Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science.

This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the (...) phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

An algebraic interpretation of multigraph networks is introduced in relation to conscious experience, brain and body. These multigraphs have the ability to merge by an associative binary operator \(\odot \), accounting for biological composition. We also study a mathematical formulation of splitting layers, resulting in a formal analysis of the transition from conscious to non-conscious activity. From this construction, we recover core structures for conscious experience, dynamical content and causal constraints that conscious interactions may impose. An important result is the (...) prediction of structural topological changes after conscious interactions. These results may inspire further use of formal mathematics to describe and predict new features of conscious experience while aligning well with formal tries to mathematize phenomenology, phenomenological tradition and applications to artificial consciousness. (shrink)

Neuroscientists continue to search for 'the' neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). In this article, I argue that a framework in which there are at least two distinct NCCs is increasingly making more sense of empirical results than one in which there is a single NCC. I outline the distinction between phenomenal NCC and access NCC, and show how they can be distinguished by experimental approaches, in particular signal- detection theory approaches. Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience provide an empirical case for (...) two different NCCs. (shrink)

Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to speak against application of mathematics to phenomenology do not in fact do so. In the second half of the paper I (...) focus on a particular example of Husserl’s “mathematized phenomenology”: his use of concepts from what is today called dynamical systems theory. (shrink)

This paper presents Integrated Information Theory of consciousness 3.0, which incorporates several advances over previous formulations. IIT starts from phenomenological axioms: information says that each experience is specific a sh it is what it is by how it differs from alternative experiences; integration says that it is unified a sh irreducible to non-interdependent components; exclusion says that it has unique borders and a particular spatio-temporal grain. These axioms are formalized into postulates that prescribe how physical mechanisms, such as neurons or (...) logic gates, must be configured to generate experience. The postulates are used to define intrinsic information as “differences that make a difference‘ within a system, and integrated information as information specified by a whole that cannot be reduced to that specified by its parts. By applying the postulates both at the level of individual mechanisms and at the level of systems of mechanisms, IIT arrives at an identity: an experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure, and the set of elements that generates it constitutes a complex. According to IIT, a MICS specifies the quality of an experience and integrated information Φ Max its quantity. From the theory follow several results, including: a system of mechanisms may condense into a major complex and non-overlapping minor complexes; the concepts that specify the quality of an experience are always about the complex itself and relate only indirectly to the external environment; anatomical connectivity influences complexes and associated MICS; a complex can generate a MICS even if its elements are inactive; simple systems can be minimally conscious; complicated systems can be unconscious; there can be true “zombies‘ a sh unconscious feed-forward systems that are functionally equivalent to conscious complexes. (shrink)

In physics, the analysis of the space representing states of physical systems often takes the form of a layer-cake of increasingly rich structure. In this paper, we propose an analogous hierarchy in the cognition of spacetime. Firstly, we explore the interplay between the objective physical properties of space-time and the subjective compositional modes of relational representations within the reasoner. Secondly, we discuss the compositional structure within and between layers. The existing evidence in the available literature is reviewed to end with (...) some testable consequences of our proposal at the brain and behavioral level. (shrink)