This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers’s (2019) version that excludes conceptual (categorical or discrete) representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a different levels of explanation approach to the relation between the brain and the mind advocated. A different theory of phenomenal consciousness is described, in which (...) there is a particular computational system involved in which Higher Order Syntactic Thoughts are used to perform credit assignment on first order thoughts of multiple step plans to correct them by manipulating symbols in a syntactic type of working memory. This provides a good evolutionary reason for the evolution of this kind of computational module, with which, it is proposed, phenomenal consciousness is associated. Some advantages of this HOST approach to phenomenal consciousness are then described with reference not only to the global workspace approach, but also to Higher Order Thought (HOT) theories. It is hypothesized that the HOST system which requires the ability to manipulate first order symbols in working memory might utilize parts of the prefrontal cortex implicated in working memory, and especially the left inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in language and probably syntactical processing. Overall, the approach advocated is to identify the computations that are linked to consciousness, and to analyze the neural bases of those computations. (shrink)

The representation of objects and faces by neurons in the temporal lobe visual cortical areas of primates has the property that the neurons encode relatively independent information in their firing rates. This means that the number of stimuli that can be encoded increases exponentially with the number of neurons in an ensemble. Moreover, the information can be read by receiving neurons that perform just a synaptically weighted sum of the firing rates being received. Some ways in which these representations become (...) grounded in the world are described. The issue of syntactic binding in representations, and of its value for a higher order thought system, is discussed. (shrink)

An approach to emotion is described in which emotions are defined as states elicited by instrumental reinforcers, that is, by stimuli that are the goals for action. This leads to a theory of the evolutionary adaptive value of emotions, which is that different genes specify different goals in their own self-interest, and any actions can then be learned and performed by instrumental learning to obtain the goals. The brain mechanisms for emotion in brain regions such as the orbitofrontal and anterior (...) cingulate cortex provide a foundation for understanding the neural basis of emotion. Classically conditioned effects may modulate the actions initiated by this system. In addition to this instrumental learning system, some stimuli may elicit responses, for example approach, withdrawal, or fixed action patterns, but intervening states are not required for this type of adaptive response. In addition, a rational thought system involved in multistep planning can allow gene-specified goals to be deferred or avoided in order to achieve longer-term types of goals that may be more advantageous to the individual than to the genes. (shrink)