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194The no-self alternativeIn Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford University Press. 2010.This article explores the ‘no-self alternative’ in the debate on the metaphysical and phenomenological concept of the self. It suggests that the no-self alternative may not be an alternative at all and it could simply be the default assumption for all rational approaches to self-consciousness and subjectivity. It outlines several different anti-realist arguments about the self and explains why the idea that there are no selves is counter-intuitive. It shows why the intuitions of phenomenology ar…Read more
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173Why are identity disorders interesting for philosophers?In Thomas Schramme & Johannes Thome (eds.), Philosophy and Psychiatry, De Gruyter. pp. 311-325. 2003.“Identity disorders” constitute a large class of psychiatric disturbances that, due to deviant forms of self-modeling, result in dramatic changes in the patients’ phenomenal experience of their own personal identity. The phenomenal experience of selfhood and transtemporal identity can vary along an extremely large number of dimensions: There are simple losses of content. There are also various typologies of phenomenal disintegration as in schizophrenia, in depersonalization disorders and in_ Dis…Read more
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162Minimal phenomenal experiencePhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (I): 1-44. 2020.This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the ne…Read more
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140Motor ontology: The representational reality of goals, actions and selvesPhilosophical Psychology 16 (3). 2003.The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target …Read more
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135Cognitive enhancementIn Judy Illes & Barbara J. Sahakian (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, Oxford University Press. 2011.Cognitive enhancement aims at optimizing a specific class of information-processing functions: cognitive functions, physically realized by the human brain. This article deals with ethical issues in cognitive enhancement. It discusses some standard conceptual issues related to the notion of “cognitive enhancement” and then continues from a purely descriptive point of view by briefly reviewing some empirical aspects and sketching the current situation. Several enhancement strategies are being test…Read more
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119The emergence of a shared action ontology: Building blocks for a theoryConsciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 549-571. 2003.To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. We will investigate which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process, by answering to the following questions: What are the ex…Read more
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119Conscious volition and mental representation: Toward a more fine-grained analysisIn Natalie Sebanz & Wolfgang Prinz (eds.), Disorders of Volition, Mit Press. 2006.<b>A Bradford Book</b> <b>The MIT Press</b> <b>Cambridge, Massachusetts</b> <b>London, England</b>
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109Commentary on jakab's Ineffability of QualiaConsciousness and Cognition 9 (3): 352-362. 2000.Zoltan Jakab has presented an interesting conceptual analysis of the ineffability of qualia in a functionalist and classical cognitivist framework. But he does not want to commit himself to a certain metaphysical thesis on the ontology of consciousness or qualia. We believe that his strategy has yielded a number of highly relevant and interesting insights, but still suffers from some minor inconsistencies and a certain lack of phenomenological and empirical plausibility. This may be due to some …Read more
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84The Ego Tunnel: The Science of Mind and the Myth of the SelfBasic Books. 2009.Philosopher and scientist Thomas Metzinger argues that neuroscience's picture of the "self" as an emergent phenomenon of our biology and the attendant fact that the "self" can be manipulated--and even controlled--raises novel and serious ...
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82Open MIND (edited book)MIND group. 2015.This is an edited collection of 39 original papers and as many commentaries and replies. The target papers and replies were written by senior members of the MIND Group, while all commentaries were written by junior group members. All papers and commentaries have undergone a rigorous process of anonymous peer review, during which the junior members of the MIND Group acted as reviewers. The final versions of all the target articles, commentaries and replies have undergone additional editorial revi…Read more
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76This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences.
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72Sommario. Prima che di definire un modello della coscienza e comprendere che cosa sia un fenomeno soggettivo, è necessario sviluppare una teoria della prospettiva in prima persona. Questa teoria deve essere concettualmente con- vincente, empiricamente plausibile e, soprattutto, aperta a nuovi sviluppi. Il quadro di riferimento concettuale deve essere coerente con il progresso scienti- fico. Le sue ipotesi fondamentali devono essere adattabili in modo da permette- re a nuovi risultati sperimental…Read more
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70Der Begriff einer „Bewusstseinskultur“In G. Kaiser (ed.), E-Journal Philosophie der Psychologie, Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-westfalen. 2003.Dies ist kein wissenschaftlicher Text im engeren Sinne. Im Gegenteil: Das erste Ziel dieses Beitrags besteht zuerst darin, auf möglichst kurze und allgemeinverständliche Weise eine neue Problemlage zu skizzieren, die mit zunehmender Geschwindigkeit an Bedeutung gewinnt. Zweitens möchte ich einen vorläufigen Arbeitsbegriff anbieten, den Begriff einer „Bewusstseinskultur“. Dieser neue Begriff soll dazu dienen, eine Reihe von ganz unterschiedlichen theoretischen und praktischen Strategien zusammenz…Read more
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67Faster than ThoughtIn Conscious Experience, Ferdinand Schoningh. 1995.In this speculative paper I would like to show how important the integration of mental content is for a theory of phenomenal consciousness. I will draw the reader's attention to two manifestations of this problem which already play a role in the empirical sciences concerned with consciousness: The binding problem and the superposition problem. In doing so I hope to be able to leave the welltrodden paths of the debate over consciousness. My main concern is to gain a fresh access to the familiar t…Read more
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65Kriterien für eine theorie zur lösung Des Leib-seele-problemsErkenntnis 32 (1). 1990.The article presents a critical survey of the philosophical discussion of the mind-body-problem since the collapse of Rylean behaviourism. The major theories (identity theories, supervenience, emergentist materialism, dualist interactionism and functionalism) are sketched and briefly evaluated with regard to their advantages and disadvantages. The conclusion is that no satisfactory theory about the relation between mental and neurophysiological states exists today, but considerable progress has …Read more
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64Das Ziel dieses Beitrags besteht darin, eine kurze Darstellung der "Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität" (SMT) anzubieten, die sich an naturwissenschaftlich orientierte Leser richtet, die selbst keine Philosophen sind, aber dennoch an philosophischen Theorien des Selbstbewusstseins interessiert sind.
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56Inferences are just folk psychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 670-670. 2004.To speak of “inferences,” “interpretations,” and so forth is just folk psychology. It creates new homunculi, and it is also implausible from a purely phenomenological perspective. Phenomenal volition must be described in the conceptual framework of an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. It is a non sequitur to conclude from dissociability that the functional properties determining phenomenal volition never make a causal contribution.
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50Ich-störungen als pathologische Formen mentaler SelbstmodellierungIn Georg Northoff (ed.), Neuropsychiatrie und Neurophilosophie, Schöningh. 1997.Was genau ist eigentlich eine Ich-Störung? Ich werde auf den folgenden Seiten dafür argumentieren, daß man die Natur dieses Typs von psychiatrischen Störungsbildern besser verstehen kann, indem man einen Blick über die medizinischen Fachgrenzen hinweg in die analytische Philosophie des Geistes [1] und in die Kognitionswissenschaft [2] wirft. Beiden Disziplinen ist gemeinsam, daß mentale Zustände dort häufig einer funktionalen Analyse unterzogen und als Informationsverarbeitungsereignisse beschri…Read more
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37Unconscious integration of multisensory bodily inputs in the peripersonal space shapes bodily self-consciousnessCognition 166 (C): 174-183. 2017.
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34Review (review)Erkenntnis 29 (1): 143-146. 1988.As Flanagan remarks at the outset, many philosophers and researchers in the cognitive and neurosciences today believe that a naturalistic solution to the mind-body problem will eventually be found. Optimistic attitudes of this sort are usually inspired by the remarkable theoretical success so far achieved under the information-processing approach. The information-processing approach rests on a number of ubiquitous background assumptions. The most central of these is that treating human beings an…Read more
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24Reply to Zahavi: The Value of Historical ScholarshipPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.Let me begin by focusing on the long list of agreements between the Dan Zahavi and me. As he is such a careful and scholarly author, there are almost no misunderstandings to get out of the way first. At the beginning of section 2, there is a conflation of different concepts of possibility. If we grant that imaginability is conceivability, if we pass over “practical” possibility as a non-defined term, and grant that by “physically” possible Zahavi very likely means “nomologically” possible, it st…Read more
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23Introduction: Consciousness research at the end of the twentieth centuryIn T. Metzinger (ed.), Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, Mit Press. 2000.conscious content like ``the self in the act of In 1989 the philosopher Colin McGinn asked the knowing'' (see, e.g., chapters 7 and 20 in this following question: ``How can technicolor phe- volume) or high-level phenomenal properties like nomenology arise from soggy gray matter?'' ``coherence'' or ``holism'' (e.g., chapters 8 and 9 (1989: 349). Since then many authors in the ®eld in this volume). But what, precisely, does it mean of consciousness research have quoted this ques- that conscious ex…Read more
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21Open Mind: An Open Access Collection of Research on Mind, Brain, andJournal of Consciousness Studies 22 (7-8): 233-234. 2015.
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20Reply to Himma: Personal Identity and Cartesian IntuitionsPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.In Kenneth Einar Himma’s substantial commentary, there are a number of conceptual misunderstandings I want to get out of the way first. This will allow us to see the core of his contribution much clearer. On page 2, Himma writes about the problem of “explaining how it is that a particular phenomenal self is associated with a set of neurophysiological processes.” This philosophical question is ill posed: no one is identical to a particular phenomenal self. “Phenomenal self” must not be conflated …Read more
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Consciousness |