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An interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterizations can be analyzed computationally. How can we account for phenomenal unity? That is, how can we characterize and explain our experience of objects and groups of objects, bodily experiences, successions of events, and the attentional structure of consciousness as wholes? In this book, Wanja Wiese develops an interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterization can be analyzed conceptually as well as computationally. Wiese first addresses how the unity of consciousness can be characterized phenomenologically, discussing what it is like to experience wholes and what is the experiential contribution of phenomenal unity. Considering the associated conceptual and empirical issues, he draws connections to phenomenological accounts and research on Gestalt theory. The results show how the attentional structure of experience, the experience of temporal flow, and different types of experiential wholes contribute to our sense of phenomenal unity. Moreover, characterizing phenomenal unity in terms of the existence of a single global phenomenal state is neither necessary nor sufficient to adequately address the problem of phenomenal unity. Wiese then suggests that the concepts and ideas of predictive processing can be used to analyze phenomenal unity computationally. The result is both a conceptual framework and an interdisciplinary account: the regularity account of phenomenal unity. According to this account, experienced wholes correspond to a hierarchy of connecting regularities. The brain tracks these regularities by hierarchical prediction error minimization, which approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference.
An in-depth investigation into the phenomenology of conscious experience - the nature of awareness; introspection; phenomenal space and time consciousness. A fascinating and probing study.
The conscious experience of the bodily self is a cornerstone of human nature, which allows us to delineate the boundaries between the surrounding environment and us. A plethora of clinical and experimental investigations has clearly demonstrated that bodily self-consciousness draws on different neuro-cognitive mechanisms with distinct anatomo-functional underpinnings. Among these, the sense of body ownership (i.e., my body belongs to me), and the sense of agency (i.e., I am the author of my actions) have attracted increasing interest in recent years. The former seems to be strongly rooted in afferent sensory signals, whereas the latter appears to be rooted in efferent motor signals and/or the monitoring of their sensory consequences. Despite the consensus that the interplay between body ownership and the sense of agency contribute to the omnipresent conscious experience of the bodily self, the character and the form of this relationship remain unclear. Though research into the mechanisms underlying ownership (e.g., bodily illusions) or on agency (e.g., intentional binding) is blooming, very few studies have aimed to investigate both these processes at the same time. Therefore, many questions remain unresolved: for example, how do the experiences of ownership and agency influence each other? What are the anatomo-functional substrates of their interplay, and how does damage to these structures affect the experience of either ownership or agency (or both) in clinical populations? What is the specific role of efferent and afferent signals, and how may these be complimented by other inputs like emotional or interoceptive cues? And going beyond the mechanisms and anatomo-functional substrates, are there rational relations between the representations underlying body ownership and agency so that ownership can be a seen as a condition on intentional action and a sense of agency? Elucidating the complex relationship between ownership and agency is a crucial step in our understanding of bodily self-consciousness, and may help us to better understand the variety of neurological/psychiatric disorders affecting the perception of one’s own body and its movements. These insights can contribute to the development of future prosthetic devices or virtual-reality applications, which may in turn allow for new approaches in neuroscience, rehabilitative medicine, and therapeutic interventions.
This is the first book devoted to the work of Ernest Sosa, one of the most influential contemporary epistemologists. Part of the acclaimed Philosophers and Their Critics series. The editor’s introduction serves as an introduction to Sosa’s epistemology. Contains critical essays by more than twenty of the most prominent epistemologists in the world, commenting on Sosa's work. Concludes with Sosa’s own reply to his critics.
Since the beginning of the 20th Century, phenomenology has developed a distinction between lived body (Leib) and physical body (Koerper), a distinction well known as body-subject vs. body-object (Hanna and Thompson 2007). The lived body is the body experienced from within - my own direct experience of my body lived in the first-person perspective, myself as a spatiotemporal embodied agent in the world. The physical body on the other hand, is the body thematically investigated from a third person perspective by natural sciences as anatomy and physiology. An active topic affecting the understanding of several psychopathological disorders is the relatively unknown dynamic existing between aspects related to the body-object (that comprises the neurobiological substrate of the disease) and the body-subject (the experiences reported by patients) (Nelson and Sass 2017). A clue testifying the need to better explore this dynamic in the psychopathological context is the marked gap that still exists between patients’ clinical reports (generally entailing disturbing experiences) and etiopathogenetic theories and therapeutic practices, that are mainly postulated at a bodily/brain level of description and analysis. The phenomenological exploration typically targets descriptions of persons’ lived experience. For instance, patients suffering from schizophrenia may describe their thoughts as alien (‘‘thoughts are intruding into my head’’) and the world surrounding them as fragmented (‘‘the world is a series of snapshots’’) (Stanghellini et al., 2015). The result is a rich and detailed collection of the patients’ qualitative self-descriptions (Stanghellini and Rossi, 2014), that reveal fundamental changes in the structure of experiencing and can be captured by using specific assessment tools (Parnas et al. 2005; Sass et al. 2017; Stanghellini et al., 2014). The practice of considering the objective and the subjective levels of analysis as separated in the research studies design has many unintended consequences. Primarily, it has the effect of limiting actionable neuroscientific progress within clinical practice. This holds true both in terms of availability of evidence-based treatments for the disorders, as well as for early diagnosis purposes. In response to this need, this collection of articles aims to promote an interdisciplinary endeavor to better connect the bodily, objective level of analysis with its experiential corollary. This is accomplished by focusing on the convergence between (neuro) physiological evidence and the phenomenological manifestations of anomalous bodily experiences present in different disorders.
Papers on the philosophy of mind. Topics include the relationship between linguistic and cognitive competence; conceivability in relation to possibility; simulated vs. actual thought; functionalism; program-causation in relation to mental causation; the Turing Test; the Language of Thought hypothesis; and the nature of personal identity.
What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there be a credible alternative? In one classic example, philosophers ask whether we can ever know what is it is like for bats to sense the world using sonar. It seems obvious to many that any amount of information about a bat's physical structure and information processing leaves us guessing about the central questions concerning the character of its experience. A Place for Consciousness begins with reflections on the existence of this gap. Is it just a psychological shortcoming in our merely human understanding of the physical world? Is it a trivial consequence of the simple fact that we just cannot be bats? Or does it mean there really are facts about consciousness over and above the physical facts? If so, what does consciousness do? Why does it exist? Rosenberg sorts out these problems, especially those centering on the causal role of consciousness. He introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects. A striking feature of Liberal Naturalism is that its central tenets are motivated independently of the mind-body problem, by analyzing causation itself. Because of this approach, when consciousness shows up in the picture it is not introduced in an ad hoc way, and its most puzzling features can be explained from first principles. Ultimately, Rosenberg's final solution gives consciousness a causally important role without supposing either that it is physical or that it interacts with the physical.
This is an expanded edition of Sydney Shoemaker's seminal collection of his work on interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Reproducing all of the original papers, many of which are now regarded as classics, and including four papers published since the first edition appeared in 1984, Identity, Cause, and Mind's reappearance will be warmly welcomed by philosophers and students alike.