Advances in Consciousness Research

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify – and relate – the often confusing meanings of the word ‘abstract’ that one may encounter even within the same discipline. The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership – anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (series A)

Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language processing interacts with our knowledge and perception of the immediate environment. Scientists interested in how language users integrate what they know with their perception of objects and events will find the book a rewarding read. The book further covers lexical, sentence, and discourse level processes, as well as active visual context effects in both non-interactive and interactive tasks and thus present a well-balanced view of the field. It is aimed at experienced researchers and students alike in the hopes of attracting new talent to the field. Thanks to its in-depth methodological introduction and broad coverage it constitutes an excellent course book.

Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry, attention, memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness (AiCR 90), this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic.

Spanning from care-giving infants and civilian rescuers risking their life to the collapse of empathy in agents of torture and extinction, this unique book deals with and illustrates the altruistic best and atrocious worst of human nature. It begins with infant roots of empathy, then turns to the neurosocial support of empathic participation, and to the nature and nurture of good and ill. It raises questions about how abuse may invite vicious circles of re-enactment, and as to how ordinary people may come to commit torture and mass murders, such as the Auschwitz doctors and the sole terrorist attacking Norway on July 22, 2011.

This volume examines the neuroscience of visual consciousness, drawing on the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. It provides overviews of brain structure and function, the visual system, and neuroscientific methodologies, and then focuses on binocular rivalry from multiple perspectives: historical, psychophysical, electrophysiological, brain-imaging, brain stimulation, clinical and computational, with a glimpse also into the future of research in this exciting field. This is the first collected volume on binocular rivalry in nearly a decade and will be of special interest to researchers, scholars and students in the vision sciences, and more broadly in the psychological and clinical sciences. In addition, it lays foundations for a forthcoming interdisciplinary volume in this series on the constitution of phenomenal consciousness, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness.

This volume brings together contributions by philosophers, art historians and artists who discuss, interpret and analyse the moving and gesturing body in the arts. Broadly inspired by phenomenology, and taking into account insights from cognitive science, the contribution of the motor body in watching a film, attending a dance or theatre performance, looking at paintings or drawings, and listening to music is explored from a diversity of perspectives. This volume is intended for both the specialist and non-specialist in the fields of art, philosophy and cognitive science, and testifies to the burgeoning interest for the moving and gesturing body, not only in the creation but also in the perception of works of art. Imagination is tied to our capacity to silently resonate with the way a work of art has been or is created.

Given that a representational system's phenomenal experience must be intrinsic to it and must therefore arise from its own temporal dynamics, consciousness is best understood — indeed, can only be understood — as being in time. Despite that, it is still acceptable for theories of consciousness to be summarily exempted from addressing the temporality of phenomenal experience. The chapters comprising this book represent a collective attempt on the part of their authors to redress this aberration. The diverse treatments of phenomenal consciousness range in their methodology from philosophy, through surveys and synthesis of behavioral and neuroscientific findings, to computational analysis. This collection's broad scope and integrative approach, characterized by the view of the brain as a dynamical system that computes the mind's representation space, will be of interest to researchers, instructors, and students in the cognitive sciences wishing to acquaint themselves with the current thinking in consciousness research. Series B.

Intended for philosophically minded psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers, this book identifies the ways that psychology has hobbled itself by adhering too strictly to empiricism, this being the doctrine that all knowledge is observation-based. In the first part of this two-part work, we show that empiricism is false. In the second part, we identify the psychology-relevant consequences of this fact. Five of these are of special importance: (i) Whereas some psychopathologies (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder) corrupt the activity mediated by one’s psychological architecture, others (e.g. sociopathy) corrupt that architecture itself.
(ii) The basic tenets of psychoanalysis are coherent.
(iii) All propositional attitudes are beliefs.
(iv) Selves are minds that self-evaluate.
And:
(v) It is by giving our thoughts a perceptible form that we enable ourselves to evaluate them, and it is by expressing ourselves in language and art that we give our thoughts a perceptible form. (Series A)

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.

This book was conceived as a tribute to one of the founders of the psychological study of the sense of smell, Professor Trygg Engen. The book is divided into four sections. The first reunites the fields of psychophysics and the perception of environmental odours and discusses the impact of odours on beliefs and expectations. The second addresses cognitive processes in olfaction, how odours are interpreted, lexicalized, associated with contexts and remembered. The third focuses on the cerebral bases of olfactory awareness and the neuropsychological investigation of olfaction with special emphasis on olfactory dysfunctions, and the last concerns affective and developmental processes in olfaction. The aim in producing this book is that it will help promote further research in olfactory cognition and attract new inquisitive scientists to the field. The volume will be a useful resource for academics, students, and professionals who study olfaction, as well as to scientists who work in the domains of perception, cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology more broadly.

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners.

The predominant positive view among philosophers and scientists alike is that consciousness is something realized in brain activity. This view, however, largely fails to capture what consciousness is like according to how it shows itself to conscious beings. What this work proposes instead is that consciousness is a phenomenon that exists in and throughout the body. Apart from whether or not it involves intentionality and apart from whether or not it involves awareness of the self, consciousness is self-intimating, self-revealing, self-disclosing. Self-disclosure is the definitive phenomenological character of consciousness in all its forms. Taking this stance as a point of departure, the book presents a specific account of what bodily field phenomenon consciousness is. In this way, the current stalemate in philosophy over the question of the physical reality of consciousness is broken. Series A

This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point, elucidating it within both an enactive and qualitative affective-kinetic dynamic. It follows through with a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from three perspectives: mind, brain, and the conceptually reciprocal realities of receptivity and responsivity as set forth in phenomenology and evolutionary biology, respectively. It ends with a substantive afterword on kinesthesia, pointing up the incontrovertible significance of the faculty to cognition and affectivity. Series A

What do the pointing gesture, the imitation of new complex motor patterns, the evocation of absent objects and the grasping of others’ false beliefs all have in common? Apart from being (one way or other) involved in the language, they all would share a demanding requirement – a second mental centre within the subject. This redefinition of the simulationism is extended in the present book in two directions. Firstly, mirror-neurons and, likewise, animal abilities connected with the visual field of their fellows, although they certainly constitute important landmarks, would not require this second mental centre. Secondly, others’ beliefs would have given rise not only to predicative communicative function but also to pre-grammatical syntax. The inquiry about the evolutionary-historic origin of language focuses on the cognitive requirements on it as a faculty (but not to the indirect causes such as environmental changes or greater co-operation), pays attention to children, and covers other human peculiarities as well, e.g., symbolic play, protodeclaratives, self-conscious emotions, and interactional or four-hand tasks.

This book provides a thoroughly worked out and systematic presentation of an interpretivist position in the philosophy of mind, of the view that having mental properties is a matter of interpretation. Bruno Mölder elaborates and defends a particular version of interpretivism, the ascription theory, which explicates the possession of mental states with contents in terms of their canonical ascribability, and shows how it can withstand various philosophical challenges. Apart from a defence of the ascription theory from the objections commonly directed against interpretivism, the book provides a critical analysis of major alternative accounts of mental state possession as well as the interpretivist ideas originating from Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. The viability of the approach is demonstrated by showing how one can treat mental causation as well as the faculties closely connected with consciousness – perception and the awareness of one’s own mental states – in the interpretivist framework. (Series A)

A fascinating cornucopia of new ideas, based on fundamentals of neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry and therapy, this book extends boundaries of current concepts of consciousness. Its eclectic mix will simulate and challenge not only neuroscientists and psychologists but entice others interested in exploring consciousness. Contributions from top researchers in consciousness and related fields project diverse ideas, focused mainly on conscious nonconscious interactions:
1. Paving the way for new research on basic scientific - physiological, pharmacological or neurochemical - mechanisms underpinning conscious experience (‘bottom up’ approach);
2. Providing directions on how psychological processes are involved in consciousness (‘top down’ approach);
3. Indicating how including consciousness could lead to new understanding of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, dementia, and addiction;
4. More provocatively, but still based on scientific evidence, exploring consciousness beyond conventional boundaries, indicating the potential for radical new thinking or ‘quantum leaps’ in neuroscientific theories of consciousness. (Series B)

Perceptual experience emerges from neural computations. Unconscious Memory Representations in Perception focuses on the role of implicit (non-conscious) memories in processing sensory information. Making sense of the wealth of information arriving at our senses requires implicit memories, which represent environmental regularities, contingencies of the sensory input, as well as general contextual knowledge. Recent findings and theories in cognitive and computational neuroscience provided new insights into the structure and contents of implicit memory representations. The chapters of this book examine implicit memories both in relatively simple situations, such as perceiving auditory and visual objects, as well as in high‑level cognitive functions, such as speech and music perception and aesthetic experience.
By nature, implicit memories cannot be directly studied with behavioral methods. Therefore, a large part of the evidence reviewed was obtained in neuroscientific studies. Readers with limited experience in neuroscience will find information about the most commonly used techniques in the appendix of this volume. (Series B)

The Transparent Becoming of World undertakes a penetrating inquiry into the quotidian world we take for granted and the brain that silently hoists our bubbles of world-thrownness. After critiquing the traditional views of direct realism, indirect realism and idealism, the continual becoming of world is explained by a novel integration of process dynamics, as formulated by Whitehead, Heidegger and Bohm, with the burgeoning field of quantum neurophilosophy. A rich ontological duality newly opened by quantum brain theory is exploited: the “between-two” of dual quantum modes. Existence as world-thrownness is between-two in waking and dreaming alike. This highly original interdisciplinary book may be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, consciousness researchers, indeed anyone attracted to the enigma of their own lived existence. (Series A)

The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech illustrates how recent findings about primary intersubjectivity, participant perception and mirror neurons afford a new understanding of children’s nature, dialogue and language.
Based on recent infancy research and the mirror neurons discovery, studies of early speech perception, comparative primate studies and computer simulations of language evolution, this book offers replies to questions as: When and how may spoken language have emerged? How is it that infants so soon after birth become so efficient in their speech perception? What enables 11-month-olds to afford and reciprocate care? What are the steps from infant imitation and simulation of body movements to simulation of mind in conversation partners?
Stein Bråten is founder and chair of the Theory Forum network with some of the world’s leading infancy, primate and brain researchers who have contributed to his edited volumes for Cambridge University Press (1998) and John Benjamins Publishing Company (2007). (Series B)

Panpsychism is the view that all things, living and nonliving, possess some mind like quality. It stands in sharp contrast to the traditional notion of mind as the property of humans and (perhaps) a few select ‘higher animals’. Though surprising at first glance, panpsychism has a long and noble history in both Western and Eastern thought. Overlooked by analytical, materialist philosophy for most of the 20^th century, it is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts in several areas of inquiry. A number of recent books – including Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West (2005) and Strawson et al’s Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2006) – have established panpsychism as respectable and viable. Mind That Abides builds on these works. It takes panpsychism to be a plausible theory of mind and then moves forward to work out the philosophical, psychological and ethical implications. With 17 contributors from a variety of fields, this book promises to mark a wholesale change in our philosophical outlook. (Series A)

Animated interactive characters and robots that are able to function in human social environments are being developed by a large number of research groups worldwide. Emotional expression, as a key element of human social interaction and communication, is often added in an attempt to make them appear more natural to us. How can such artefacts be given emotional displays that are believable and acceptable to humans? This is the central question of Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interaction.
The ability to express and recognize emotions is a fundamental aspect of social interaction. Not only is it a central research question, it has been explored in animated films, dance, and other expressive arts for a much longer period. This book is unique in presenting a multi-disciplinary approach to animation in its broadest sense: from internal mechanisms to external displays, not only from a graphical perspective, but more generally examining how to give characters an “anima”, so that they appear as life-like entities and social partners to humans. (Series B)

Constructing the Self analyzes the narrative conception of self, filling a serious gap in philosophy and grounding discussion in other disciplines. It answers the questions:
• What are the connections between our interpretations, selfhood, and conscious phenomenal experience?



• Why do we believe that our interpretations of our life-defining events are narrative in nature?



• From the myriad of thoughts, actions, and emotions which constitute our experiences, how do we choose what is interpretively important, the tiny subset that composes the self?



By synthesizing the different approaches to understanding the self from philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, psychopathology, and cognitive science, this monograph gives us deeper insight into what being minded, being a person, and having a self are, as well as clarifies the difference and relation between conscious and unconscious mental states and normal and abnormal minds. The explication also affords new perspectives on human development and human emotion. (Series A)

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, “implicit” awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or “what-it-is-like,” dimension of conscious experience, defending the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (Series A)

This volume shows that the notions of embodied or situated cognition, which have transformed the scientific study of intelligence have the potential to reorient cultural studies as well. The essays adapt and amplify embodied cognition in such different fields as art history, literature, history of science, religious studies, philosophy, biology, and cognitive science. The topics include the biological genesis of teleology, the dependence of meaning in signs upon biological embodiment, the notion of image schema and the concept of force in cognitive semantics, pictorial self-portraiture as a means to study self-perception, the difference between reading aloud and silent reading as a way to make sense of literary texts, intermodal (kinesthetic) understanding of art, psychosomatic medicine, laughter as a medical and ethical phenomenon, the valuation of laughter and the body in religion, and how embodied cognition revives and extends earlier attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. (Series A)

To understand a cat: methodology and philosophy rests on the realization that the everyday behavior of a cat (but other animals too) should be understood through a new approach, namely methodological dualism. It appeals to mechanistic explanation models and to mentalistic explanation models. It puts up the methodological idea that these models have to be combined in one theoretical structure according to the scientific game-rules. This approach shows that specific mentalistic explanations are generated from explanation models or schemes, which meet the demands of the scientific games-rules; and it proposes a new theoretical structure called the multi-explanation theory to generate particular theories, which provide us with efficient explanations for behavioral phenomena. The book delves deep into anthropomorphism, and the complex question of whether a cat has consciousness and free will, and examines the intricate relations of the mental, the computational, and the neurophysiological.(Series A)

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)

In this collective volume the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Entailing a paradigmatic revolution in the intersection of developmental, social and neural sciences, two radical turnabouts are entailed. First, no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects with disembodied minds without windows to each other except as mediated by culture. Supported by a mirror system, specified in this volume by some of the discoverers, modes of participant perception have now been identified which entail embodied simulation and co-movements with others in felt immediacy. Second, no longer can be retained the Piagetian attribution of infant egocentricity. Pioneers who have broken new research grounds in the study of newborns, protoconversation, and early speech perception document in the present volume infant capacity for interpersonal communion, empathic identification, and learning by altercentric participation. Pertinent new findings and results are presented on these topics:
(i) Origins and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy
(ii) Neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity, participant perception, and simulation of mind
(iii) From preverbal sharing and early speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity
(iv) New windows on other-centred movements and moments of meeting in therapy and intervention. (Series B)

This volume starts from an interdisciplinary expertise of the contributors, and chooses to work on the very origins of conscious qualitative states in perception. The leading research paradigm can be synthesized in ‘phenomenology to neurons to stimuli, and backwards’, since as a starting point it has taken the phenomenal appearances in the visual field. Specifically, the leading theme of the volume is the co-presence and interaction of diverse types of spaces in vision, like the optical space of psychophysics and of neural elaboration, the qualitative space of phenomenal appearances, and its relation with the pictorial space of art. The contributors to the volume agree in arguing that those spaces follow different rules of organization, whose specific singularity and reciprocal dependence have to be individuated, as a preliminary step to understand the architecture of the conscious awareness of our environment and to conceive its potential implementation in constructing any kind of embodied intentional agents. (Series B)

The relationships between perception and imagery, imagery and spatial processes, memory and action: these are the main themes of this text. The interest in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience on imagery and spatial cognition has remarkably increased in the last decades. Different areas of research contribute to the clarification of the multiple cognitive processes subserving spatial perception and exploration, and to the definition of the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning these cognitive functions. The aim of this book is to provide the reader (post-graduate students as well as experts) with a complete overview of this field of research. It illustrates how brain, behaviour and cognition interact in normal and pathological subjects in perceiving, representing and exploring space.(Series B)

The book presents a new science of semiotic linguistics. The goal of semiotic linguistics is to discover what characterizes language as an intermediary between the mind and reality so that language creates the picture of reality we perceive. The cornerstone of semiotic linguistics is the discovery and resolution of language antinomies ­-contradictions between two apparently reasonable principles or laws. Language antinomies constitute the essence of language, and hence must be studied from both linguistic and philosophical points of view. The basic language antinomy which underlies all other antinomies is the antinomy between meaning and information. Both generative and classical linguistic theories are unaware of the need to distinguish between meaning and information. By confounding these notions they are unable to discover language antinomies and confine their research to naturalistic description of superficial language phenomena rather than the quest for the essence of language.(Series A)

Written for the psychologist, philosopher, and layperson interested in consciousness, Exploring Inner Experience provides a comprehensive introduction to the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method for obtaining accurate reports of inner experience. DES uses a beeper to cue participants to pay attention to their experience at precisely defined moments; participants are then interviewed to obtain high-fidelity accounts of their experience at those moments. Exploring Inner Experience shows (a) how DES uncovers previously unknown details of inner experience; (b) how the implications of this method affect our understanding of inner experience and the human condition more generally; (c) how DES avoids the traps that destroyed the introspections of the previous century; (d) why DES reports of inner experience should be considered reliable and valid; and (e) how to use the DES method. This book will be basic reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and students interested in consciousness, as well as anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding the human condition.(Series B)

This book treats memory and understanding on two levels, on the phenomenological level of experience, on which a theory of dynamic conceptual semantics is built, and on the neuro-connectionist level, which supports the capacities of concept formation, remembering, and understanding. A neuro-connectionist circuit architecture of a constructive memory is developed in which understanding and remembering are modelled in accordance with the constituent structures of a dynamic conceptual semantics. Consciousness emerges by circuit activation between conceptual indicators and episodic indices with the sensory-motor, emotional, and proprioceptual areas.
This theory of concept formation, remembering, and understanding is applied to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu , with special attention to the author’s excursions into philosophical and aesthetic issues. Under this perspective, Proust’s work can be seen as an artistic exploration into our capacity of understanding, whereby the unconscious, the memory, is exteriorized in consciousness by presenting the experienced episodes in the conceptual order of similarity and contiguity through our capacity of concept formation. (Series A)

The body, as the common ground for objectivity and (inter)subjectivity, is a phenomenon with a perplexing plurality of registers. Therefore, this innovative volume offers an interdisciplinary approach from the fields of neuroscience, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of body image and body schema have a firm tradition in each of these disciplines and make up the conceptual anchors of this volume.
Challenged by neuropathological phenomena, neuroscience has dealt with body image and body schema since the beginning of the twentieth century. Halfway through the twentieth century, phenomenology was inspired by child development and elaborated a specifically phenomenological account of body image and schema. Starting from the mirror stage, this source of inspiration is shared with psychoanalysis which develops the concept of body image in interaction with the clinic of the singular subject. In this volume, the creative encounter of these three perspectives on the body opens up present-day paths for conceptualisation, research and (clinical) practice. (Series B)

Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. (Series A)

Consciousness lies at the core of being human. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we need a theory of consciousness. In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that prevents it from ever being explained. Consequently, philosophical debates over materialism and dualism are a waste of time. Scientific explanations of consciousness fare no better. Scientists do study consciousness, and such investigations will continue to grow and advance. However, none of them will ever reveal what consciousness is. In addition, given the centrality of consciousness in philosophy, Dietrich and Hardcastle claim that philosophy itself needs to change. That the central problems of philosophy persist is actually a profound epistemic fact about humans. Philosophy, then, is a limit to what humans can understand. (Series A)

Self-consciousness is a topic of considerable importance to a variety of empirical and theoretical disciplines such as developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers. Some of the topics included are the infants’ sense of self and others, theory of mind, phenomenology of embodiment, neural mechanisms of action attribution, and hermeneutics of the self. A number of these essays argue in turn that empirical findings in developmental psychology, phenomenological analyses of embodiment, or studies of pathological self-experiences point to the existence of a type of self-consciousness that does not require any explicit I —thought or self-observation, but is more adequately described as a pre-reflective, embodied form of self-familiarity. The different contributions in the volume amply demonstrate that self-consciousness is a complex multifaceted phenomenon that calls for an integration of different complementary interdisciplinary perspectives. (Series B)

This book results from a group meeting held at the Institute for Scientific Exchange in Torino, Italy. The central aim was for scientists to “think together” in new ways with those in the humanities inspired by quantum theory and especially quantum brain theory. These fields of inquiry have suffered conceptual estrangement but now are ripe for rapprochement, if academic parochialism is put aside. A prevalent theme of the book is a moving away from individual elements and individual actors acting upon each other, toward a coordinate hermeneutic dynamics that manifests as a coherent totality. Among the topics covered are image in photography and in neuroscience; language; time; brain and mathematics; quantum brain dynamics and quantum communication.

Wolfgang Wildgen presents three perspectives on the evolution of language as a key element in the evolution of mankind in terms of the development of human symbol use. (1) He approaches this question by constructing possible scenarios in which mechanisms necessary for symbolic behavior could have developed, on the basis of the state of the art in evolutionary anthropology and genetics. (2) Non-linguistic symbolic behavior such as cave art is investigated as an important clue to the developmental background to the origin of language. Creativity and innovation and a population's ability to integrate individual experiments are considered with regard to historical examples of symbolic creativity in the visual arts and natural sciences. (3) Probable linguistic 'fossils' of such linguistic innovations are examined. The results of this study allow for new proposals for a 'protolanguage' and for a theory of language within a broader philosophical and semiotic framework, and raises interesting questions as to human consciousness, universal grammar, and linguistic methodology. (Series B)

Higher-Order (HO) theories of consciousness have in common the idea that what makes a mental state conscious is that it is the object of some kind of higher-order representation. This volume presents fourteen previously unpublished essays both defending and criticizing this approach to the problem of consciousness. It is the first anthology devoted entirely to HO theories of consciousness. There are several kinds of HO theory, such as the HOT (higher-order thought) and HOP (higher-order perception) models, and each is discussed and debated. Part One contains essays by authors who defend some form of HO theory. Part Two includes papers by those who are critics of the HO approach. Some of the topics covered include animal consciousness, misrepresentation, the nature of pain, subvocal speech, subliminal perception, blindsight, the nature of emotion, the difference between perception and thought, first-order versus higher-order theories of consciousness, and the relationship between nonconscious and conscious mentality. (Series A)

Which causal patterns are involved in mental processes?
On what mechanisms does the self-organisation of cognitive structure rest?
Can a naturalistic view account for the basic resources of intentionality, while avoiding the objections to reductive materialism?
By considering the developmental, phenomenological and biological aspects linking mind and causality, this volume offers a state-of-the art theoretical proposal emphasising the fine-tuning of cognition with the complexity of bodily dynamics. In contrast to the de-coupling of mind from the physical environment in classical information-processing models, growth of brain’s architecture and stabilisation of perception­–action cycles are considered decisive, with no need for an eliminative approach to representations pursued by neural network models. The tools provided by physics and biology for the description of massive causal interactions, on top of which ‘qualitative’ changes occur, are exploited to suggest a model of the mind as a many-layered, co-evolving system. (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)

The dominance of vision is so strong in sighted people that touch is sometimes considered as a minor perceptual modality. However, touch is a powerful tool which contributes significantly to our knowledge of space and objects. Its intensive use by blind persons allows them to reach the same levels of knowledge and cognition as their sighted peers.In this book, specialized researchers present the recent state of knowledge about the cognitive functioning of touch. After an analysis of the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of touch, exploratory manual behaviors, intramodal haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) abilities and cross-modal visual-tactual coordination are examined in infants, children and adults, and in non-human primates. These studies concern both sighted and blind persons in order to know whether early visual deprivation modifies the modes of processing space and objects. The last section is devoted to the technical devices favoring the school and social integration of the young blind: Braille reading, use of raised maps and drawings, “sensory substitution” displays, and new technologies of communication adapted for the blind. (Series B)

"What is the mind?"
"What is the relationship between brain and mind?"
These are common questions. But "What is the brain?" is a rare question in both the neurosciences and philosophy. The reason for this may lie in the brain itself: Is there a "brain problem"?
In this fresh and innovative book, Georg Northoff demonstrates that there is in fact a "brain problem". He argues that our brain can only be understood when its empirical functions are directly related to the modes of acquiring knowledge, our epistemic abilities and inabilities. Drawing on the latest neuroscientific data and philosophical theories, he provides an empirical-epistemic definition of the brain. Northoff reveals the basic conceptual confusion about the relationship between mind and brain that has so obstinately been lingering in both neuroscience and philosophy. He subsequently develops an alternative framework where the integration of the brain within body and environment is central. This novel approach plunges the reader into the depths of our own brain. The "Philosophy of the Brain" that emerges opens the door to a fascinating world of new findings that explore the mind and its relationship to our very human brain. (Series A)

A major obstacle for materialist theories of the mind is the problem of sensory consciousness. How could a physical brain produce conscious sensory states that exhibit the rich and luxurious qualities of red velvet, a Mozart concerto or fresh-brewed coffee? Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness offers to explain what these conscious sensory states have in common, by virtue of being conscious as opposed to unconscious states. After arguing against accounts of consciousness in terms of higher-order representation of mental states, the theory claims that sensory consciousness is a special way we have of representing the world. The book also introduces a way of thinking about subjectivity as separate and more fundamental than consciousness, and considers how this foundational notion can be developed into more elaborate varieties. An appendix reviews the connection between consciousness and attention with an eye toward providing a neuropsychological instantiation of the proposed theory. (Series A)

Quantum Closures and Disclosures thinks together two seemingly irreconcilable discourses: An application of quantum field theory to brain functioning, called quantum brain dynamics, and the continental postphenomenological tradition, especially the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Underlying both developments is a new ontology of nonCartesian dual modes whose rich provenance is their "between." World is disclosed in the lumen naturale of dual modes belonging-together in their between; all presencing is a function of a "~conjugate" form of match in the between. This surprising rapprochement between a powerful tradition within continental philosophy and the 20th-century quantum revolution in science is fruitfully applied to crucial issues in philosophy, brain science, mathematics and psychiatry.

Related Titles: Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness: An introduction, edited by Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue (1995), and My Double Unveiled: The dissipative quantum model of the brain, by Giuseppe Vitiello (2001)

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience make possible an understanding of the neural events that are associated with different forms of consciousness. To fully understand and unveil the mystery of consciousness inside the brain we require examination of the concept of neural basis of conscious mind.This book provides a systematic exploration of consciousness and gives an overview of neural and quantum basis of conscious mind through careful explanation of proposed models and extends these theories challenging some generalised views on consciousness.
Each chapter provides a review of the findings and theoretical accounts related to neural basis of consciousness and the mechanisms of the different varieties of consciousness.
Professor Naoyuki Osaka (Kyoto University) has been active in experimental research on consciousness and attention for more than 15 years. (Series B)

Attention and Implicit Learning provides a comprehensive overview of the research conducted in this area. The book is conceived as a multidisciplinary forum of discussion on the question of whether implicit learning may be depicted as a process that runs independently of attention. The volume also deals with the complementary question of whether implicit learning affects the dynamics of attention, and it addresses these questions from perspectives that range from functional to neuroscientific and computational approaches. The view of implicit learning that arises from these pages is not that of a mysterious faculty, but rather that of an elementary ability of the cognitive systems to extract the structure of their environment as it appears directly through experience, and regardless of any intention to do so. Implicit learning, thus, is taken to be a process that may shape not only our behavior, but also our representations of the world, our attentional functions, and even our conscious experience. (Series B)

Tone of Voice and Mind is a synthesis of findings from neurophysiology (how neurons produce subjective feeling), neuropsychology (how the human cerebral hemispheres undertake complementary information-processing), intonation studies (how the emotions are encoded in the tone of voice), and music perception (how human beings hear and feel harmony). The focus is on the psychological characteristics that distinguish us from other primate species. At a neuronal level, we are just another mammalian species, but the functional specialization of the human cerebral hemispheres has resulted in three outstanding, uniquely-human talents: language, tool-usage and music. To understand how the human brain coordinates those behaviors is to understand who we are. (Series B)

Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative, Artificial Intelligence, and media studies — studies, models, and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers, providing perspectives from computational linguistics, agent research, psychology, ethology, art, and media theory. It describes artificial agents with narratively structured behavior, agents that take part in stories and tours, systems that automatically generate stories, dramas, and documentaries, and systems that support people telling their own stories. It looks at how people use stories, the features of narrative that play a role in how people understand the world, and how human narrative ability may have evolved. It addresses meta-issues in NI: the history of the field, the stories AI researchers tell about their research, and the effects those stories have on the things they discover. (Series B)

The current debate between theory theory and simulation theory on the nature of mentalisation has reached no consensus yet, although many now think that some hybrid theory is needed. This collection of essays represents an effort at re-evaluating the scope of simulation theory, while also considering areas in which it could be submitted to experimental tests. The volume explores the two main versions of simulation theory, Goldman’s introspectionism and Gordon’s radical simulationism, and enquires whether they allow a non-circular account of mentalisation. The originality of the volume is to confront conceptual views on simulation with data from pragmatics, developmental psychology and the neurosciences. Individual chapters contain discussions of specific issues such as autism, imitation, motor imagery, conditional reasoning, joint attention and the understanding of demonstratives. It will be of interest primarily to advanced students and researchers in the philosophy of mind, language and action, but also to everyone interested in the nature of interpretation and communication. (Series B)

Emotional Cognition gives the reader an up to date overview of the current state of emotion and cognition research that is striving for computationally explicit accounts of the relationship between these two domains. Many different areas are covered by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this area and the book crosses a range of domains, from the neurosciences through cognition and formal models to philosophy. Specific chapters consider, amongst other things, the role of emotion in decision-making, the representation and evaluation of emotive events, the relationship of affect on working memory and goal regulation. The emergence of such an integrative, computational, approach in emotion and cognition research is a unique and exciting development, one that will be of interest to established scholars as much as graduate students feeling their way in this area, and applicable to research in applied as well as purely theoretical domains. (Series B)

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian a priori ‘new theory’ of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we become aware of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one’s own. The metaphor of ‘mirror’ aptly comes to mind.Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to ‘mirror’ other’s actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: ‘mirror neurons’. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person ‘intersubjectivity’ of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans.
The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.(Series B)

The book analyses the differences between the mathematical interpretation and the phenomenological intuition of the continuum. The basic idea is that the continuity of the experience of space and time originates in phenomenic movement. The problem of consciousness and of the spaces of representation is related to the primary processes of perception. Conceived as an interplay between cognitive science, linguistics and philosophy, the book presents a conceptual framework based on a dynamic and experimental approach to the problem of the continuum. Besides presenting the primitives of a theory of cognitive space and time, it presents a theory of the observer, analyzing the relationship among perspective, points of view and unity of consciousness. The book's chapters deal with the dynamic elaboration and recognition of forms from the lower to the higher processes in the various perceptual fields. Experimental analysis from visual, auditory and tactile perception outline the basic structures of intentionality and its counterpart in language and gesture. (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.

This study of the workings of neural networks in perception and understanding of situations and simple sentences shows that, and how, distributed conceptual constituents are bound together in episodes within an interactive/dynamic architecture of sensorial and pre-motor maps, and maps of conceptual indicators (semantic memory) and individuating indicators (historical, episodic memory). Activation circuits between these maps make sensorial and pre-motor fields in the brain function as episodic maps creating representations, which are expressions in consciousness. It is argued that all consciousness is episodic, consisting of situational or linguistic representations, and that the mind is the whole of all conscious manifestations of the brain. Thought occurs only in the form of linguistic or image representations. The book also discusses the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. Four recent controversies in consciousness research are discussed and decided along this model of consciousness:
• Is consciousness an internal or external monitoring device of brain states?
• Do all conscious states involve thought and judgement?
• Are there different kinds of consciousness?
• Do we have a one-on-one correspondence between certain brain states and conscious states.

The book discusses also the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. (Series A)

Sleep and wakefulness undergo important changes with age. Awakening, a crucial event in the sleep-wake rhythm, is a transition implying complex physiological mechanisms. Its involvement in sleep disturbances is also well known. This collective volume is the first attempt to systematically approach awakening across development.A methodological section considers criteria to define awakening in a developmental perspective. Theoretical considerations on development of wakefulness and on its relation to consciousness are included and provide a vigorous impulse to go beyond present criteria and classifications.
Age changes are the core of studies on development: a section of the book examines old and new data from preterm to infants up to children, underscoring the main turning points along this developmental path. As for other aspects of development, awakening and the sleep-wake cycle are also influenced by external factors, both physical and human. Several contributions deal with this topic, in particular focusing on the parent-infant interaction and the influences of culture.
Clinical contexts offer an opportunity to show both quantitative and qualitative changes of awakening and arousals in different pathological conditions. Either partial changes of one physiological variable or global and massive changes can be observed. (Series B)

It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book, which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde, Sweden, provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive and computer science, biology, physics, art and the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity, nonconceptuality vs conceptuality, language, evolutionary aspects, neural correlates, microphysical level, creativity, visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (Series A)

This pioneering book explores in depth the role of neurotransmitters in conscious awareness. The central aim is to identify common neural denominators of conscious awareness, informed by the neurochemistry of natural, drug induced and pathological states of consciousness. Chemicals such as acetylcholine and dopamine, which bridge the synaptic gap between neurones, are the 'neurotransmitters in mind' that form the substance of the volume, which is essential reading for all who believe that unravelling mechanisms of consciousness must include these vital systems of the brain.Up-to-date information is provided on:
• Psychological domains of attention, motivation, memory, sleep and dreaming that define normal states of consciousness.
• Effects of chemicals that alter or abolish consciousness, including hallucinogens and anaesthetics.
• Disorders of the brain such as dementia, schizophrenia and depression considered from the novel perspective of the way these affect consciousness, and how this might relate to disturbances in neurotransmission.

(Series B)

Language, vision and music: what common cognitive patterns underlie our competence in these disparate modes of thought? Language (natural & formal), vision and music seem to share at least the following attributes: a hierarchical organisation of constituents, recursivity, metaphor, the possibility of self-reference, ambiguity, and systematicity. Can we propose the existence of a general symbol system with instantiations in these three modes or is the only commonality to be found at the level of such entities as cerebral columnar automata? Answers are to be found in this international collection of work which recognises that one of the basic features of consciousness is its MultiModality, that there are possibilities to model this with contemporary technology, and that cross-cultural commonalities in the experience of, and creativity within, the various modalities are significant. With the advent of Intelligent MultiMedia this aspect of consciousness implementation in mind/brain acquires new significance. (Series B)

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)

This international selection of 34 papers from the Tokyo '99 conference held at the United Nations University gives a valuable state of the art overview of consciousness research. Not only the recognized European and American approaches but also the distinguishing approaches from many Japanese researchers are presented. It will provide a world-wide audience with a comprehensive outlook for the remarkable potential contribution in the future scene of consciousness research.The Tokyo '99 declaration to promote scientists’ ethical warning against the thoughtless aiming of consciousness research at warfare is also included.(Series B)

This introduction to the dissipative quantum model of brain and to its possible implications for consciousness studies is addressed to a broad interdisciplinary audience. Memory and consciousness are approached from the physicist point of view focusing on the basic observation that the brain is an open system continuously interacting with its environment. The unavoidable dissipative character of the brain functioning turns out to be the root of the brain’s large memory capacity and of other memory features such as memory association, memory confusion, duration of memory. The openness of the brain implies a formal picture of the world which is modeled on the same brain image: a sort of brain copy or “Double”, where world objectiveness and the brain implicit subjectivity are conjugated. Consciousness is seen to arise from the permanent “dialogue” of the brain with its Double.
The author’s narration of his (re-)search gives a cross-over of the physics of elementary particles and condensed matter, and the brain’s basic dynamics. This dynamic interplay makes for a “satisfying feeling of the unity of knowledge”. (Series A)

Face Recognition: Cognitive and Computational Processes critically discusses current research in face recognition, leading to an original approach with criminological applications. The book covers
• The methodological and philosophical basis of research in face recognition.
• Findings and their explanations, conceptual issues, theories and models of face recognition
• The Catch Model (Rakover & Cahlon) for reconstructing (identifying) a face from memory, and other models and methods of face reconstruction.
• Conscious perception and recognition of faces.

The book also discusses original ideas on conceptualizing face perception and recognition in tasks of facial cognition, developing the Schema Theory and the Catch Model, and introducing Rakover & Cahlon's discovery of the proposed law of Face Recognition by Similarity (FRBS). (Series B)

Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege, brings four classic contributions together in one place, and offers five new studies. (Series A)

The Physical Nature of Consciousness contains twelve chapters that discuss recent and new perspectives on the relation between modern physics and consciousness.
Stuart Hameroff opens with an extended and updated exposition of the Penrose/Hameroff Orch-OR model, and subsequently addresses recent criticisms of quantum approaches to the brain. Evan Walker presents his view on consciousness from the perspective of a new approach to the integration of quantum theory and relativity. Friedrich Beck elaborates on the Beck/Eccles quantum approach to consciousness. Karl Pribram puts the holographic view on consciousness in perspective of his life long work. Peter Marcer and Edgar Mitchell explain the relevance of quantum holography for consciousness. Gordon Globus discusses the relation between postmodern philosophical theories and quantum consciousness. Chris Clarke develops a theory in terms of a specific type of formal logic to reconcile the phenomenology of consciousness with the physical world. Ilya Prigogine summarizes his view on complexity, and on the future of quantum theory, which goes beyond the present formalism, and goes on to comment on the problem of consciousness. Matti Pitkanen identifies the place for consciousness in a unifying topological geometro-dynamics theory. Colin McGinn argues against classical materialism. Dick Bierman gives an overview of anomalous phenomena. He identifies a decline effect, and discusses different possible interpretations. Philip Van Loocke closes the volume with a discussion on how deep teleology in cellular systems may relate to consciousness. (Series A)

This interdisciplinary work addresses the question, What role should psychological conceptualization play for thinkers who believe that the brain is the organ of the mind? It offers readers something unique both by systematically comparing the writings of eliminativist philosophers of mind with the writings of the most committed proponents of biological psychiatry, and by critically scrutinizing their shared “anti-anthropomorphism” from the standpoint of a diagnostician and therapist. Contradicting the contemporary assumption that common sense psychology has already been proven futile, and we are just waiting for an adequate scientifically-based replacement, this book provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments showing why, if they did not already have both cognitive and psychodynamic psychologies, philosophers and scientists would have to invent them to better understand brains. (Series A)

Is there an internal relationship between consciousness and intentionality? Can mental content be described in such a way so as to avoid dualism? What is the influence of social context upon consciousness, conceptions of self and mental content?
This book considers questions such as these and argues for a conception of consciousness, mental content and intentionality that is anti-Cartesian in its major tenets. Focusing upon the rule governed nature of concepts and the grounding of the rules for concept use in the practical world, intentional consciousness emerges as a phenomena that depends upon social context. Given that dependence, the authors consider and set aside attempts to reduce human consciousness and intentionality to phenomena explicable at biological or neuroscientific levels. (Series A)

Spatial Cognition brings together psychology, computer science, linguistics and geography, discussing how people think about space (our internal cognitive maps and spatial perception) and how we communicate about space, for instance giving route directions or using spatial metaphors. The technological applications adding dynamism to the area include computer interfaces, educational software, multimedia, and in-car navigation systems. On the experimental level, themes as varied as gender differences in orientation and — of course, wholly unrelated — the role of the hippocampus in rodent navigation are described. Much detailed analysis and computational modeling of the structure of short term memory (STM) is discussed. The papers were presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society of Ireland, Mind III. (Series B)

Many secrets of nature have been discovered since we have a better understanding of microstructures, for example subatomic spheres in physics and genetic structures in biochemistry. This book is set to convey an overview of the history, methods, findings and theoretical accounts of microgenetic research in consciousness and experimental psychology. The reader will find information about how conscious percepts unfold within only a fraction of a second. In a sense, and according to the microgenetic hypothesis, our subjectively experienced perceptual image undergoes formation similar to the process of developing a photograph. Yet the time scale of the awareness-related perceptual development is much finer and therefore accessible only to observation armed with special experimental procedures that are exposed in this book. In addition, the author presents empirical findings and theoretical interpretations from his own lab. Professor Talis Bachmann has been active in microgenetic research on attention, perception and consciousness for more than 25 years. (Series B)

This is the only book that examines the theory and data on the development of implicit and explicit memory. It first describes the characteristics of implicit and explicit memory (including conscious recollection) and tasks used with adults to measure them. Next, it reviews the brain mechanisms thought to underlie implicit and explicit memory and the studies with amnesics that initially prompted the search for different neuroanatomically-based memory systems. Two chapters review the Jacksonian (first in, last out) principle and empirical evidence for the hierarchical appearance and dissolution of two memory systems in animal models (rats, nonhuman primates), children, and normal/amnesic adults. Two chapters examine memory tasks used with human infants and evidence of implicit and explicit memory during early infancy. Three final chapters consider structural and processing accounts of adult memory dissociations, their applicability to infant memory dissociations, and implications of infant data for current concepts of implicit and explicit memory. (Series B)

The aim of this volume is to discuss recent research into self-experience and its disorders,and to contribute to a better integration of the different empirical and conceptual perspectives. Among the topics discussed are questions like ‘What is a self?,’ ‘What is the relation between the self-givenness of consciousness and the givenness of the conscious self?’,‘How should we understand the self-disorders encountered in schizophrenia?’ and ‘What general insights into the nature of the self can pathological phenomena provide us with?’ Most of the contributions are characterized by a distinct phenomenological approach.
The chapters by Butterworth, Strawson, Zahavi, and Marbach are general in nature and address different psychological and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a self. Next Eilan, Parnas, and Sass turn to schizophrenia and ask both how we should approach and understand this disorder, and, more specifically,what we can learn about the nature of selfhood and existence from psychopathology. The chapters by Blakemore and Gallagher present a defense and a criticism of the so-called model of self-monitoring, respectively. The final three chapters by Cutting, Stanghellini, Schwartz and Wiggins represent anthropologically oriented attempts to situate pathologies of self-experience.
(Series B)

Analysis and dissociation have proved to be useful tools to understand the basic functions of the brain and the mind, which therefore have been decomposed to a multitude of ever smaller subsystems and pieces by most scientific approaches. However, the understanding of complex functions such as consciousness will not succeed without a more global consideration of the ways the mind-brain works. This implies that synthesis rather than analysis should be applied to the brain. The present book offers a collection of contributions ranging from sensory and motor cognitive neuroscience to mood management and thought, which all focus on the dissociation between conscious (explicit) and nonconscious (implicit) processing in different cognitive situations. The contributions in this book clearly demonstrate that conscious and nonconscious processes typically interact in complex ways. The central message of this collection of papers is: In order to understand how the brain operates as one integrated whole that generates cognition and behaviour, we need to reassemble the brain and mind and put all the conscious and nonconscious pieces back together again. (Series B)

Unlike standard attempts to address the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, which assume our understanding of consciousness is unproblematic, this book begins by focusing on phenomenology and is devoted to clarifying the relations between intentionality, propositional content and experience. In particular, it argues that the subjectivity of experience cannot be understood in representationalist terms. This is important, for it is because many philosophers fail to come to terms with subjectivity that they are at a loss to provide a convincing solution to the mind-body problem. In this light the metaphysical problem is revealed to be a product of the misguided attempt to incorporate consciousness within an object-based schema, inspired by physicalism. A similar problem arises in the interpretation of quantum mechanics and this gives us further reason to look beyond physicalism, in matters metaphysical. Thus the virtues of absolute idealism are re-examined, as are the wider consequences of adopting its understanding of truth within the philosophy of science.
This book complements the arguments and investigations of The Presence of Mind, which it partners. (Series A)

Individual Differences in Conscious Experience is intended for readers with philosophical, psychological, or clinical interests in subjective experience. It addresses some difficult but important issues in the study of consciousness, subconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The book’s fourteen chapters are written by renowned, pioneering researchers who, collectively, have published more than fifty books and more than one thousand journal articles. The editors’ introductory chapter frames the book’s subtext: that mind-brain theories embodying the constraints of individual differences in subjective experience should be given greater credence than nomothetic theories ignoring those constraints. The next five chapters describe research and theory pertaining to individual differences in conscious sensations — specifically, individual differences in pain perception, phantom limbs, gustatory sensations, and mental imagery. Then, two succeeding chapters focus on individual differences in subconsciousness. The final six chapters address individual differences in altered states of self-consciousness — dreams, hypnotic phenomena, and various clinical syndromes.
(Series B)

Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology is written for readers who are curious about what human (social) cognition is, and whether and how advanced software programs or robots can become social agents. Topics addressed in 16 peer-reviewed chapters by researchers at the forefront of agent research include: Narrative intelligence and implementations of story-telling systems, socially situated avatars and ‘conscious’ software agents, cognitive architectures for socially intelligent agents, agents with emotions, design issues for interactive systems, artificial life agents, contributions to agent design from artistic practice, and a Cognitive Technology view on living with socially intelligent agents. The book addresses both software and robotic agents. On the one hand justice is done to the scientific and technical aspects, and on the other hand the reader will learn about pioneering technological developments which are necessary for a public discourse and critical evaluation on where social agent technology is leading us and how such a development can be shaped in order to meet the social, cultural and cognitive needs of humans.
The book is suitable for students, researchers, and everyone interested in this emerging and quickly growing field, it does not require any specialist background knowledge.
(Series B)

Working from Radcliffe-Brown’s landmark concept of social sentiments, anthropologists and linguists examine pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of emotion-language in several societies. Introductory and concluding chapters devote special attention to emotional consciousness. Chapters cover language primordialism in Tamil (Harold Schiffman), the erasure of lamentation in Bangla in favor of referential language praxis (James Wilce), women's discourse in Java that creates dignity by reframing the pain of humiliation (Laine Berman), speech styles signalling intimacy and remoteness in Japanese (Cynthia Dunn), divergent conceptions of love in Japanese and translated American romance novels (Janet Shibamoto-Smith), the syntax of emotion-mimetics in Japanese (Debra Occhi), the grammar of emotion-metaphors in Tagalog (Gary Palmer, Heather Bennett and Lester Stacey), and the lexical organization of emotions in the English and Spanish of second language learners (Howard Grabois). Zoltán Kövecses (with Palmer) examines the complementary relationship of social construction theory to the search for universals of emotional experience. (Series B)

Will our everyday account of ourselves be vindicated by a new science? Or, will our self-understanding remain untouched by such developments? This book argues that beliefs and desires have a legitimate place in the explanation of action. Eliminativist arguments mistakenly focus on the vehicles of content not content itself. This book asks whether a naturalistic theory of content is possible. It is argued that a modest biosemantic theory of intentional, but nonconceptual, content is the naturalist’s best bet. A theory of this kind complements connectionism and recent work on embodied and embedded cognition. But intentional content is not equivalent to propositional content. In order to understand propositional content we must rely on Davidsonian radical interpretation.
However, radical interpretation is shown to be at odds with physicalism. But if the best naturalised theory of content we are likely to get from cognitive science is only a theory of intentional content, then a naturalistic explanation of scientific theorising is not possible. It is concluded that cognitive science alone cannot explain the nature of our minds and that eliminativism is intellectually incoherent. (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)

The notion of stratification has played an important role in linguistics and evolutionary studies for some time, but its role in cognitive science has not yet been well articulated and identified. What is meant by stratification? What is the role and value of stratification in the contemporary study of cognition and consciousness? This collective volume speaks to these questions. The twelve articles in the book cover a range of relevant issues including
(a) the vertical dimension and modularity of visual processing, search and attention,
(b) the stratification of encoding and retrieval processes in memory,
(c) the hierarchical nature of conscious and unconscious components of memory, and
(d) the levels of awareness and varieties of conscious experience.
The volume presents stimulating and self-contained articles for researchers and students of experimental psychology and neuroscience, and is suitable for an advanced university course.
(Series B)

How can one investigate phenomenal consciousness? As in other areas of science, the investigation of consciousness aims for a more precise knowledge of its phenomena, and the discovery of general truths about their nature. This requires the development of appropriate first-person, second-person and third-person methods. This book introduces some of the creative ways in which these methods can be applied to different purposes, e.g. to understanding the relation of consciousness to brain, to examining or changing consciousness as such, and to understanding the way consciousness is influenced by social, clinical and therapeutic contexts. To clarify the strengths and weaknesses of different methods and to demonstrate the interplay of methodology and epistemology, the book also suggests a number of “maps” of the consciousness studies terrain that place different approaches to the study of consciousness into a broader, interdisciplinary context.
(Series A).

The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)

According to Heidegger, naturalistic thinking is naive and unable to deal with its own essence and limitations. It can only serve the veiled interests of modern Western technology in its inherent inclination to attain global dominance. But these eight thematically intertwined essays face Heidegger’s critique of naturalistic thinking habits. The author develops a holistic and antirealistic version of naturalism. This ‘holistic naturalism’ does not approach nature as a set of entities or things which can be used for technological purposes. Instead, nature is approached as human experience which originally lacks conceptual structure and which can therefore not be fully controlled by a rational subject. (Series A)

How can symbols have meaning for a subject? Foundations of Understanding argues that this is the key question to ask about intentionality, or meaningful thought. It thus offers an alternative to currently popular linguistic models of intentionality, whose inadequacies are examined: the goal should be to explain, not how symbols, mental or otherwise, can refer to or ‘mean’ states of affairs in the external world, but how they can mean something to us, the users. The essence of intentionality is shown to be conscious understanding, the roots of which lie in experiences of embodiment and goal-directed action. A developmental path is traced from a foundation of conscious understanding in the ability to perform basic actions, through the understanding of the concept of an objective, external world, to the understanding of language and abstract symbols. The work is interdisciplinary: data from the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, and the perspectives of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, are combined with traditional philosophical analysis. The book includes a chapter on the nature of conscious qualitative experience and its neural correlates. (Series A)

The Reaching for Mind workshop, held at AISB ’95, explicitly addressed itself to the current crisis in Cognitive Science. In particular, the issue of how this discipline can address consciousness was a leitmotiv in the workshop. The conclusion seems inescapable that there is a need for two sciences in this area. Cognitive Science can be freed to become a fully-fledged experimental epistemology by the creation of a science of consciousness also encompassing subjectivity. This exciting collection of papers indicates where both these sciences may be heading. (Series B)
The programme committee of the workshop included: Mike Brady (Oxford); Daniel Dennett (Tufts); Jerry Feldman (Berkeley); John Macnamara (McGill) and Zenon Pylyshyn (Rutgers).

How does the brain go about the business of being conscious? Though we cannot yet provide a complete answer, this book explains what is now known about the neural basis of human consciousness.The last decade has witnessed the dawn of an exciting new era of cognitive neuroscience. For example, combination of new imaging technologies and experimental study of attention has linked brain activity to specific psychological functions. The authors are leaders in psychology and neuroscience who have conducted original research on consciousness. They wish to communicate the highlights of this research to both specialists and interested others, and hope that this volume will be read by students concerned with the neuroscientific underpinnings of subjective experience. As a whole, the book progresses from an overview of conscious awareness, through careful explanation of identified neurocognitive systems, and extends to theories which tackle global aspects of consciousness. (Series B)

This collective volume is the first to discuss systematically what are the possibilities to model different aspects of brain and mind functioning with the formal means of fractal geometry and deterministic chaos. At stake here is not an approximation to the way of actual performance, but the possibility of brain and mind to implement nonlinear dynamic patterns in their functioning. The contributions discuss the following topics (among others): the edge-of-chaos dynamics in recursively organized neural systems and in intersensory interaction, the fractal timing of the neural functioning on different scales of brain networking, aspects of fractal neurodynamics and quantum chaos in novel biophysics, the fractal maximum-power evolution of brain and mind, the chaotic dynamics in the development of consciousness, etc. It is suggested that the ‘margins’ of our capacity for phenomenal experience, are ‘fractal-limit phenomena’. Here the possibilities to prove the plausibility of fractal modeling with appropriate experimentation and rational reconstruction are also discussed. A conjecture is made that the brain vs. mind differentiation becomes possible, most probably, only with the imposition of appropriate symmetry groups implementing a flowing interface of features of local vs. global brain dynamics. (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)

This is a philosophical study of qualitative consciousness, characteristic examples of which are pains, experienced colors, sounds, etc. Consciousness is analyzed as the having of qualia. Phenomenal properties or qualia are problematical because they lack appropriate bearers. The relation of having is problematical because none of the typical candidates for this relation — introspection, inner monitoring, higher level thoughts — is capable of explaining what it looks like to have a quale . The qualia problem is solved by introducing a bundle theory of phenomenal objects. Phenomenal objects are bundles of qualia. Thus there is no need for independent qualia bearers. The having problem is solved by introducing a bundle theory of the self. To have a quale is for it to be in the bundle one is. Thus no further relations are needed to explain how qualia are had. This study strives for phenomenological adequacy. Thus the first-person point of view dominates throughout. (Series A)

Locating Consciousness argues that our qualitative experiences should be aligned with the activity of a single and distinct memory system in our mind/brain. Spelling out in detail what we do and do not know about phenomenological experience, this book denies the common view of consciousness as a central decision-making system. Instead, consciousness is viewed as a lower level dynamical structure underpinning our information processing. This new perspective affords novel solutions to a wide range of problems: the absent qualia, the binding problem, the inverted spectra, the specter of epiphenomenalism, the explanatory gap, the distinction between objective and subjective, and the general skeptical doubts about the viability of the naturalist project itself. Drawing on recent data in psychology and neuroscience, Locating Consciousness also discusses when we become conscious and when we should think other animals are conscious. (Series A)

This introduction to quantum brain dynamics is accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The authors, a brain scientist and a theoretical physicist, present a new quantum framework for investigating advanced functions of the brain such as consciousness and memory. The book is the first to give a systematic account, founded in fundamental quantum physical principles, of how the brain functions as a unified system. It is based on the quantum field theory originated in the 1960s by the great theoretical physicist, Hiroomi Umezawa, to whom the book is dedicated. Both quantum physics for sub-microscopic constituents of brain cells and tissues, and classical physics for the microscopic and macroscopic constituents, are simultaneously justified by this theory. It poses an alternative to the dominant conceptions in the neuro- and cognitive sciences, which take neurons organized into networks as the basic constituents of the brain. Certain physical substrates in the brain are shown to support quantum field phenomena, and the resulting strange quantum properties are used to explain consciousness and memory. The whole of memory is stored in such a state of macroscopic order and consciousness is realized by the creation and annihilation dynamics of energy quanta of the electromagnetic field and molecular fields of water and protein. This change of perspective results in a radically new vision of how the brain functions. (Series A, B)

Questioning Consciousness brings together neuroscientific, psychological and phenomenological research, combining in a readable format recent developments in image research and neurology. It reassesses the mind-body relation and research on 'mental models', abstract concept formation, and acquisition of logical and apparently 'imageless' inference skills. It is argued that to be conscious of an object is essentially to imagine in a habituated way what would happen if we were to perform certain actions in relation to the object; and that mental images fit together to build up abstract concepts. This analysis shows why conscious information processing is so structurally different from — yet interrelated with — non-conscious processing, and how mind and body interrelate as a process to its substratum in the way that a sound wave relates to the medium through which it passes. (Series A)

This interdisciplinary work discloses an unexpected coherence between recent concepts in brain science and postmodern thought. A nonlinear dynamical model of brain states is viewed as an autopoietic, autorhoetic, self-organizing, self-tuning eruption under multiple constraints and guided by an overarching optimization principle which insures conservation of invariances and enhancement of symmetries. The nonlinear dynamical brain as developed shows quantum nonlocality, undergoes chaotic regimes, and does not compute. Heidegger and Derrida are ‘appropriated’ as dynamical theorists who are concerned respectively with the movement of time and being (Ereignis) and text (Différance). The chasm between postmodern thought and the thoroughly metaphysical theory that the brain computes is breached, once the nonlinear dynamical framework is adopted. The book is written in a postmodern style, making playful, opportunistic use of marginalia and dreams, and presenting a nonserial surface of broken complexity. (Series A)