To understand the complex religious dynamics in a globalizing world, Arjun Appadurai's view on imagination as a social practice, Charles Taylor's view on social imaginaries, and John Dewey's view on moral imagination are discussed. Their views enable us to understand religious dynamics as a “space of contestation” in which secular and religious images and voices interact, argue, and clash. Imagination can be used in violent ways in service of extremist world images that spread over the world by the intensive use (...) of social media. This raises an urgent question for psychology of religion: what enables people psychologically to engage in religious pluralism, understood as negotiating and perhaps stimulating diversity in non-violent, constructive ways? It is argued that dialogical psychology helps us to understand the self as the anchor point and navigational system of the social imaginaries that are at play in religious dynamics. (shrink)

This paper is a conceptual essay rooted in two basic observations. First, felt dignity—the subjective sense people have of their own autonomy and self-worth—ultimately emerges from, and is thus most evident in the connective space between people. Second, stories are everyday works of art that afford unique insight into the subtle complexities of the socio-emotional realities of work. Building on these observations, we describe how personal stories about episodes of interpersonal connections and disconnections at work—moments in which we feel mutual (...) appreciation and empowerment or a sense of separation and distancing from another—can help us better understand the felt experience of dignity at work. In attending to such personal stories as art, we become more attuned to their felt, aesthetic qualities, which then helps us develop a more holistic and visceral appreciation of how actors experience, make sense of, and claim felt dignity. In support of our ideas, we present a few illustrative story excerpts and briefly consider how a select few aesthetic qualities—the way the stories’ elements are configured, the stories’ acuity or sharpness, and their rawness—enhance the felt impact of the stories and help to remind us of their and the storytellers’ intrinsic value. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to interpret the educational philosophy of John Dewey in a way that accomplishes two goals. The first of these is to avoid any reference to Dewey as a propagator of a particular scientific method or to any of the individualist and cognitivist ideas that is sometimes associated with him. Secondly, I want to overcome the tendency to interpret Dewey as a naturalist by looking at his concept of intelligence. It is argued that ‘intelligent experience’ is (...) the basic concept of education. I suggest how this concept should be understood. I propose to look at it as an interplay between the faculties of imagination and judgment. (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.

Existence of similarities of overall brain activation, specifically during emotional and other common psychological operations (discussed by Lindquist et al.), supports a proposal that emotion participates continuously in dynamic adjustment of behavior. The proposed participation can clarify the relationship of emotion to musical experience. Music, in turn, can help explore such participation.

Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme is collection of essays that lends emphasis to, and in some cases sheds new light on, Arnold Berleant's distinctive approach to aesthetic theory. T...

In this paper, I set an aspect of what it is to live a flourishing life against the backdrop of neo liberal trends that continue to influence educational policy across the globe. The view I set out is in sharp contrast to any narrow assumption that education’s main task is the measurement of high performing individuals who will thus contribute to an economically viable society. Instead, I explore and argue for a conception of what constitutes a flourishing life that is (...) embedded in a more pragmatist analysis of what education may be. The argument begins with developing the centrality of embodiment to aesthetic sensibility and goes on to suggest how collective understanding of this within a community could constitute a sense of performance and thus contribute to the educational aim of developing a full and flourishing life. The argument is that this way of seeing life could have implications for educational practice, the role of the teacher and could help to reconfigure how education is experienced by the young. (shrink)

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing (...) the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming, and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity; but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming, but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic effect emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as mine by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation; and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and surprise. Analyzing this material through the lens of passive syntheses helps explain these experiences, as well as the sense of subject–object fusion that occurs in some (...) of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience. These analyses are then contrasted with a potentially contradicting take on aesthetic experience from a recent trend in cognitive science, namely enactive aesthetics, which insists on the active subjective construction and sense-making of aesthetic experience. Finally we show that the two positions are in fact compatible. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of “the insufficiency of now” that stems from the entanglement of education with time. Namely, the embodied-lived present is always inferior compared to the hypothetical ideal future. Education and its promise hence carry the seed of inevitable disenchantment. This problem is examined based on two contrasting perspectives: Plato’s cave allegory and its application to contemporary schooling on the one hand and the Yogacara Buddhist “mind-moments” model on the other hand. The insufficiency of now emerges from (...) both models in different ways; however, the latter model accentuates the mind’s role in its formation. The paper then describes mindfulness practice in light of the latter model, and suggests that it may be a necessary pedagogy for addressing a problem that is inherent in the concept of education and in the mind. However, the teaching of mindfulness itself has to overcome the present/future dualism that is the basis for the insufficiency of now. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the ongoing references made to the ban on graven images for the foundation of political aesthetics. In this tradition the image itself plays a significant role in the creation of a dichotomy in which the image becomes either “icon” or false appearance. The image in this tradition is a powerful agent and gains as such performative power. From the Bible to Kant and German idealism to Adorno and Deleuze, the prohibition of the image signals its power (...) and turns it into a strong magnet in political aesthetics, may it be affirmative or negative. (shrink)

The aesthetic and political sides of public art have recently been examined from different theoretical vantage points. Pragmatist accounts, however, have been largely absent from the discussion. This article develops a theory of public art on some central ideas of John Dewey's aesthetics and social philosophy. From a pragmatist perspective, the best cases of public art turn out to have high social significance, for they are means of promoting the sense of community, which Dewey saw as foundational for well-functioning democracies. (...) The Deweyan account of public art developed in this article is set against theories that explain its social value by public artworks’ ability to disrupt people's everyday routines and beliefs, as well as by the political alertness they often raise. Diana Boros's recent treatment of what she calls “visionary public art” serves as the main specimen of this approach. The Deweyan understanding of public art is illuminated and defended with the help of a reading of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls—a piece composed in memory of the victims of 9/11—that highlights its capacity to generate such communal experiences that have a fundamental role in Dewey's theory of democracy. (shrink)

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

This article addresses the issue of units of analysis and atomistic models in psychology taking creativity research as a case study. A classic typology in this area, initially proposed by Rhodes, distinguishes between the four P's of creativity: person, process, product, and press. Continuing an effort to rewrite this basic language of the discipline from a cultural psychological perspective in the form of five A's, the discussion here focuses on bringing relationships to the fore within this framework and problematising strict (...) distinctions between each of the five elements. A closer look at the five A's of creativity, drawing on theoretical considerations and illustrated by interviews with creators working in different domains, reveals the permeable borders surrounding these units and challenges clear divisions between actors and audiences, action and artefacts, actors and artefacts. In the end, it is argued that creative phenomena cannot be properly understood and studied outside of their integrated and dynamic totality defined as a creativity complex. Implications of adopting this “molecular” perspective for theory and methodology are discussed. (shrink)

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.

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of (...) the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible. (shrink)

This symposium provides five case studies of the ways that John Dewey's philosophy and practice were influenced by women or "weirdoes" (our choices include F. M. Alexander, Albert Barnes, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Jane Addams) and presents some conclusions about the value of dialoging across difference for philosophers and other scholars.

In his work on aesthetics, John Dewey provocatively (and enigmatically) called art the "most universal and freest form of communication," and tied his reading of aesthetic experience to such an employment. I will explore how art, a seemingly obscure and indirect means of communication, can be used as the most effective and moving means of communication in certain circumstances. Dewey's theory of art will be shown to hold that art can be purposively employed to communicatively evoke a certain experience through (...) an auditor's experience of an art object. Such a use is shown to be an extension of Dewey's conceptions of scientific method and the role of experience in criticism and communication, and is discussed in light of examples drawn from contemporary film, sculpture, and classical Japanese poetry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Main Street as Art Museum:Metaphor and Teaching StrategiesElizabeth (Beau) Vallance (bio)In truth, walking down Main Street in many American small towns today is rather like walking through an art museum whose walls have mysterious gaps where paintings have been removed for cleaning. Maybe more accurately, walking down Main Street can be rather like walking through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston after a Vermeer, two Rembrandts, and eleven (...) other artworks were stolen in 1990: since the Gardner's charter does not allow it to rearrange its holdings, the resulting gaps remained with only explanatory notes in their too-large spaces on my last visit there. A town I know well has a disturbing number of empty storefronts, identified with only the faint outlines of their former names, their windows holding explanatory notes in the form of signs proclaiming that they are for sale or rent. Thanks to Wal-Mart and other big-box stores thriving in a distinctly nonpedestrian strip north of town, the commerce that once thrived on Main Street has died or been removed to new locations, and the once-lively street-level shop windows that testified to downtown liveliness for foot traffic are now empty, awaiting new life as, very likely, antique shops or restaurants.But in principle, a walk down Main Street can be very much like a stroll through a museum gallery—visually rich, inviting unexpected choices, aesthetically rewarding. This article explores the concept of shop windows as visually ordered compositions much like paintings and other art objects and suggests some approaches to applying this concept in teaching a range of subjects and styles of art in both classrooms and actual museums. For the purposes of argument, we will assume that our mythical Main Street is alive [End Page 25] with businesses of many kinds, with the old-fashioned windows open to the street that allow us to "window shop" for many blocks. Some of my examples are drawn from the very enjoyable experience they still offer, of wandering from image to image, commenting as we go.Museum Visitors as Window-ShoppersConsider the behavior of the average museum visitor, a composite characterization drawn from my years as a museum educator and augmented by a few statistics on how people comport themselves in museums and other public places. The behavior of visitors in art museums is an especially clear case of how people observe deliberate compositions, for in art museums objects are typically arranged fairly sparely, with minimal crowding of the objects themselves, small labels that may or may not explain much about the painting or sculpture or silver tureen, good lighting, and a fairly hushed atmosphere, unless a crowd has gathered for a family festival or a major exhibition.Generally, people come to museums in pairs or small groups and not necessarily with a clear plan beyond perhaps seeing a particular favorite work of art or generally catching the highlights of the collection. Their purpose may be social as much as specifically educational, and those who come with companions tend to chat a bit as they walk through the collection. Generally, other things being equal, they turn to the right on entering the building.1 After that, however, visitors become unpredictable, and they meander among the objects in ways the museum cannot control unless visitors are following a live tour guide or a printed self-guiding tour that recommends stopping at selected objects in a predetermined order. Visitors may move to a large object located in the center of the gallery (such as a medieval suit of armor, an Egyptian mummy case, or an enormous painting on a freestanding wall partition), or to a case filled with many small precious-looking objects (such as pre-Columbian gold jewelry from Peru, or the tiny bass sculptures that are gold weights from the Ashanti culture in Ghana). They may be drawn to something in a familiar style, such as a large Impressionist painting or a Rembrandt-looking portrait. They may gravitate to a favorite object in the collection, or they may be attracted by a new acquisition or a work recently installed after many years in storage. At all these stops, they... (shrink)

The nature of craft creativity has often been ignored in research which focuses on innovative and novel ideas and thought processes. This view of creativity casts the repetitive nature of craft as antithetical to the disruptive nature of genuine creativity. Drawing on combined enactivist and pragmatist accounts of habits and on a focused cognitive ethnography of a wooden bowl turner, this paper explores the nature of the constraints wrought by habitual action. Habitual action will be shown to be less repetitive (...) than may be initially assumed because of the uncertainty inherent in working with both the wood which forms the initial material and the tools necessary to transform it. Rather, this paper proposes habitual learned movements as an important concept in a pragmatist-informed theory of creativity since they mark the skilled co-ordination of material, tool and maker, at once constraining and enhancing the creative craft process. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDespite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically a...

A good part of what makes the seemingly endless ascent up Mount Jihuashan such a powerful experience, for the curious visitor no less than for the earnest pilgrim, is the overwhelming solemnity of its atmosphere. As it is one of the four holy mountains of Chinese Buddhism, throngs of the pious march dutifully over its stone steps, passing temples and nunneries on their way to the summit. Bells ring out from behind open windows of old shrines, as if rushing to (...) compete with the glow of candles and wafts of smoking incense. Every element seems to conspire in inducing a sense of the beyond. All of this is entirely appropriate, for Jihuashan is the abode of Dizang—the bodhisattva or savior being most known for refusing... (shrink)

Borrowing from the title and some of the content of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, it is argued that museums have great value as sites for what may be called a philosophical culture. A philosophical culture is one in which members or citizens engage in fair-minded debate and shared reflection, presenting and evaluating reasons for different positions particularly as these have relevance for matters of governance. In a philosophical culture, persuasion is almost always a matter of seeking (...) to provide reasonable grounds for adopting some position without resorting to violence or physical force.A philosophical culture is, in turn, an important foundation for a democratic culture and republic. A philosophy of museums emerges, a model we shall call the Philosophical Culture Museum Model. This concept is stipulative and ideal in the sense that it presents a paradigm of a museum with great virtue and promise. It must be confessed, however, that, historically, this is an emerging concept of the role of museums and one not evident in many of the museums in the early modern era or today. Reasons are offered as to why the time may be right to recognize the philosophy of museums as a particular sub-field in the overall practice of philosophy. (shrink)

Gray unwisely melds together two distinguishable contributions of consciousness: one to epistemology, the other to evolution. He also renders consciousness needlessly invisible behaviorally.

Robust theories concerning the connection between consciousness and brain function should derive not only from empirical evidence but also from a well grounded inind-body ontology. In the case of the comparator hypothesis, Gray develops his ideas relying extensively on empirical evidence, but he bounces irresolutely among logically incompatible metaphysical theses which, in turn, leads him to excessively skeptical conclusions concerning the naturalization of consciousness.

The commentary argues that we cannot be sure that human consciousness has survival value and that in order to understand the origins and, perhaps, the function of consciousness, we should examine the behavioural and neural precursors to consciousness in nonhumans. An example is given of research on the role of context in decisions regarding fleeing from probable predators in the Mongolian gerbil.

1 The question of expression is essential for artistic practices; it designates how a material is articulated through sculptural gestures, how a musical idea is shaped by the dancer’s movements, an...

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1070-1086, December 2021.

Corporate governance sits at the intersection of many disciplines, among them law, business, management, finance, and accounting. The point of departure for large portions of this literature concerns the ugliness of greed, ambition, misdemeanors, and malfeasance of corporations, their directors, and those actors who hold shares in them. This essay takes a rather different starting point. Drawing upon insights from a distant field, it uses the discussion of aesthetics in Dewey’s treatise on art to ask what motivates directors to act (...) in ways that constitute the attention and engagement that we associate with the effectiveness of boards. Using Dewey’s thinking about aesthetic experience, this paper examines the experience of organization boards, both in the literature and in the personal experience of the author. These observations point to need to reflect on motivation when considering both the practice of corporate governance and the policy frameworks in which it operates. (shrink)

It is with the materiality of language, or Materia Prima, that this article concerns itself, reflecting upon the ‘surface’ of text, as an image in its own right. The oral or spoken/auditory/acoustic qualities of language have long been held to be aesthetically central to literature and poetry, not material words. The philosopher Richard Shusterman describes this phenomenon as a lack of attention to those instances when the ‘visible is visible’, this phrase relying upon a distinction between two meanings of the (...) word ‘visible’. The first suggests being ‘able to be seen’, while the second suggests the ‘conspicuous’ or ‘strikingly manifest’ aspect of the seen. The printed surface of language, where the ‘visible is visible’, has traditionally been viewed as irrelevant in philosophical accounts of language, from Plato to Wittgenstein, where, frequently, language is broken down only into ‘the sound aspect’ and ‘the meaning aspect’. However, this article will argue that the knowledge that artists, designers, typographers and illustrators bring is that the material word is a crucial partner in the production of meaning. This article engages with those practitioners whose work interfaces with these concerns, both directly and indirectly. Article examining the potential of material explorations of language in the form of typographic/artistic practice, as a method of philosophical reflection about language. This involves a synthesis of methodologies drawn from both theory and practice. This research is concerned with articulating a new theory about the materiality of language. This new methodology involves exploring/making examples of self-reflexive ‘visible’ language, which in turn offer insight into philosophies of language from an aesthetic/experiential perspective: constituting an immanent critique of language, rather than a descriptive one. The argument made is that philosophical theories about language cannot be separated from their enactment at the level of the sensory attributes and experience of language. To this end, alongside historical examples, the article contains images of textual experiments, made by the author, which are intended to complement and extend philosophical discourses by using accompanying those theoretical analyses, with ‘enacted’ examples. (shrink)

Çalışmamın amacı postmodern öğretim programları kavramını Patrick Slattery’nin yazmış olduğu Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era başlıklı kitap çerçevesinde irdelemektir. Çalışmada Slattery’nin adı geçen kitabından alıntılar yaparak postmodern öğretim programları kavramını onun sözcükleriyle hem düzyazı hem de şiir yoluyla özetleyeceğim. Bunu yaparken de postmodern öğretim programı kavramını, kitabın ruhuna uygun olarak, görseller yoluyla somutlaştırmaya çalışacağım.

The debate around ethical consumption is often characterised by discussion of its numerous failures arising from complexity in perceived trade-offs. In response, this paper advances a pragmatist understanding of the role and nature of trade-offs in ethical consumption. In doing so, it draws on the central roles of values and value in consumption and pragmatist philosophical thought, and proposes a critique of the ethical consumer as rational maximiser and the cognitive and utilitarian discourse of individual trade-offs to understand how sustainable (...) consumption practices are established and maintained. An in-depth qualitative study is conducted employing phenomenological interviews and hermeneutic analysis to explore the consumption stories of a group of ethically minded consumers. The research uncovers the location of value within a fluid, yet habitual, plurality of patterns, preferences, morals, identities and relationships. Its contribution is to propose that consumer perception of value in moral judgements is represented by an overall form of aggregate personal advantage, which lacks conscious reflection and delivers a phenomenological form of value rooted in habits, reflecting a pragmatist representation of value unified as a ‘consummatory experience’. (shrink)

Textbooks and manuals on management suggest that managers are heroes who deal with difficult problems of collective adaptation and change. American films are similarly built on the premise of a hero confronted with extremely difficult situations. What if this hero figure promoted for so long in both management literature and the American film industry was the same at the structural level? This paper will attempt to clearly define the ethical performance of heroes that is perhaps shared by the imagination industry (...) and the workplace on the long run. We shall follow this picture of a hero-leader in the ethics of business and cinema through a large corpus of movies and writings on management and provide a set of six features for examining both, a common heroic structure we shall call the Hero-Leader Matrix. (shrink)

This article questions educational practices that undermine ‘being’ musical. Where Western misconceptions about the nature of human musicality distance many individuals from meaningful engagement with an intrinsic part of their humanity, I challenge the status quo to argue for an inclusive educational practice which gives everyone an opportunity to ‘be’ musical. Despite evidence from neuroscience now supporting the understanding that humans are a musical species, the widespread neo-liberal oriented focus on vocational training fails to recognise music as an essential aspect (...) of healthy human being. Where current polarised music education provision supports a discriminatory system that leads to widespread underdeveloped musicality, I draw on Gadamer and Dewey to explore how musicking integrates cultural development and to question the value of a practice that leaves many of us musically disabled. Including examples of teaching practices that engage and transform, I argue the case for an enriched, broader curriculum that no longer sees music as a ‘frill’. (shrink)

It is argued here that understanding John Dewey's thought as that of a prodigal liberal or a fellow traveller does not capture the complexity of his work. It is also important to recognise the portion of his work that is historie morale. In the very best sense it is epic, encapsulating the hopes and dreams of a history of the American people in the early 1900s. It is a work that simultaneously pursues modernity and the past — for the sake (...) of coping with the present. It also calls attention to an unnoticed element in his work 'inexperience'. (shrink)

This narrative account describes and analyzes the story of resistance to aesthetic education in an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. After carefully listening to the students’ resistance to the Lincoln Center Institute’s aesthetic education component of their student teacher experience, the author designs a curriculum initiative to address the questions of relevance and application of aesthetic education in pre-service teacher preparation. This article follows the initiation, development, implementation, and evaluation of the aesthetic art initiative. Framed by Young’s understanding of ‘asymmetrical (...) reciprocity’, the author suggests that three layers of asymmetry — instructor asymmetry, departmental asymmetry, and institutional asymmetry — may have influenced the pre-service teachers’ engagement with aesthetic education. This autoethnographic account asserts that embracing resistance and asymmetry may be important to the development of aesthetic education with pre-service teachers, and also yields insight into the ways contextual features of higher education may influence educational experiences. (shrink)

The comparator model is insufficient for three reasons. First, consciousness is involved in the process of comparison as well as in the output. Second, we still do not have enough neurophysiological information to match the events of consciousness, although such knowledge is growing. Third, the anatomical localisation proposed can be damaged bilaterally but consciousness will persist.

Gray, like other recent authors, seeks a scientific approach to consciousness, but fails to provide a biologically convincing description, partly because he implicitly bases his model on a computationalist foundation that embeds the contents of thought in irreducible symbolic representations. When patterns of neural activity instantiating conscious thought are shorn of homuncular observers, it appears most likely that these patterns and the circuitry that compares them with memories and plans should be found distributed over large regions of neocortex.