There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

In recent times we have seen an explosion in the amount of attention paid to the conscious brain from scientists and philosophers alike. One message that has emerged loud and clear from scientific work is that the brain is a dynamical system whose operations unfold in time. Any theory of consciousness that is going to be physically realistic must take account of the intrinsic nature of neurons and brain activity. At the same time a long discussion on consciousness among philosophers (...) has resulted in our distinguishing several kinds of consciousness. So when we ask where the place of consciousness is in nature we may mean several different things. In this chapter I will argue that it is plausible that all of the kinds of consciousness turn out to be nothing but patterns of synchronized neural activity in various frequencies against a dynamically changing chemical background. (shrink)

We discuss cases where subjects seem to enjoy conscious experience when the relevant first-order perceptual representations are either missing or too weak to account for the experience. Though these cases are originally considered to be theoretical possibilities that may be problematical for the higher-order view of consciousness, careful considerations of actual empirical examples suggest that this strategy may backfire; these cases may cause more trouble for first-order theories instead. Specifically, these cases suggest that (I) recurrent feedback loops to V1 are (...) most likely not the neural correlate of first-order representations for conscious experience, (II) first-order views seem to have a problem accounting for the phenomenology in these cases, and either (III) a version of the ambitious higher-order approach is superior in that it is the simplest theory that can account for all results at face value, or (IV) a view where phenomenology is jointly determined by both first-order and higher-order states. In our view (III) and (IV) are both live options and the decision between them may ultimately be an empirical question that cannot yet be decided. (shrink)

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

Once upon a time, people thought that all perception was conscious. Indeed, it was widely believed that all mental states are conscious, so the problem of explaining consciousness collapses into the problem of explaining mentality. But things have changed. Most people now believe that a lot goes on unconsciously. Indeed, some people believe that mental states that are not perceptual in nature are never conscious. That’s a matter of controversy. Less controversial is the claim that perceptual states are conscious some (...) of the time, but not all of the time. This raises a question. When are perceptual states conscious? A theory of consciousness is, in large part, an answer to that question. In this chapter, I will offer a few critical remarks on one answer that has been popular in philosophy, and then I will offer a defense of another answer that has emerged out of cognitive science. To avoid undue suspense, the answer that I favor is that perceptual states become conscious when and only when the perceiver is attending. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of (...) attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

I introduce "nomic-role nonreductionism" as an alternative to traditional causal-role functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Rather than identify mental properties by a theory that describes their intra-level causal roles via types of inputs, internal states, and outputs, I suggest that one identify mental properties by a more comprehensive theory that also describes inter-level realization roles via types of lower-level engineering, internal mental states, and still higher-level states generated by them. I defend this position on grounds that mental properties should (...) be understood by our best scientific theories, which at present include informatioin about mental engineering. I further defend this claim by a "parity of reasons" argument. Causal-role functionalists are justified to include sensory stimuli in their theory of mind as opposed to, say, the remote causes of sensory stimuli because the former but not the latter are items of direct mental production. But ditto for the system's physical realizations. They too directly produce mental states, only not by "causing" them but by "realizing" them. Engineering realizations and their input triggering conditions work in tandem. In addition, I tell a related but more general metaphysical story about property identity, namely, that the traditional causal theory should be replaced by a more comprehensive nomic theory that individuates properties by their intra-level causal powers as well as their inter-level realization capacities. (shrink)

Control consciousness is the awareness or experience of seeming to be in control of one’s actions. One view, which I will be arguing against in the present paper, is that control consciousness is a form of sensory consciousness. In such a view, control consciousness is exhausted by sensory elements such as tactile and proprioceptive information. An opposing view, which I will be arguing for, is that sensory elements cannot be the whole story and must be supplemented by direct contributions of (...) nonsensory, motor elements. More specifically, I will be arguing for the view that the neural basis of control consciousness is constituted by states of recurrent activation in relatively intermediate levels of the motor hierarchy. (shrink)

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in conscious visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver's bodily actions. In this paper, I review and assess three main sources (...) of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis. I argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency. (shrink)

How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their (...) authority, and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is ‘Yes’? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! The paper argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. The paper argues that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified by the explanations it allows. (shrink)

Many different methodological approaches have been proposed to infer the presence of consciousness in non-human systems. In this paper, a version of the theory-heavy approach is defended. Theory-heavy approaches rely heavily on considerations from theories of consciousness to make inferences about non-human consciousness. Recently, the theory-heavy approach has been critiqued in the form of Birch's (Noûs, 56(1): 133-153, 2022) dilemma of demandingness and Shevlin's (Mind & Language, 36(2): 297-314, 2021) specificity problem. However, both challenges implicitly assume an inapt characterization of (...) the theory-heavy approach. I argue that an alternative characterization of the approach, what I call a credence-based theory-heavy approach, avoids these challenges. Theorists can generate interpretations of their theory, at different levels of generality, and operationalize these into theory-informed markers. These theory-informed are assigned a likelihood and are used to assess the probability that a target system is conscious. In providing this characterization, and mapping out the possible ways in which a credence-based theory-heavy approach can be fleshed out, the aim is to situate the theory-heavy approach as a more compelling approach than it is currently being perceived as. Our attention, then, needs to towards remaining challenges such as the consensus problem and the problem of calibrating the likelihoods associated with theory-informed markers. I also explore methodological pluralism and assess how the credence-based theory-heavy approach can benefit from other methodological approaches. (shrink)

The principal aim of the thesis is to develop a developmental account of conscious experience. In this account, the objective is to understand and explain the phenomenal experience of newborns and pre-linguistic infants. The question that guides the investigation concerns the phenomenality of babies' experiences: what is it like to be a baby? There are some crucial philosophical issues that any account of the nature of infant consciousness must face: the ontology of early conscious states; the epistemic status of infants' (...) experiences; the content of infants' experiences. The thesis addresses how we evolve as conscious beings from early states of life until we become full self-conscious beings who are morally responsible for our actions. The thesis involves four chapters. The first chapter explores phenomenal consciousness in newborns, first addressing the epistemological and methodological problems, and then arguing that newborns are phenomenally conscious and have a variety of phenomenal experiences. The second chapter addresses representation in newborns, claiming that their conscious experiences represent the world and discussing the consequences for representationalism. The third chapter focuses on the sense of agency, arguing that infants have a sense of agency and a sort of self-consciousness. The fourth chapter discusses moral agency, focusing mainly on the role of empathy. (shrink)

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and interplay (...) in our cogntive architecture. Based on the philosophical discourse of philosophy of mind, four types of imagination are indentified and conceptualized: sensory, propositional, experiential, and creative imagination. These categories are then employed on five phenomena that can be found in scientific and religious environments: metaphors, models, thought experiments, aspect perception, and - in the religious case - rituals. In relation to the concept of religious "seeing" I consider how imaginings may influence visionary experiences and visualization, and compare these phenomena with cases of scientific visualization and eureka experiences. In regard to scientific and religious models, a distinction is made between, on the one hand, two notions of truth and, on the other hand, truth-independent meaning-making. In light of these categories, I differentiate between, and critically discuss, the use of imagination in doxastic, non-doxastic and fictionalist accounts. In light of this investigation, I formulate and defend the position of interactivism, which acknowledges a constant interplay between different attitudes and mental states. In my examination of rituals and scientific and religious thought experiments, special attention is given to the mental capacity to recreate the experiences that are entailed in an imagined scenario. At the end of the investigation, I consider the possible impact that my study might have on how we view science and religion as well as the dialogue bewteen these two fields. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. We begin by (...) outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion. (shrink)

Emotion is conscious experience. It is the affective aspect of consciousness. Emotion arises from sensory stimulation and is typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. Hence an emotion is a complex reaction pattern consisting of three components: a physiological component, a behavioral component, and an experiential (conscious) component. The reactions making up an emotion determine what the emotion will be recognized as. Three processes are involved in generating an emotion: (1) identification of the emotional significance of a (...) sensory stimulus, (2) production of an affective state (emotion), and (3) regulation of the affective state. Two opposing systems in the brain (the reward and punishment systems) establish an affective value or valence (stimulus-reinforcement association) for sensory stimulation. This is process (1), the first step in the generation of an emotion. Development of stimulus-reinforcement associations (affective valence) serves as the basis for emotion expression (process 2), conditioned emotion learning acquisition and expression, memory consolidation, reinforcement-expectations, decision-making, coping responses, and social behavior. The amygdala is critical for the representation of stimulus-reinforcement associations (both reward and punishment-based) for these functions. Three distinct and separate architectural and functional areas of the prefrontal cortex (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex) are involved in the regulation of emotion (process 3). The regulation of emotion by the prefrontal cortex consists of a positive feedback interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal cortex resulting in the nonlinear emergence of emotion. This positive feedback and nonlinear emergence represents a type of working memory (focal attention) by which perception is reorganized and rerepresented, becoming explicit, functional, and conscious. The explicit emotion states arising may be involved in the production of voluntary new or novel intentional (adaptive) behavior, especially social behavior. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an empirically informed sketch of how our perceptual capacities can interact with cognitive processes to give rise to new perceptual attributives. In section 1, I present ongoing debates about the reach of perception and direct focus toward arguments offered in recent work by Tyler Burge and Ned Block. In section 2, I draw on empirical evidence relating to language processing to argue against the claim that we have no acquired, culture-specific, high-level perceptual attributives. In section (...) 3, I turn to the cognitive dimension; I outline how cognitive procedures can be involved in the acquisition of what ought to, nonetheless, be recognized as genuinely perceptual capacities. Finally, in section 4, I argue for the importance of distinguishing these conclusions from more familiar and radical claims about rampant “cognitive penetration” into the perceptual domain. (shrink)

In this review, we deal with two central questions of consciousness how and why, and we outline their possible future development. The question how refers to the empirical endeavor to reveal the neural correlates and mechanisms that form consciousness. On the other hand, the question why generally refers to the “hard problem” of consciousness, which claims that empirical science will always fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question why is there conscious experience at all. Unfortunately, the hard problem (...) of consciousness will probably never completely disappear because it will always have its most committed supporters. However, there is a good chance that its weight and importance will be highly reduced by empirically tackling consciousness in the near future. We expect that future empirical endeavor of consciousness will be based on a unifying brain theory and will answer the question as to what is the function of conscious experience, which will in turn replace the implications of the hard problem. The candidate of such a unifying brain theory is predictive coding, which will have to explain both perceptual consciousness and conscious mind-wandering in order to become the truly unifying theory of brain functioning. (shrink)

I argue that we sometimes visually perceive the intentions of others. Just as we can see something as blue or as moving to the left, so too can we see someone as intending to evade detection or as aiming to traverse a physical obstacle. I consider the typical subject presented with the Heider and Simmel movie, a widely studied ‘animacy’ stimulus, and I argue that this subject mentally attributes proximal intentions to some of the objects in the movie. I further (...) argue that these attributions are unrevisable in a certain sense and that this result can be used to as part of an argument that these attributions are not post-perceptual thoughts. Finally, I suggest that if these attributions are visual experiences, and more particularly visual illusions, their unrevisability can be satisfyingly explained, by appealing to the mechanisms which underlie visual illusions more generally. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Conscious experience is the direct observation of conscious events. Human conscious experience is four-dimensional. Conscious events are linked (associated) by spacetime intervals to produce a coherent conscious experience. This explains why conscious experience appears to us the way it does. Conscious experience is an orientation in space and time, an understanding of the position of the observer in space and time. Causality, past-future relations, learning, memory, cognitive processing, and goal-directed actions all evolve from four-dimensional conscious experience. A neural correlate for (...) four-dimensional conscious experience can be found in the human brain and is modelled by Einstein's special theory of relativity. The relativistic concept of spacetime interval is central for understanding conscious experience and cognition. (shrink)

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information. They consider what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. They consider how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful. (...) They consider the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. They explore both the familiar five sense modalities and other candidate sense modalities, including a sense for flavour, inner senses (e.g., a sense for pain), and various senses that may result from using sensory substitution devices. Contributors often represent competing views, and the methods they deploy sometimes differ from one essay to the next—with some drawing upon the sciences and engineering and others relying upon conceptual analysis. All contributors agree, nonetheless, that traditional theorizing about the senses is hampered by a neglect of the senses other than vision, and by the misconception that vision is a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. And many contributors believe that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities; they think that to understand perception properly, we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. The ambition of the volume is to begin to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses, and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception. (shrink)

Analyzing the outline of the endless literature on consciousness, the separation between science and philosophy rather than being overcome, seems to come back in different shapes. According to this point of view, the hard problem seems to be how to study consciousness while avoiding a slip back to the old dualism. This article outlines the advantages of the phenomenological method. This method, more than getting over the mind-body separation, anticipates it through an open gaze, able to bring back the human (...) presence as something structurally “ambiguous.” Reintroducing Husserl's scientific project in a complete way, Francisco Varela opened up a research area yet to be explored, which promises to be fertile for neuroscience, provided that we accept that radicalism essential to phenomenology. (shrink)

How has multiplicity superseded impossibility in philosophical challenges to artificial consciousness? I assess a trajectory in recent debates on artificial consciousness, in which metaphysical and explanatory challenges to the possibility of building conscious machines lead to epistemological concerns about the multiplicity underlying ‘what it is like’ to be a conscious creature or be in a conscious state. First, I analyse earlier challenges which claim that phenomenal consciousness cannot arise, or cannot be built, in machines. These are based on Block’s Chinese (...) Nation and Chalmers’ Hard Problem. To defuse such challenges, theorists of artificial consciousness can appeal to empirical methods and models of explanation. Second, I explain why this naturalistic approach produces an epistemological puzzle on the role of biological properties in phenomenal consciousness. Neither behavioural tests nor theoretical inferences seem to settle whether our machines are conscious. Third, I evaluate whether the new challenge can be managed through a more fine-grained taxonomy of conscious states. This strategy is supported by the development of similar taxonomies for biological species and animal consciousness. Although it makes sense of some current models of artificial consciousness, it raises questions about their subjective and moral significance. (shrink)

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 (...) target are commonly assumed to be not attending to it, these scenarios would be instances of consciousness without attention: instead of inattentional and change blindness supporting the Necessity Thesis, they would present counterexamples to it. (shrink)

What is the philosophical significance of attention? The present article provides an overview of recent debates surrounding the connections between attention and other topics of philosophical interest. In particular, it discusses the interplay between attention and consciousness, attention and agency, and attention and reference. The article outlines the questions and contemporary positions concerning how attention shapes the phenomenal character of experience, whether it is necessary or sufficient for consciousness, and whether it plays a special role in the best philosophical theories (...) of action or conceptual reference. Various interdependencies between the answers to these questions are indicated, as well as how these answers might depend on the metaphysics of attention. Together with its companion piece this article serves as an introduction to the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

The evolutionary origin of consciousness has been a growing area of study in recent years. Nevertheless, there is intense debate on whether the existence of phenomenal consciousness without the cerebral cortex is possible. The corticocentrists have an empirical advantage because we are quasi-confident that we humans are conscious and have the well-developed cortex as the site of our consciousness. However, their prejudice can be an anthropic bias similar to the anthropocentric prejudice in pre-Darwinian natural history. In this paper, I propose (...) three basic principles to provide a conceptual basis for evolutionary studies of consciousness: the non-solipsistic principle, the evolution principle, and the anthropic principle. These principles collectively help us to avoid solipsism, anthropocentrism, and anthropomorphism to some degree, although we cannot be completely free from them. Also, the landscape metaphor associated with the anthropic principle provides an image of how different forms of consciousness can be acquired. (shrink)

The prolific discussion about consciousness has resulted a multiplicity in the uses for the term. The -curious- little clarity regarding the use of the notion, can lead to confusion to who tries to enter the contemporary discussion of the philosophy of mind. The purpose of this article is to serve as a starting point for those who seek to enter the contemporary discussion of consciousness, presenting: i) the central concept of the consciousness that is used, and ii) give an account (...) of the state of the discussion, that is, the central problem of consciousness. (shrink)

According to Armstrong (amongst others) ‘any truth, should depend for its truth for something “outside” it’ where this one-way dependency is explained in terms of the asymmetric relationship that obtains between a truth and its truth-maker. But there’s no need to appeal to truth-makers to make sense of this dependency. The truth of a proposition is essentially determined by the interlocking semantic mechanism of reference and satisfaction which already ensures that the truth-value of a proposition depends on how things stand (...) outside it. By contrast, how things stand outside of a proposition is determined by other worldly mechanisms that have nothing to do with truth. (shrink)

There is a view on consciousness that has strong intuitive appeal and empirical support: the intermediate-level theory of consciousness, proposed mainly by Ray Jackendoff and by Jesse Prinz. This theory identifies a specific “intermediate” level of representation as the basis of human phenomenal consciousness, which sits between high-level non-perspectival thought processes and low-level disjointed feature-detection processes in the perceptual and cognitive processing hierarchy. In this article, we show that the claim that consciousness arises at an intermediate-level is true of some (...) cognitive systems, but only in virtue of specific constraints on their active interactions with the environment. We provide ecological reasons for why certain processing levels in a cognitive hierarchy are privileged with respect to consciousness. We do this from the perspective of a prediction-error minimization model of perception and cognition, relying especially on the notion of active inference: the privileged level for consciousness depends on the specific dispositions of an organism concerned with inferring its policies for action. Such a level is indeed intermediate for humans, but this depends on the spatiotemporal resolution of the typical actions that a human organism can normally perform. Thus, intermediateness is not an essential feature of consciousness. In organisms with different action dispositions the privileged level or levels may differ as well. (shrink)

Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories in the philosophy of mind are offered as explanations of what it is that makes a mental state a conscious state. According to HOP, a mental state is conscious just in case it is itself represented in a quasi-perceptual way by an internal monitor or scanning device. We start with one of the more popular objections to HOP and a seemingly innocuous concession to it: identifying the internal monitor with the faculty of attention. We show how (...) this concession undermines HOP. (shrink)

In his 1757 essay “Of Tragedy”, Hume reflected on a curious puzzle about emotions. Sometimes people seek out emotions or experiences that are typically negative and associated with displeasure or pain. People often desire to watch horror films that will make them scared or listen to music that will make them sad. Some people even engage in the pursuit of negative emotions on a regular basis such as in the case of thrill-seeking. In this paper my goal is to update (...) Hume’s puzzle with empirical evidence from the affective sciences and argue for two conclusions. First I will argue that Hume’s puzzle still runs deep. Though some recent scientific and philosophical accounts of emotions have tried to solve it, they have thus far failed. Second I attempt to construct a psychological account that solves the puzzle. Instead of focusing on how emotions are generated as previous theories have done, I argue that what is important is how emotions are regulated. (shrink)

Attention is a complex process that modulates perception in various ways. Phenomenological philosophy provides an array of concepts for describing the rich structures of attention, thereby avoiding reductions to singular aspects of an experiential spectrum. By suggesting various modes and levels of attentional experience, we intend to do some justice to its complexity, taking into account sub-personal and personal factors on the side of subjective (noetic) horizons and feature-oriented as well as context-oriented aspects on the side of objective (noematic) horizons.

In this response to 32 commentators, I start by clarifying the overflow argument. I explain why the distinction between generic and specific phenomenology is important and why we are justified in acknowledging specific phenomenology in the overflow experiments. Other issues discussed are the relations among report, cognitive access, and attention; panpsychic disaster; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience; and whether consciousness exists.

Studies of consciousness have traditionally been based mainly upon the perceptual domains of consciousness. However, there is another side of consciousness, represented by various types of intrinsic conscious experiences. Even though intrinsic experiences can represent up to 50% of our conscious experiences, they are still largely neglected in conscious studies. We assume there are two reasons for this. First, the field of intrinsic conscious experiences is methodologically far more problematic than any other. Second, specific paradigms for capturing the correlates of (...) intrinsic conscious experiences are almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, we expect the intrinsic side of consciousness to soon take its place in conscious studies, but first new experimental paradigms will have to be devised, which would be of a similar design to the paradigms used in studies of perceptual consciousness. In this hypothesis and theory article, we propose such a hypothetical paradigm, presenting the exploratory data of our proof-of-concept study, discussing its use, and addressing its shortcomings and their possible remediation. (shrink)

It is easy to think of attention as a purely sensorimotor, exogenous mechanism divorced from the influence of an agent’s preferences and needs. However, according to the active inference framework, such a strict reduction cannot be straightforwardly invoked, since _all_ cognitive and behavioural processes can at least be described as maximising the evidence for a generative model entailed by the ongoing existence of that agent; that is, the minimisation of variational free energy. As such, active inference models could cast an (...) (embodied) cognitive mechanism like attention, described in this paper as a relevance filter, as constrained (or enslaved) by these prior preferences for which an agent must seek evidence, whether or not such priors are having direct, real-time neurocognitive effects on the sensorimotor loops that couple the attending agent and her surrounding environment. This duality with respect to the role of priors corresponds to a wider, ongoing debate in the active inference community regarding the framework’s explanatory power. More specifically, the debate centres on whether the notion of a generative model and the priors embedded ubiqitously therein act as a purely useful instrumental tool for scientists aiming to model the behaviours of self-organising entities, or, rather, the brain (and body) is genuinely constituted by a predictive hierarchy within which higher-order dynamics constrain and contextualise activity unfolding at lower levels. With a focus on the second (ontologically realist) construal of active inference presented here, this paper argues that in cognitive systems endowed with attentional schema, higher-order preferences do, indeed, impose a demonstrable and powerful modulating effect on the way attention unfolds. Furthermore, these preferences in question transcend the contingent, task-relevant goals that have already been shown to bias attention. Rather, attention is powerfully tuned by the most-deep rooted priors the agent possesses, such that, when sensory evidence against these priors is observed and free energy spikes, the agent attentionally prioritises the homeostatic restoration of these preferred states over their shorter-term desires. This suggests that, at its core, attention is a goal-driven process, which calls into question the putative dichotomy that exists between endogenous (goal-directed) attention and exogenous (stimulus-driven) attention. What emerges in its place is a symbiotic relationship between attention and preferences, whereby the fulfilment of the latter rests on successful application of the former, and the former derives its function from the organismic need to find evidence for the latter. (shrink)