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First-order embodiment, second-order embodiment, third-order embodimentIn Lawrence Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, Routledge. 2014.
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348The Elephant and the Blind is a book about why we need a new culture of consciousness, and how to get it. A culture of consciousness (or Bewusstseinskultur) is a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.
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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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Empirical perspectives from the self-model theory of subjectivity: a brief summary with examplesIn Rahul Banerjee & Bikas K. Chakrabarti (eds.), Models of brain and mind: physical, computational, and psychological approaches, Elsevier. 2008.
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723Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic PhenomenologyJournal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 1 (8): 1-24. 2021.
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163Minimal 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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583Radical disruptions of self-consciousnessPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (I): 1-13. 2020.This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.
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8Zeitfenster im Gehirn und die Einheit des Bewußtseins. Der Zusammenhang zwischen phänomenalem Bewußtsein und subsymbolischer InformationsverarbeitungIn Hans Lenk & Hans Poser (eds.), Neue Realitäten. Herausforderung der Philosophie: Xvi. Deutscher Kongreß Für Philosophie Berlin 20.–24. September 1993, De Gruyter. pp. 246-260. 1995.
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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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2Open MIND Philosophy and the Mind Sciences in the 21st Century. Volume 2, (edited book)MIT Press. 2016.
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1322Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its ba- sic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the t…Read more
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267Conscious Experience (edited book)Ferdinand Schoningh. 1995.The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 the…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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963Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-TechnologyFrontiers in Robotics and AI 3 1-23. 2016.The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting t…Read more
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3450Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive ProcessingPhilosophy and Predictive Processing. 2017.The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. The features describe…Read more
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3321The Problem of Mental ActionPhilosophy and Predicitive Processing. 2017.In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and de…Read more
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275Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (edited book)MIT Press. 2003." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of...
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1985Reply to Gallagher: Different conceptions of embodimentPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.Gallagher is right in pointing out that scientific realism is an implicit background assumption of BNO, and that I did not give an independent argument for it. He is also right in saying that science does not _demonstrate_ the existence of certain entities, but that it assumes those entities in a process of explanation and theory formation. However, it is not true that science, as Gallagher writes (p.2), “simply” assumes the reality of certain things: such assumptions are embedded in the context…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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3445Out-of-body experiences as the origin of the concept of a 'soul 'Mind and Matter 3 (1): 57-84. 2005.Contemporary philosophical and scienti .c discussions of mind developed from a 'proto-concept of mind ',a mythical,tradition- alistic,animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many di .erent cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a 'soul '.It will be argued that this notion originates in accurate and truthful .rst-person reports about the experiential content of a special neurophenomenological state-cl…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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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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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.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Consciousness |