Silvia Galikova

In everyday life we experience ourselves as living conscious creatures. We feel intuitively that our intentions play an important role in action and behaviour. The aim of my presentation is twofold. Firstly, I intend to point out a profound asymetry between inner experience and a theoretical explanation of the nature of felt inner states. This claim will be supported by experimental research and clinical practise on normal and impaired states of consciousness. Based on novel research findings philosophers tend to emphasize the natural – physical nature of conscious experience. However, third person – reductionist approach has been criticized for not taking „phenomenology seriously“ or neglecting the „irreducibility of the first person story“. The second aim of my presentation is to argue against the claim according to which physicalist approaches consider conscious experience as a nonexistent phenomenon – an illusion. I claim that it is a category mistake to identify that what is illusionary with that what does not exist. In order to unfold misunderstandings in the study of consciousness it is necessary both to outline in what sense conscious experience is and is not an illusion. Untill then - search for a science of consciousness is futile.

The Feeling Brain — The Thinking Soul Recent advances in neuroscience have dramatically improved our understanding of human emotional states. With the help of new technologies and models, scholars are beginning to unravel the "mystery" of emotional life. Confusions in contemporary emotion studies are due to the traditional model of a person as a rational conscious agent. The paper highlights two problematic aspects of this prevailing model: the relation between emotion and reason and the relation between emotion and consciousness. Firstly, it is claimed that the difference between emotions and thoughts does not transcend their mutual interconnectivity. Secondly, conscious content and emotional responses are both products of specialized emotion systems that operate unconsciously. Both claims are supported by experimental findings and clinical practice.

Existential and functional dependence of consciousness on brain activity, on the body within its surroundings and evolutionary perspective are two fundamental theoretical "touchstones" of the paper. Consciousness is characterized as a quality and capacity of a living organism varying in degrees and types through evolution, fylogeny and ontogeny. Conscious creature is aware of its body and self, it represents the "inner" and "outer" worlds in the form of images, thoughts, feelings, beliefs etc. Evidence for both theses is taken from empirical research on brain-consciousness-behaviour lesions, paleoarcheology, comparative anatomy and morfology, embryology etc. Author considers the coevolutionary research strategy, based on mutual cooperation between humanities and science, of great importance in studying and explaining consciousness, Paper argues towards the possibility of an objective systematic theory of consciousness