The search for neural correlates of consciousness (or NCCs) is arguably the cornerstone in the recent resurgence of the science of consciousness. The search poses many difficult empirical problems, but it seems to be tractable in principle, and some ingenious studies in recent years have led to considerable progress. A number of proposals have been put forward concerning the nature and location of neural correlates of consciousness. A few of these include.

Contemporary cognitive neuropsychology attempts to infer unobserved features of normal human cognition, or ‘cognitive architecture’, from experiments with normals and with brain-damaged subjects in whom certain normal cognitive capacities are altered, diminished, or absent. Fundamental methodological issues about the enterprise of cognitive neuropsychology concern the characterization of methods by which features of normal cognitive architecture can be identified from such data, the assumptions upon which the reliability of such methods are premised, and the limits of such methods—even granting their assumptions—in (...) resolving uncertainties about that architecture. With some idealization, the question of the capacities of various experimental designs in cognitive neuropsychology to uncover cognitive architecture can be reduced to comparatively simple questions about the prior assumptions investigators are willing to make. This paper presents some of simplest of those reductions. (shrink)

This chapter surveys current approaches to consciousness in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It focuses on five approaches, to which I will refer as mysterianism, dualism, representationalism, higher-order monitoring theory, and self-representationalism. With each approach, I will present in order the leading account of consciousness along its line, the case for the approach, and the case against the approach. I will not issue a final verdict on any approach, though by the end of the chapter it should be evident where my own (...) sympathies lie. (shrink)

What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The (...) consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy. (shrink)

In the past decade, the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness (or NCC) has become a focal point for scientific research on consciousness (Metzinger, 2000a). A growing number of investigators believe that the first step toward a science of consciousness is to discover the neural correlates of consciousness. Indeed, Francis Crick has gone so far as to proclaim that ‘we … need to discover the neural correlates of consciousness.… For this task the primate visual system seems especially attractive.… No (...) longer need one spend time attempting … to endure the tedium of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. Con- sciousness is now largely a scientific problem’ (Crick, 1996, p. 486).2 Yet the question of what it means to be a neural correlate of consciousness is actually far from straightforward, for it involves fundamental empirical, methodological, and _philosophical _issues about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain. Even if one assumes, as we do, that states of consciousness causally depend on states of the brain, one can nevertheless wonder in what sense there is, or could be, such a thing as a neural correlate of consciousness. (shrink)

Fleshing out Ramsey-sentence functionalism; against Lewis's "mad pain" mixed theory; relating functionalism to the causal theory of properties. Empirical functionalism is chauvinistic so probably false. A terrific, in-depth paper.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a method capable of transiently modulating neural excitability. Depending on the stimulation parameters information processing in the brain can be either enhanced or disrupted. This way the contribution of different brain areas involved in mental processes can be studied, allowing a functional decomposition of cognitive behavior both in the temporal and spatial domain, hence providing a functional resolution of brain/mind processes. The aim of the present paper is to argue that TMS with its ability to (...) draw causal inferences on function and its neural representations is a valuable neurophysiological tool for investigating the causal basis of neuronal functions and can provide substantive insight into the modern interdisciplinary and (anti)reductionist neurophilosophical debates concerning the relationships between brain functions and mental abilities. Thus, TMS can serve as a heuristic method for resolving causal issues in an arena where only correlative tools have traditionally been available. (shrink)

Correspondence: Alva Noë, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-2390, USA. _Email: [email protected]_ Evan Thompson, Philosophy Department, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. _Email: [email protected]_.

Nāgārjuna rejects ‘inherent existence’ or ‘essence’ in favor of co-dependent origination, and that is also why he rejects causality. Causality is a major issue in metaphysical views; for example, one could argue that consciousness causes/affects our brain/behavior/function/matter or vice-versa. My goals are as follows: (i) which entities lack ‘inherent existence’ or ‘essence’ and which ones inherently exist? (ii) Do the entities that lack inherent existence dependently co-arise and hence can we reject causality as in Nāgārjuna’s philosophy? (iii) Do the entities (...) that exist inherently cause entities that lack inherent existence? (iv) Do structure, function, experience, and environment cause each other? And (v) we critically analyze, extend, and examine Nāgārjuna’s philosophy of dependent co-origination (Nāgārjuna & Garfield, 1995)with respect to the dual-aspect-dual-mode PE-SE framework (Vimal, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009c). Our analysis suggests that: (i)All conventional entities lack inherently existence, except subjective experiences (SEs)/proto-experiences (PEs) that are fundamental and irreducible and hence inherently exist. (ii) The entities that lack inherent existence dependently co-arise, and hence causality for them can be rejected but instead conditions (such as efficient, percept-object, immediate, and dominant conditions) might be necessary, as in Nāgārjuna’s philosophy. (iii) It is not clear that SEs that exist inherently cause entities that lack inherent existence, but one could argue that (a) superposed PEs/SEs in the mental aspect of stings or elementary particles might be the motivation for the evolution to form neural-nets to realize a specific SE, and (b) Nāgārjuna’s rejection of causality and ‘relational ontology’ (Caponigro & Prakash, 2009) need to be reconsidered for SEs. For example, the SE redness (redness-bhutatma (Vimal, 2009g)) inherently, independently, and eternally exists; and hence causality may not be rejected and the ‘relational ontology’ may not apply for any such SE. (iv) It is not clear that structure, function, experience, and environment cause each other, but they might be linked via conditions. (v) Furthermore, (a) an entity has double aspect: mental and material aspects, (b) string is a dual-aspect entity that dependently co-arises from string-vacuum or brane, and (c) the dual-aspect-dual-mode PE-SE framework is consistent with these premises. For example, PEs/SEs inherently exist and are in superposed form in the mental aspect of (a) string-vacuum and/or brane before Big-Bang, (b) strings, elementary particles (bosons and fermions) and all evolved entities after Big-Bang, and (c) entities before and after Big-Freeze/Big-Crunch or entities in cyclic universe as in the big bounce/quantum-bounce (Loop Quantum Gravity) framework. However, the selection of a specific SE has dependent co-origination (and hence not inherently existent, consistent with Nāgārjuna), i.e., a specific SE occurs in brain when (i) relevant neural-net is formed via neural Darwinism, (ii) the specific SE is selected via matching and selection mechanisms, and (iii) the necessary ingredients ―such as wakefulness, re-entry, attention, working memory, stimulus at above threshold, and neural-net PEs― are satisfied. If this is true, then only experiences (PEs/SEs in superposed form) are inherently existent and other entities have dependent co-origination. (shrink)