we find evidence of contraction of felt time in trials with a perceptual switch, consistent with the idea that perceived time is a function of temporally evolving conscious experience. Additionally, we present a phenomenological demonstration to support our empirical data. Overall, the study provides evidence for temporal mirroring and isomorphism in visual experience, arguing for a link between the timing of experience and time perception. (shrink)

In physics, the temporal dimension has units of infinitesimally brief duration. Given this, how is it possible to perceive things, such as motion, music, and vibrotactile stimulation, that involve extension across many units of time? To address this problem, it is proposed that there is what is termed an “information construct of happening” (ICOH), a simultaneous representation of recent, temporally differentiated perceptual information on the millisecond time scale. The main features of the ICOH are (i) time marking, semantic labeling of (...) all information in the ICOH with ordinal temporal information and distance from what is informationally identified as the present moment, (ii) vector informational features that specify kind, direction, and rate of change for every feature in a percept, and (iii) connectives, information relating vector informational features at adjacent temporal locations in the ICOH. The ICOH integrates products of perceptual processing with recent historical information in sensory memory on the subsecond time scale. Perceptual information about happening in informational sensory memory is encoded in semantic form that preserves connected semantic trails of vector and timing information. The basic properties of the ICOH must be supported by a general and widespread timing mechanism that generates ordinal and interval timing information and it is suggested that state‐dependent networks may suffice for that purpose. Happening, therefore, is perceived at a moment and is constituted by an information structure of connected recent historical information. (shrink)

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav describes the tzaddik as experiencing time in a distinctive, enlightened way: What is seventy years for the rest of us feels like a mere fifteen minutes for the tzaddik. Furthermore, even higher levels of enlightenment are possible—for a tzaddik on a higher level, what feels like seventy years for the first tzaddik is again but a mere fifteen minutes. This pattern continues, approaching a limit point which Rabbi Nachman calls “above time,” and which is the perspective (...) on time of the Divine. How might Rabbi Nachman’s claims about enlightened temporal experience be understood? In this paper, my aim is to examine some ways of understanding what it might mean to ‘experience time more quickly’ or to ‘experience 70 years as 15 minutes’ in light of contemporary theories of the structure of temporal experience. I then present a novel interpretation of Rabbi Nachman’s claims which appeals to the contemporary notion of the specious present —a nonzero temporal interval experienced in a unified way as present. (shrink)

In Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a content (such as an item of information) without having access to it. If this phenomenon can be correctly interpreted as having to do with consciousness, then there would be a P-conscious mental experience which is dissociated from access.

Block's cases of superblindsight, the pneumatic drill, and the Sperling experiments do not show that P-consciousness and Aconsciousness can come apart. On certain tendentious but not implausible construals of the concepts of P- and A-consciousness, they refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

The information processing that constitutes accessconsciousness is not sufficient to make a representational state conscious in any sense. Standard examples of computation without consciousness undermine A-consciousness, and Block's cases seem to derive their plausibility from a lurking phenomenal awareness. That is, people and other minded systems seem to have access-consciousness only insofar as the state accessed is a phenomenal one, or the state resulting from access is phenomenal, or both.

Gray's account is remarkable in its depth and scope but too little attention is paid to poor correspondences with the literature on hippocampal/subicular damage, the theta rhythm, and novelty detection. An alternative account, focusing on hippocampal involvement in organizing memories in a way that makes them accessible to conscious recollection but not in access to consciousness per se, avoids each of these limitations.

Gray takes an information-processing paradigm as his departure point, invoking a comparator as part of the system. He concludes that consciousness is to be found “in” the comparator but is unable to point to how the comparison takes place. Thus, the comparator turns out not to be an entity arising out of brain research per se, but out of the logic of the paradigm. In this way, Gray both reinvents dualism and remains trapped in the language game of his own (...) model – ending up dealing with the unknowable. (shrink)

Gray hypothesizes that the contents of consciousness correspond to the outputs of a subicular (hippocampal/temporal lobe) comparator that compares the current state of the organism's perceptual world with a predicted state. I argue that Gray has identified a key contributing system to conscious awareness, but that his model is inadequate for explaining how conscious contents are generated in the brain. An alternative model is offered.

Dennett and Kinsbourne ([1992]) argue that metacontrast backward visual masking provides a clear illustration that ‘there is really only a verbal difference’ between two versions of the Cartesian Theater model of the mind. This alleged lack of a distinction is both the crucial premise of their main argument against the Cartesian Theater and a motivator for accepting their own Multiple Drafts model. I argue that metacontrast reveals a difference between the two versions of the Cartesian Theater that meets criteria found (...) in (Dennett and Kinsbourne [1992]) for determining such a difference. This difference undermines the soundness of their argument against the Cartesian Theater, and exerts pressure on Dennett and Kinsbourne to offer a more detailed articulation of their model. 1. Introduction2. Brief Explanation of Metacontrast Backward Visual Masking3. The Stalinesque and Orwellian Models of Metacontrast 3.1. Criteria for determining a difference4. A Difference That Makes a Difference 4.1. Skeptical hypothesis objection5. Other Objections and Replies 5.1. Straw person objection5.2. Corroborative issues objection6. Conclusion. (shrink)

The question of how the brain can construct a stable representation of the external world despite eye movements is a very old one. If there have been some wrong statements of problems (such as the inverted retinal image), other statements are less naive and have led to analytic solutions possibly adopted by the brain to counteract the spurious effects of eye movements. Following the MacKay (1973) objections to the analytic view of perceptual stability, Bridgeman et al. claim that the idea (...) that signals canceling the effects of saccadic eye movements are needed is also a misconception, as is the claim that stability and position encoding are two distinct problems. It must be remembered, however, that what made the theory of “cancellation” formulated by von Holst and Mittelstaedt (1950) so appealing was the clinical observation of perceptual instability following ocular paralysis. Following the concept of corollary discharge, the theory of efference copy had the advantage of simultaneously solving three problems: the stability of the visual world during the saccade, the same visual stability across saccades, and the visual constancy problem of allowing the subject to know where an object in space is. (shrink)

Segmentalized consciousness in schizophrenia reflects a loss of the normal Gestalt organization and contextualization of perception. Grays model explains such segmentalization in terms of septohippocampal dysfunction, which is consistent with known neuropsychological impairment in schizophrenia. However, other considerations suggest that everyday perception and its failure in schizophrenia also involve prefrontal executive mechanisms, which are only minimally elaborated by Gray.

This commentary is divided into two parts. The first considers a possible role for Gray's predictor plus comparator mechanism in human episodic recognition memory. It draws on the computational specifications of recognition outlined in Humphreys et al. to demonstrate how the logically necessary components of recognition tasks might be mapped onto the mechanism. The second part demonstrates how the mechanism outlined by Gray might be implicated in a form of imitative learning suitable for the acquisition of complex tasks.

We assume that we can act—in at least some cases—by consciously intending to do so. Wegner (2002) appeals to empirical research carried out by Libet et al. (1983) to challenge this assumption. I argue that his conclusion presupposes a particular view of conscious intention. But there is an alternative model available, which has been developed by various writers in the phenomenological tradition, and most recently defended by Moran (2001). If we adopt this alternative account of conscious intention, Wegner’s argument no (...) longer goes through, and we can retain the claim that our conscious intentions can give rise to action. (shrink)

. I sketch a synthetic integration of several levels of explanation in addressing how myths, narratives, and stories engage human beings, produce their sense of identity and self‐understanding, and shape their intellectual, emotional, and embodied lives. Ultimately it is our engagement with the metanarratives of religious imagination by which we address a set of existentially necessary but ontologically unanswerable metaphysical questions that form the basis of religious belief. I show how a multileveled understanding of evolutionary biology, history, neuroscience, psychology, narrative, (...) and mythology may form a coherent picture of the human spirit. Neuropsychological functions involved in constructing and responding to the narratives by which we form our identities and build meaningful lives include memory, attention, emotional marking, and temporal sequencing. It is the neural substrate, the emotional shaping, and the narrative structuring of higher cognitive function that provide the sine qua non for the construction of meaning, relationship, morality, and purpose that extend beyond our personal boundaries, both spatial and temporal. This includes a neural affect system shaped by our developmental dependency, the dynamic narratives of self formed in the development of identity and reconstructed over the life span, drawing on culturally available mythic and storied forms. Narrative constitutes our movement in moral space and may have the potential both for healing and for disruption for us as individuals and as a species, providing a contingent solution to the alienation and fragmentation of personhood, relationship, and community. (shrink)

the philosophical regions. I will identify three: three obvious zones of The first and third of these kinds of problem are studied almost tectonic conflict within contemporary cognitive approaches to exclusively within departments of philosophy. Applied to perception.

In the first section of this paper I argue that the main reason why Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Systems Theory (IST) has been perceived as behaviourist or antirealist is its inability to account for the causal efficacy of the mental. The rest of the paper is devoted to the claim that by emending the theory with a phenomenon called ‘empathic resonance’ (ER), it can account for the various explananda in the mental causation debate. Thus, IST + ER is a much more (...) viable option than IST, even though IST + ER assigns a crucial role to the phenomenology of agency, a role that is incompatible with Dennett’s writings on consciousness. (shrink)

Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world. Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to ‘naturalise’ consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to (...) the brain and the physical world. This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics. How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on). This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience. It also views consciousness as an integral part and natural expression of the world—in a manner true to the spirit (if not to the detail) of Whitehead’s philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

This commentary offers two criticisms of Block's account of phenomenal consciousness and a brief sketch of a rival account. The negative points are that monitoring consciousness also involves the possession of certain states and that phenomenal consciousness inevitably involves some sort of monitoring. My positive suggestion is that “phenomenal consciousness” may refer to our ability to monitor the rich but preconceptual states that retain perceptual information for complex processing.

To avoid teleological interpretations, it is important to make a distinction between functions and uses of consciousness, and to address questions concerning the consequences of consciousness. Assumptions about the phylogenetic distribution of consciousness are examined. It is concluded that there is some value in identifying consciousness an exclusively human attribute.

Connectionist views in psychology and neuroscience give the impression that there is no one place in the brain into which all information funnels. If these impression are accurate, then we will have great difficulty picking out a point in neuronal or psychological time at which phenomena become conscious. If so, pointing to one place in which we are conscious of a particular event and expecting a psychophysical correlation between qualitative and neural events seems hopeless. In response to this worry, I (...) argue that ERP research can bridge the psychology and neuroscience such that we can identify when qualitative experiences occur relative to other cognitive events. I present data suggesting that accessing an early implicit priming system gives rise to a qualitatively different kind of ERP wave than does accessing a later episodic memory system. These results illustrate how it is possible to parse psychological events finely enough in (neuro-)psychological investigations in order to determine when particular psychological events occur in the head. So, if we could align consciousness with some psychological event, then we should be able to articulate when that event occurs in the processing stream (relative to other events) as long as that event can be correlated with some ERP waveform. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn by Benjamin Libet from his work with collegues on the timing of somatosensorial conscious experiences has met with a lot of praise and criticism. In this issue we find three examples of the latter. Here I attempt to place the divide between the two opponent camps in a broader perspective by analyzing the question of the relation between physical timing, neural timing, and experiential timing. The nervous system does a sophisticated job of recombining and recoding messages from (...) the sensorial surfaces and if these processes are slighted in a theory, it might become necessary to postulate weird operations, including subjective back-referral. Neuroscientifically inspired theories are of necessity still based on guesses, extrapolations, and philosophically dubious manners of speech. They often assume some neural correlate of consciousness as a part of the nervous system that transforms neural activity in reportable experiences. The majority of neuroscientists appear to assume that the NCC can compare and bind activity patterns only if they arrive simultaneously at the NCC. This leads to a search for synchrony or to theories in terms of the compensation of differences in neural delays . This is the main dimension of the Libet discussion. Examples from vision research, such as “temporal-binding-by-synchrony” and the “flash-lag” effect, are then used to illustrate these reasoning patterns in more detail. Alternatively one could assume symbolic representations of time and space that are not coded in their own dimension . Unless such tags are multiplexed with the quality message , one gets a binding problem for tags. One of the hidden aspects of the discussion between Libet and opponents appears to be the following. Is the NCC smarter than the rest of the nervous system, so that it can solve the problems of local sign and timing on its own, or are these pieces of information coded symbolically early on in the system? A supersmart NCC appears to be the assumption of Libet's camp . The wish to distribute the smartness evenly across all stages of processing in the nervous system appears to motivate the opponents. I argue that there are reasons to side with the latter group. (shrink)