... Geoffrey Underwood (University of Nottingham) Francisco Varela (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique. Paris) Volume 2 Ralph D. Ellis Questioning Consciousness ...

Evolutionary theory makes further predictions about conflict. It predicts sex differences in the proclivity to attack and defend. It further suggests complementary biases in what we expect of the sexes. Finally, it suggests that the forms of human facial expressions of anger and happiness may have coevolved with the regularity of conflict as a means of signaling, bluffing, and defusing attack.

The object of this study is to find a coherent theoretical approach to three problems which appear to interrelate in complex ways: (1) What is the ontological status of consciousness? (2) How can there be 'un conscious,' 'prereflective' or 'self-alienated' consciousness? And (3) Is there a 'self' or 'ego' formed by means of the interrelation of more elementary states of consciousness? The motivation for combining such a diversity of difficult questions is that we often learn more by looking at interrelations (...) of problems than we could by viewing them only in isola tion. The three questions posed here have emerged as especially prob lematic in the context of twentieth century philosophy. 1. The question of the ontological status of consciousness The question 'What is consciousness?' is one of the most perplexing in philosophy-so perplexing that many have been motivated to proceed as though consciousness did not exist. If William James was speaking rhetorically when he said "Consciousness does not exist," 1 many behaviorists of the recent past were not. 2 James meant only to imply that consciousness is not an independently existing soul-substance, along side physical substances. He did not mean that we do not really 'have' consciousness, and he did not provide final resolution for the problem of the causal interrelations between consciousness and the physical realm (e. g. , our bodies). Many recent philosophers and psychologists, however, try to proceed as though these problems did not exist. (shrink)

Any physical explanation of consciousness seems to leave unresolved the ‘explanatory gap': Isn't it conceivable that all the elements in that explanation could occur, with the same information processing outcomes as in a conscious process, but in the absence of consciousness? E.g. any digital computational process could occur in the absence of consciousness. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a biological-process-oriented physiological- phenomenological characterization of consciousness that addresses three ‘paradoxical’ qualities seemingly incompatible with the empirical realm: The dual location of (...) phenomenal properties ‘out there’ yet ‘in here’ in consciousness; the mysterious ‘thickness’ of the specious present; the feeling of ‘free agency', that we can voluntarily direct our actions, including the act of conscious attention, while at the same time attention and the emotions that direct it seem responsive to physiological substrates with physical causes. These paradoxes are then resolved by relating three elements of consciousness: organismically interested anticipation; sensory and proprioceptive imagery generated by the interested anticipation rather than by sensory input; resonating of these activities with activity stimulated by sensory data, where the interested anticipation precedes the processing of the input. Each of these elements is bridged to physiological processes such that, if they occur in a certain relation to each other, we can understand why they would inevitably be accompanied by the corresponding elements of conscious experience. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Nicholas Humphrey argues persuasively that consciousness results from active and efferent rather than passive and afferent functions. These arguments contribute to the mounting recent evidence that consciousness is inseparable from the motivated action planning of creatures that in some sense are organismic and agent-like rather than passively mechanical and reactive in the way that digital computers are. Newton calls this new approach the ‘action theory of understanding'; Varela et al. dubbed it the ‘enactive’ view of consciousness. It was (...) endorsed in passing by the early Dennett , although he never followed up on it in his later work. According to Dennett, ‘No afferent can be said to have a significance ‘A’ until it is ‘taken’ to have the significance ‘A’ by the efferent side of the brain’ . Luria also stressed the neurophysiology of efferent processes as correlated with consciousness . Further elaborations of the enactive approach are defended by Ellis , Newton , Ellis and Newton , Watt , Thelen and Smith , Jarvilehto and Gendlin . According to this view, conscious information processing can arise only as the self-regulated action of a self-organizing process that confronts the world as a system of action affordances. While information can be passively absorbed in the form of afferent input, only efferent nervous activity in the interest of a living organism's homeostatic balance can create consciousness of any information, whether perceptual, imagistic, emotional or intellectual. (shrink)

Introduction: Searching for the covert agent of consciousness -- The devil's pact (or, why the hard problem is now so hard) -- Action at the macro level : an agent-based theory of intentionality -- Action imagery and representation of the external world -- Do we need an emergency metaphysician? : action versus reaction at the micro level -- Herding neurons : the causal structure of self-organizing systems -- The paradoxes of phenomenal consciousness -- The self-organizing imagination : addressing the mind-body (...) problem -- Introspection and private access -- Action imagery and the role of efference -- Connecting physiology with phenomenology. (shrink)

Combines phenomenology with the "enactivist" approach to consciousness theory and recent emotion research to explore the way self-motivated action plans shape selective attention, exploration, and ultimately the mind's interpretation of reality - in philosophy, psychology, cultural awareness, and our personal lives.

The enactivist account of consciousness posits that motivated activation of sensorimotor action imagery anticipates possible action affordances of environmental situations, resulting in representation of the environment with a conscious “feel” associated with the valences motivating the anticipations. This approach makes the mind–body problem and the problem of mental causation easier to resolve, and offers promise for understanding how consciousness results from natural processes. Given a process-oriented understanding of the way many systems in non-conscious nature are “proto-motivated” toward realizing unactualized possibilities, (...) and can use symbolic objects to “proto-represent” unactualized possibilities, it becomes more clear how self-organizing systems can subserve subjective consciousness. If a system executes, in a unified way, both a proto-desire and a proto-representation of the same unactualized possibility — in order to provide a kind of causal power for the unactualized possibility — then the result is the familiar experience of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Ellis (philosophy, Claark Atlanta U.) describes a number of different kindsf abnormalities that result from the detrimental effects of narcissism onhe ability to love. Developing the notion of a culture of narcissism firstroposed by Christopher Lasch, he presents a theory of the role played byove in human attempts to grapple with ontologica.

Many scholars have sought to understand renaissance culture in terms of self-fashioning, a concept that sees the sixteenth-century preoccupation with imitation and performance as symptoms of a desire to conform outwardly to social expectations. Historians of Tudor England and biographers of Thomas More, influenced by this concept, have despaired of discovering the “true” Thomas More behind a bewildering array of self-fashioned masks that More “wore” as both an author and public figure. Recent scholarship seeks to show the coherence of More's (...) character, despite the fact that his life and writings do not fit neatly into contemporary scholarly categories. Understanding More as a “Christian Humanist” and focusing on More's intervention in a controversy between his friends Erasmus and Dorp, this study positions More as engaging in typological emulation, whereby in imitating the correspondence of Jerome and Augustine, he seeks to embody more perfectly the ideal of the Christian orator. (shrink)

Art perception offers action affordances for the self-generated movement of the eyes, the mind, and the emotions; thus some scenes are ’easy to look at', and evoke different kinds of moods depending on what kind of affordances they present for the eyes, the brain, and the action schemas that further the dynamical self-organizing patterns of activity toward which the organism tends, as reflected in its ongoing emotional life. Art can do this only because perception is active rather than passive, and (...) begins with efferent activity in emotional brain areas (e.g. hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate) which then motivates afferent processing (parietal imaging activity which finally, after a 1/3-second motivational/selective process is complete, resonates with occipital patterns, resulting in perceptual consciousness). The limbic system ’categories’ that motivate the ’looking-for’ of selective attention are categories of utility, to be understood in terms of emotional affordances and whole-organism affective meanings. Art plays with this looking-for, using it to make us engage in different afforded actions that relate to different limbic (emotional) categories. The drawings of children and of the artistically untutored reveal this structure when we fail to ’draw what we see’, drawing instead what we conceptualize that we ought to be seeing. Art teaches us to get beyond this almost complete dominance of habitual categories, and to see things more freshly -- both in the perceptual and in the emotive sphere. Rather than reinforcing our preconceptions, it forces us to see how they affect our view of reality. -/- Because neither perceptions nor emotional responses are really passive ’responses’ at all, art does not cause us to feel a certain way. Instead, we ’use’ art for the purpose of symbolizing our emotions. Our most important feelings are not directly ’about’ the perceptual objects that trigger them. The object in conscious attention during the feeling of an emotion is normally not the intentional object of the emotion, i.e., it is not the object in relation to which our actions could serve the purpose of the emotion. Emotions are not even triggered by simple ’stimuli’, but rather by the meaning for us of a stimulus in a total context determined by ongoing and dynamical organismic purposes. Emotions arise from the total life process, which is a dynamical system -- not as an isolated chemical event or a causal result of a simple stimulus. For this reason, emotions call not just for satiation or pleasure, but for explication; this is why art is different from entertainment or pretty decoration. Visual art affords not only a meaningful, self-directed dance of the eyes, but also a meaningful dance of this emotional explicating process. (shrink)

"First Published in 1999, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

Most versions of the knowledge argument say that, since scientists observing my brain wouldn't know what my consciousness "is like," consciousness isn't describable as a physical process. Although this argument unwarrantedly equates the physical with the empirically observable, we can conclude, not that consciousness is nonphysical but that consciousness isn't identical with anything empirically observable. But what kind of mind&endash;body relation would render possible this empirical inaccessibility of consciousness? Even if multiple realizability may allow a distinction between consciousness and its (...) physical substrata, why does this distinction make consciousness empirically unobservable? The reason must be that the emotions motivating attention direction, partly constitutive of phenomenal states, are executed, not undergone by self-organizing processes actively appropriating and replacing needed physical substrata; we feel motivations by generating them. But all consciousness is motivated; visual cortex activation is unconscious of red unless the emotional limbic system and anterior cingulate motivatedly "look for" red. Experiencing entails executing motivations. Experimenters do know what subjects' brain events "are like" ---; but from the standpoint of the experimenter's motivational processes. (shrink)

Pushing back against the potential trivialization of moral psychology that would reduce it to emotional preferences, this book takes an enactivist, self-organizational, and hermeneutic approach to internal conflict between a basic exploratory drive motivating the search for actual truth, and opposing incentives to confabulate in the interest of conformity, authoritarianism, and cognitive dissonance, which often can lead to harmful worldviews. The result is a new possibility that ethical beliefs can have truth value and are not merely a result of ephemeral (...) altruistic or cooperative feelings. It will interest moral and political psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and all who are concerned with inner emotional conflicts driving ethical thinking beyond mere emotivism, and toward moral realism, albeit a fallibilist one requiring continual rethinking and self-reflection. It combines 'basic emotion' theories with hermeneutic depth psychology. The result is a realist approach to moral thinking emphasizing coherence rather than foundationalist theory of knowledge. (shrink)

What motivates the voluntary suffering of training for a long-distance run – or any other difficult athletic skill? Long-term pleasure cannot adequately explain this seemingly masochistic activity. On the contrary, I argue that pleasure, or “reinforcement,” is not the only ultimate motivator of behavior. Each of the emotion systems defines its own intrinsic values, including an innate “play” system and an innate “exploratory drive” that is included in what neuropsychologist Jaak Panksepp calls the “SEEKING system” of the emotional brain. Panksepp’s (...) description of the conscious dimension of SEEKING is remarkably similar to Otto Rank’s descriptions of his “love of life” dimension of motivation, which actually conflicts with the pleasure principle. The desire for pleasure is a desire to reduce consummatory drives, which means reducing the energy level of our bodily systems. Complete reduction would be death. If there were no competing motivation in the other direction, there would be nothing to keep us alive. The SEEKING system is what does that. It motivates a higher energy level. In the case of athletic training, we do not have to “force ourselves” to this higher energy level. The SEEKING system is an innate natural drive. If we were to deliberately try to just sit on a couch indefinitely, at some point we would fail. (shrink)

Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content.

Dynamical systems promise to elucidate a notion of top–down causation without violating the causal closure of physical events. This approach is particularly useful for the problem of mental causation. Since dynamical systems seek out, appropriate, and replace physical substrata needed to continue their structural pattern, the system is autonomous with respect to its components, yet the components constitute closed causal chains. But how can systems have causal power over their substrates, if each component is sufficiently caused by other components? Suppose (...) every causal relation requires background conditions, without which it is insufficient. The dynamical system is structured with a tendency to change background conditions for causal relations anytime needed substrates for the pattern's maintenance are missing; under the changed background conditions, alternative causal relations become sufficient to maintain the pattern. The system controls the background conditions under which one or another causal relation can subserve the system's overall pattern, while the components remain causally closed under their given background conditions. (shrink)

Foundations of Civic Engagement is a comprehensive survey and reassessment of the entire field of social and political philosophy. Suitable for use as a primary text for courses on political thought, this book explores the basic arguments of the most important historical and contemporary figures—including Ancient Greek, modern and contemporary theories of communitarianism, social contract, feminism, postmodernsim, Marxism, and theories of communicative actions—and offers a thematic critique and integration of these philosophies.

In addressing the shortcomings of computationalism, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon with optional access to unconscious computations does not imply that unconscious computations, in the limited domain where they do occur (e.g., occipital transformations of visual data), cannot be reformulated in a way consistent with a self-organizational view.

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Integrating the Physiological and Phenomenological Dimensions of Affect and Motivation Ralph D. Ellis Clark Atlanta University A neglected but ...

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploring the Depth of Dream Experience: The Enactive Framework and Methods for Neurophenomenological Research” by Elizaveta Solomonova & Xin Wei Sha. Upshot: A neurophenomenological approach to the enactive account of consciousness in general is supported by an account of how the brain functions in creating imagery of non-present objects and situations. Three types of non-sensory imagery are needed to ground our consciousness of sensory imagery: proprioceptive imagery, motor imagery, and what Eugene Gendlin calls the (...) “felt sense” of a situation. Dreams show clearly how we image situations without sensory input, a process that is clearly enactive rather than reactive. This enactive account of imagery then supports Gendlin’s method of interpreting dreams by comparing their “felt sense” to the felt sense of waking situations. (shrink)