Desde 1980, C. D. Frith ha venido investigando sobre la esquizofrenia, explicando síntomas centrales como las alucinaciones, con miras a aclarar cuál es el déficit de base y originario de este trastorno mental. A lo largo de estos años, Frith ha propuesto su hipótesis centrada en el concepto de consciencia, y ha venido elaborándola como parte del desarrollo científico contemporáneo: parte de la aplicación de modelos neurocognitivos de control motor, según los cuales el déficit se atribuye al concepto de copia (...) eferente y su función, luego la actualiza y complementa con evidencia de imagen cerebral de la atenuación de la actividad cortical parietal, como efecto derivado de la copia eferente; por último, adiciona el concepto de sentido de agencia, y el componente de cognición social, intentando integrar la experiencia del paciente y la relevancia del ámbito inter-subjetivo a su propuesta, ambos aspectos recientemente populares. (shrink)

This non-article explores the limitations of applying brain science in “higher” disciplines. Many brain scientists believe that it is only a matter of time that everything human will be accounted for by the findings of brain science. Michael Polányi in the nineteen-sixties and recently Michael Gazzaniga argued against such determinism. They say that while “lower-level” processes constrain “higher-level” ones, they cannot determine them. The human mind is an emergent process, and it cannot be predicted from brain structure anymore than traffic (...) can be predicted from the structure of a car. I claim that in many instances, the application of brain science in psychology and literary studies merely re-states in brain-language what has already been said in psychology-language or literature-language. It can, however, be fruitfully applied when it refutes prevalent erroneous assumptions or resolves certain incongruities in the domain of “higher” disciplines. (shrink)

RESUMEN Desde 1980, C. D. Frith investiga la esquizofrenia, y explica sus síntomas centrales como las alucinaciones, con miras a aclarar cuál es el déficit originario de este trastorno mental. Frith propone una hipótesis centrada en el concepto de conciencia, que ha elaborado como parte del desarrollo científico contemporáneo. En primer lugar, como parte de la aplicación de modelos neurocognitivos de control motor, según los cuales el déficit se atribuye al concepto de copia eferente y su función. En segundo lugar, (...) la actualiza y complementa con evidencia de imagen cerebral de la atenuación de la actividad cortical parietal, como efecto derivado de la copia eferente. En tercer lugar, adiciona el concepto de sentido de agencia, y el componente de cognición social, intentando integrar la experiencia del paciente y la relevancia del ámbito intersubjetivo a su propuesta. Este artículo hace una revisión crítica de la hipótesis de Frith y se divide en cuatro partes: primero, se presenta una síntesis de la evolución de la hipótesis; segundo, se sintetiza su argumentación; tercero, se presentan los principales puntos críticos y, por último, se derivan unas conclusiones generales. ABSTRACT Since 1980, C. D. Frith has been working on schizophrenia, and explaining central symptoms such as hallucinations, in an attempt to clarify the basic deficits of this mental disorder. Frith has put forth a hypothesis based on the concept of consciousness, and has been adjusting it alongside contemporary scientific developments. In first place, it begins with the use of neurocognitive models of motor control, according to which the deficit is attributable to the concept of efferent copy and its function. In second place, he updated the model by including neuroimaging evidence of attenuation in parietal activity, as a consequence of the efferent copy. In third place, he added the concept of sense of agency, and the social cognition component, trying to integrate to his proposal the patient's experience and the relevance of the inter-subjective aspect. The current paper, which critically reviews Frith's hypothesis, it's divided in four parts: First, the hypothesis' evolution is synthesized; second, the main arguments are summarized; third, the main critical points are presented; and, finally, some general conclusions are drawn. (shrink)

Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that ‘consciousness’ contains no top-down control processes. We propose that ‘consciousness’ involves no executive, causal or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view all psychological processing and psychological products are non-conscious. In particular, we argue that all ‘contents of consciousness’ are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or (...) influenced in any way by the ‘experience of consciousness’. This continuously updated personal narrative arises from selective ‘internal broadcasting’ of outputs from non-conscious executive systems that have access to all forms of cognitive processing, sensory information and motor control. The personal narrative provides information for storage in autobiographical memory and is underpinned by constructs of self and agency, also created in non-conscious systems. The experience of consciousness, is seen as a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though at an individual level it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows the recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage – not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. (shrink)

A widely shared view in the literature on first-person thought is that the ability to entertain first-person thoughts requires prior non-conceptual forms of self-consciousness. Many philosophers maintain that the distinctive awareness which accompanies the use of the first person already presupposes a non-conceptual consciousness of the fact that oneself is the owner of a first-person thought. I call this argument The Argument for Non-Conceptual Self-Consciousness based on the Meaning of “I” and will demonstrate that most proponents of the presented argument (...) fail to establish their conclusion, even though I believe that the conclusion is actually true. The argument only justifies the claim that contextual information is needed in order to recognize oneself as the referent of an occurrence of the first person. However, it does not justify the thesis that this information needs to be given consciously and thus the existence of any non-conceptual self-consciousness. Finally, I shall present an argument for the assumption that some form of self-consciousness is needed to reflexively think about oneself via the first-person concept. In order to do so, I will draw on the general discussion about the functional role of consciousness. In particular, I will rely on results recently proposed by Frith and Metzinger (2016), Frith (Pragmatics & Cognition 18:497–551, 2010, Cognitive Neuroscience 2:117–118, 2011), Graziano (2013, Frontiers in Robotics and AI 4:article 60, 2017), and Graziano and Kastner (Cognitive Neuroscience 2:98–113, 2011), which suggest that one of the central functions of consciousness is to provide information about mental states for communication. (shrink)

What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...) serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness. (shrink)

What distinguishes conscious information processing from other kinds of information processing is its phenomenal aspect (PAC), the-what-it-is-like for an agent to experience something. The PAC supplies the agent with a sense of self, and informs the agent on how its self is affected by the agent’s own operations. The PAC originates from the activity that attention performs to detect the state of what I define “the self” (S). S is centered and develops on a hierarchy of innate and acquired values, (...) and is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems; it maps the agent’s body and cognitive capacities, and its interactions with the environment. The detection of the state of S by attention modulates the energy level of the organ of attention (OA), i.e., the neural substrate that underpins attention. This modulation generates the PAC. The PAC can be qualified according to five dimensions: qualitative, quantitative, hedonic, temporal and spatial. Each dimension can be traced back to a specific feature of the modulation of the energy level of the OA. (shrink)

Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious (...) cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness. (shrink)