The stream of human consciousness appears to be interruptible, in that we can experience a sensation of ‘returning to ourselves after an absence of content’ (e.g. sleep, anaesthesia, full-absorption meditation). Prima facie, such evidence poses a challenge to simple applications of theories of consciousness based on electromagnetic or neural activity in the brain, because some of this activity persists during periods of interruption. This paper elaborates one of several possible responses to the challenge. We build on a previous theory in (...) which EM field topology delineates complex macrophenomenal experience. We first apply an analytic lens to identify different ways in which field topologies might generate sensations of ‘absence of content’. We then test the feasibility of a particular phenomenological approach for assessing those field topologies, powered by the unusual lucidity about cessation pathways induced via certain meditation practices and psychedelic dosages. We build computational simulations of these cessation pathways and test them on eight interviewees with various levels of experience in cessation states. We conclude that this approach can generate usable insight, but requires further formalisation to fulfil its potential. The findings tentatively support our claims but the theory remains speculative at this stage. We set out empirical tests with 11 specific predictions, both for further phenomenological research and for brain manipulation research. Although they align neatly, our ontological and cessation theories can also be separated. The paper describes how our theories can be consistent with other perspectives on consciousness, such as variants of predictive processing or global network theory. (shrink)

Implementing an algorithm on part of our causally-interconnected physical environment requires three choices that are typically considered arbitrary, i.e. no single option is innately privileged without invoking an external observer perspective. First, how to delineate one set of local causal relationships from the environment. Second, within this delineation, which inputs and outputs to designate for attention. Third, what meaning to assign to particular states of the designated inputs and outputs. Having explained these types of arbitrariness, we assess their relevance for (...) algorithms from various computational theories of mind (CTM) seeking to account for phenomenal consciousness. Some CTM accounts can survive some of these arbitrariness challenges, but eventually each one examined faces a trilemma. Each is under pressure to dilute at least one of three important CTM desiderata: its causal relevance, its substrate neutrality, or its assignment discrimination (e.g. ability to avoid near-panpsychism). However, unlike previous research, we suggest the debate cannot be fully settled at the level of principle. Certain complex CTM algorithms may be salvageable, albeit not the algorithms specified to date. The paper specifies three areas of investigative work, as well as further theoretical avenues of research, which computationalists may wish to explore to escape the trilemma. (shrink)

Frustration has been growing with mainstay epistemological methods of logical deduction and experimental falsification for assessing theories of consciousness. This paper explores one among several alternatives being proposed: the listed requirements epistemology. A literature search identifies five papers that explicitly list requirements for assessing consciousness theories. These five lists are analysed as a promising starting point, but as yet insufficiently comprehensive to do the method justice. The longest list has 11 items, but 19 unique items are identified across the five (...) lists and a taxonomic analysis by category further surfaces at least 30 potential candidates. Four limitations of the method are discussed, arguing that it is best treated as one practical tool as part of a broader strategy for rigorously assessing consciousness theories and identifying avenues for future research. The conclusion describes a workplan for a sufficiently complete working taxonomy to support the field’s collective endeavours. (shrink)

The boundary problem is related to the binding problem, part of a family of puzzles and phenomenal experiences that theories of consciousness (ToC) must either explain or eliminate. By comparison with the phenomenal binding problem, the boundary problem has received very little scholarly attention since first framed in detail by Rosengard in 1998, despite discussion by Chalmers in his widely cited 2016 work on the combination problem. However, any ToC that addresses the binding problem must also address the boundary problem. (...) The binding problem asks how a unified first person perspective (1PP) can bind experiences across multiple physically distinct activities, whether billions of individual neurons firing or some other underlying phenomenon. To a first approximation, the boundary problem asks why we experience hard boundaries around those unified 1PPs and why the boundaries operate at their apparent spatiotemporal scale. We review recent discussion of the boundary problem, identifying several promising avenues but none that yet address all aspects of the problem. We set out five specific boundary problems to aid precision in future efforts. We also examine electromagnetic (EM) field theories in detail, given their previous success with the binding problem, and introduce a feature with the necessary characteristics to address the boundary problem at a conceptual level. Topological segmentation can, in principle, create exactly the hard boundaries desired, enclosing holistic, frame-invariant units capable of effecting downward causality. The conclusion outlines a programme for testing this concept, describing how it might also differentiate between competing EM ToCs. (shrink)

The American novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) considered himself a "thief of Peirce", because he found in the views of C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, an alternative approach to prevailing reductionist theories in order to understand what we human beings are and what the peculiar nature of our linguistic activity is. -/- This paper describes, quoting widely from Percy, how abduction is the spontaneous activity of our reason by which we couple meanings and experience in our linguistic expressions. (...) This coupling of personal creativity and cultural tradition makes it possible to bridge the gaps between persons and cultures. (shrink)

Este artigo procura analisar algumas das principais ideias abordadas no encontro anual promovido pela “American Association for the Advancement of Sciencie” em Boston (EUA) em 1953. Parte do encontro foi para abordar sobre o estado atual da concepção operacional de significado desenvolvida por Percy W. Bridgman a partir de 1927. As principais ideias tratadas no encontro foram posteriormente publicadas pela revista “The Scientific Montly” em 1954-1955 e republicadas no capítulo 2 do livro “The validation of scientific theories” (1961), editado (...) por Philipp Frank. A obra de 1961 será utilizada aqui como referência para as citações. Os autores dos capítulos são Henry Margenau, Gustav Bergmann, Carl G. Hempel, R. B. Lindsay, Raymond J. Sieger, Adolf Gründbaun, além do artigo do próprio Percy Bridgman. Este debate surgiu a mais de 20 anos depois da publicação da primeira obra de Bridgman, a saber, “The Logic of Modern Physics” (1927), onde ele apresenta pela primeira vez sua concepção de significado dos conceitos científicos baseada em procedimentos operacionais. A obra de 1927 trouxe os debates sobre a importância da linguagem científica e da correspondência empírica, uma questão pertinente na filosofia da ciência da época inflacionada pela filosofia da ciência do empirismo lógico. Os debates do encontro tiveram como objetivo apresentar questionamentos e fazer exposições gerais sobre a forma como a concepção operacional pode ser interpretada por cientistas e filósofos da época, seja em seus elementos favoráveis na ciência, enquanto resolvendo questões pertinentes para cientistas e filósofos da ciência, seja por mostrar também as limitações da concepção operacional através dos questionamentos dirigidos a ela. Ressaltamos a importância deste debate na época e nos dias atuais. Temos aqui um material que pode servir de direcionamento histórico e de debate filosófico para algumas das questões pertinentes dos filósofos da ciência da época. (shrink)

"Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur'd-"While you live Drink!-for once dead you never shall return." " [http://philpapers.org/profile/112741] .

Consonant with the ongoing “aesthetic turn” in legal scholarship, this article pursues a new conception of law as poetry. Gestures in this law-as-poetry direction appear in all three main schools in the philosophy of law’s history, as follows. First, natural law sees law as divinely-inspired prophetic poetry. Second, positive law sees the law as a creative human positing (from poetry’s poesis). And third, critical legal theory sees these posited laws as calcified prose prisons, vulnerable to poetic liberation. My first two (...) sections interpret two texts at the intersections among these three theories, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Shelley identifies a poetic rebirth in the ruins of natural law, suggesting a philosophy of law as “natural poesis.” And Tocqueville names several figurative aristocracies capable of redeploying aristocratic law against democratic despotism, suggesting a philosophy of law as “aristo-poetic counterforce.” Finally, I propose a new theory of law as poetry bridging these two theories, “natural aristo-poetic counterforce.”. (shrink)

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s locating of Herder and Rousseau’s “expressivism” in Marx’s understanding of the human as artist, I begin this essay by examining expressivism in Taylor, followed by its counterpart in M. H. Abrams’s work, namely the wind as metaphor in British Romantic poetry. I then further explore this expressivism/wind connection in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Marx’s The German Ideology. Ultimately I conclude that these expressive winds lead to poetic gesture per se, and (...) thereby, to a kind of poetry at the heart of Marx’s philosophy. (shrink)

Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman's philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman's broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily (...) an individual commitment to a set of epistemic norms and values. Considerations of external moral or social values are not, on this view, intrinsic to scientific practice, though they have a broader pragmatic significance. What Bridgman takes as the proper relation between science and society is shown through analysis of his many writings on the topic and consideration of his rarely remarked upon involvement in the most problematic example of "Big Science" of his day: the atomic bomb. A reevaluation of Bridgman's views provides a unique characterization of what is at stake in the values in science debate: the normative autonomy of science. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘plant sleep’ – whereby vegetables rhythmically open and close their leaves or petals in daily cycles – has been a continual source of fascination for those with botanical interests, from the Portuguese physician Cristóbal Acosta and the Italian naturalist Prospero Alpini in the sixteenth century to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth. But it was in 1757 that the topic received its earliest systemic treatment on English shores with the prodigious author, botanist, actor, (...) and Royal Society critic John Hill’s The Sleep of Plants, and Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant. As the present article aims to illustrate, Hill and his respondents used this remarkable behaviour, exhibited by certain plants, as a lens through which to reassess the nature of vegetables, and to address pressing questions of wider natural philosophical import, particularly the degree of continuity between the structures and functions of plants and animals and whether similar mechanisms necessarily account for related movements in different life forms. These disputes, this paper contends, also had profound methodological implications regarding the proper way to conduct experiments, the extent to which it was acceptable to extrapolate from observations, and the status of causal explanations. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that Richard Rorty and others are wrong to contrast the Romantic poets with Plato and other philosophers in virtue of a lack of concern for the truth. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in particular, believed that the metaphors in poetry revealed the fundamental truth about the world.

In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. -/- The consciousness we (...) humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic threshold' (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or 'the subject of experience'. It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be 'lived experience' but it is experience 'lived' non-consciously. -/- Speech requires assertion and by learning to speak we find ourselves asserting, in essence, our selves into the world. The narrative form of language allows us to develop life stories, self-knowledge, and, most important, narrative memory coincident with narrative time. All this is made possible with the intersubjective 'net' of language which allows us to know ourselves by first identifying with the viewpoint of others; and, later, such allows us to identify with other minds as we anticipate their reception our communication. These three, assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity are the essence of what language is and are the keystones that make culture possible outside of nature. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for phenomenology, Husserlian phenomenology to be precise, as providing a solid paradigm on how to determine and assess hallucination. To be more explicit, in the context of my deliberations, I analyze Susanna Schellenberg’s arguments for “phenomenal” evidence and “factive” evidence, as regards her evidential theory of perception. To pinpoint the inadequacies raised in her account of (the hallucinating) Hallie and (the veridically perceiving) Percy sharing any kind of evidence, I propose Edmund Husserl’s epistemic fulfillment (...) as a detailed epistemological analysis of perception, which takes into consideration the latter’s phenomenological complexity. (shrink)

Durante uma competição que envolveu Lord Byron, Polidori e Percy Shelley, numa prova de quem seria capaz de criar a melhor história de horror, nasce o rascunho de o que conhecemos hoje como Frankenstein. Aprovado e exaltado pela crítica, o novo romance de horrores, que marca o início da segunda fase do gótico, é tido por Walter Scott como uma obra que investiga as condições e implicações do conhecimento e da imaginação humana. Não é novidade que o gênero gótico (...) é tido como uma marca e um local no qual temas marginalizados e silenciados podem ser tratados de forma aberta, os ideais deixados por grandes filósofos como, por exemplo, Bacon e Descartes passam a ser questionados e têm suas implicações levadas às últimas consequências. Frankenstein não foge dessa regra. O romance se distingue por conta da formação do arquétipo do cientista louco, do medo dos avanços científicos e a superação de limites através da artificialidade que são caracterizados, em última instância, no ato de "brincar" de Deus e tentar conferir vida a uma matéria morta. Dito isso, meu objetivo é explorar, em primeiro lugar, de que maneira este romance se posiciona perante os ideais filosóficos (especialmente científicos); em segundo lugar, como recusa tais ideais e, por fim, de que maneira se difere dos romances góticos que o antecedeu. (shrink)

La atención relativamente escasa que los estudiosos del filósofo y científico norteamericano Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) han prestado a lo largo de los años a las dimensiones religiosas de su pensamiento siempre me ha parecido cuando menos sorprendente. Desde mis primeras lecturas de Peirce me impresionó profundamente esa desatención que tanto contrastaba con la ubicuidad de las referencias religiosas en los escritos de Peirce, especialmente en sus años de madurez. En mis encuentros con reconocidos estudiosos peirceanos solía preguntarles acerca de (...) Dios y la religión en Peirce, y la respuesta que recibí casi siempre fue que efectivamente había una gran cantidad de cuestiones religiosas en su obra, pero que no estaban interesados en ellas. Por otra parte, me sorprendió gratamente que el fallecido novelista Walker Percy se considerara a sí mismo en su correspondencia con Ken Ketner como “un ladrón de Peirce”, aspirando a “usar a CSP como uno de los pilares de la apologética cristiana”. Me pareció que el novelista converso al catolicismo estaba en algún sentido mucho más cercano al Peirce real que aquellos estudiosos a los que les había preguntado acerca de Dios y la religión en Peirce. -/- El objetivo de este artículo es subrayar el hecho de que para Peirce la creencia en Dios no es sólo un producto natural de la abducción o "instinto racional", de las conjeturas educadas del científico o del hombre corriente, sino que también la creencia en Dios y el desarrollo científico están interrelacionados. No sólo la creencia en Dios es capaz de cambiar la conducta del creyente, sino que de acuerdo con Peirce la realidad de Dios dota de sentido a toda la empresa científica. Esto puede sonar un poco extraño a los oídos positivistas contemporáneos, pero para comprender realmente a Peirce es preciso estudiar sus preocupaciones religiosas, que de forma creciente se consideran quizá tan importantes filosóficamente como sus preocupaciones científicas6. Más aún, en algún sentido quiero sugerir que para Peirce la actividad científica es una empresa genuinamente religiosa, quizá incluso la actividad religiosa por excelencia, y que separar religión y ciencia es contrario tanto al espíritu científico como al Peirce real. (shrink)

Why was mythology of vital importance for the romantics? What role did mythology play in their philosophical and literary work? And what common sources of influence inspired these writers across Britain and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century? In this wide-ranging study, Owen Ware argues that the romantics turned to mythology for its potential to transform how we see ourselves, others, and the world. Engaging with authors such as William Blake, Friedrich Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich von Hardenberg (...) (Novalis), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ware shows why they believed that neither perception nor reason alone can sustain a vision of the unity of all things. A new mode of cognition is necessary, they claimed, one that revives the poetic origin of mythology and reveals our own mythmaking powers. _Return of the Gods_ investigates the rise of mythology in the British and German traditions and the romantics’ practices of reinterpreting old myths and inventing new ones. Their shared aim was nothing less than to elevate the human imagination to higher stages of self-development in which philosophy and poetry, as well as intellect and imagination, form an integrated whole. Far from calling us to return to the past, the romantics’ work on mythology points us to a future where we can live in harmony with the personal, social, and natural worlds we inhabit. Owen Ware combines intellectual history with philosophical analysis and literary criticism to offer a bold reflection on why mythology mattered for the romantics—and why it still matters today. (shrink)