Advances in Consciousness Research (vols. 1–92, 1995–2015)

Consciousness in Interaction is an interdisciplinary collection with contributions from philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and historians of philosophy. It revolves around the idea that consciousness emerges from, and impacts on, our skilled interactions with the natural and social context. Section one discusses how phenomenal consciousness and subjective selfhood are grounded on natural and social interactions, and what role brain activity plays in these phenomena. Section two analyzes how interactions with external objects and other human beings shape our understanding of ourselves, and how consciousness changes social interaction, self-control and emotions. Section three provides historical depth to the volume, by tracing the roots of the contemporary notion of consciousness in early modern philosophy. The book offers interdisciplinary insight on a variety of key topics in consciousness research: as such, it is of particular interest for researchers from philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive and social sciences, and humanities.

What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics, a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences, for example:

• One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g.

Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer). • Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing.

• The mind cannot be understood in terms of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. belief, desire, intention).

• One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven.

• Thoughts are sentence-tokens, and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic, not the semantic, properties of those tokens.



In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind, John-Michael Kuczynski argues that these implausible but widely held views are direct consequences of a popular doctrine known as content-externalism, this being the view that the contents of one’s mental states are constitutively dependent on facts about the external world. Kuczynski shows that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between, on the one hand, what is literally meant by linguistic expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must work through to compute the literal meanings of such expressions.

The second half of the present work concerns the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Underlying CTM is an acceptance of conceptual atomism – the view that a creature can have a single concept without having any others – and also an acceptance of the view that concepts are not descriptive (i.e. that one can have a concept of a thing without knowing of any description that is satisfied by that thing). Kuczynski shows that both views are false, one reason being that they presuppose the truth of content-externalism, another being that they are incompatible with the epistemological anti-foundationalism proven correct by Wilfred Sellars and Laurence Bonjour. Kuczynski also shows that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as “computation”, “syntax”, “algorithm” and “formal truth”; and he provides novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms. (Series A)

During the last decade, the study of emotional self-regulation has blossomed in a variety of sub-disciplines belonging to either psychology (developmental, clinical) or the neurosciences (cognitive and affective). Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain gives an overview of the current state of this relatively new scientific field. Several areas are examined by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this emerging domain. Most chapters seek to either present theoretical and developmental perspectives about emotional self-regulation (and dysregulation), provide cutting edge information with regard to the neural basis of conscious emotional experience and emotional self-regulation, or expound theoretical models susceptible of explaining how healthy individuals are capable of consciously and voluntarily changing the neural activity underlying emotional processes and states. In addition, a few chapters consider the capacity of human consciousness to volitionally influence the brain’s electrical activity or modulate the impact of emotions on the psychoneuroendocrine-immune network. This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the body. (Series B)

This integrated approach to the psychology of consciousness arises out of Mandler’s 1975 paper that was seminal in starting the current flood of interest in consciousness. The book starts with this paper, followed by a novel psychological/evolutionary theoretical discussion of consciousness, and then a historically oriented presentation of relevant functions of consciousness, from memory to attention to emotion, drawing in part on Mandler’s publications between 1975 and 2000.

The manuscript is controversial; it is outspoken and often judgmental. The book does not address speculations about the neurophysiological/brain bases of consciousness, arguing that these are premature, and it is highly critical of philosophical speculations, often ungrounded in any empirical observations. In short it is a psychological approach — pure and simple.

A collection of stimulating studies on the past, the present, and the future of consciousness, Consciousness Evolving contributes to understanding some of the most important conceptual problems of our time. The advent of the modern synthesis together with the human genome project affords a platform for considering what it is that makes humans distinctive. Beginning with an essay that accents the nature of the problem within a behavioristic framework and concluding with reflections on the prospects for a form of immortality through serial cloning, the chapters are divided into three sections, which concern how and why consciousness may have evolved, special capacities involving language, creativity, and mentality as candidates for evolved adaptations, and the prospects for artificial evolution though the design of robots with specific forms of consciousness and mind. This volume should appeal to every reader who wants to better understand the human species, including its distinctive properties and its place in nature. (Series A)

These new studies by prominent neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general, as an aspect of self-organizing, embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities, and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness, which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for ‘agency’; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious, behaving organism.

(Series B)

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal, the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition, the somewhat controversial claim that “consciousness entails self-consciousness” is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science, perception, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and psychopathology. However, the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and, in turn, sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness, behavior, memory, intentionality, and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work. (Series A)