_Stream of Consciousness_ is about the phenomenology of conscious experience. Barry Dainton shows us that stream of consciousness is not a mosaic of discrete fragments of experience, but rather an interconnected flowing whole. Through a deep probing into the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time consciousness, Dainton offers a truly original understanding of the nature of consciousness.

This article examines Olivier Rolin's use of stream of consciousness narration in L'invention du monde (1993). It draws upon philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio to propose that the novel—with its obsessions for information, technology, and space—depicts a crossroads of subjectivity. At that crossroads, natural and computational connotations of "stream" collide, fueling the novel's central crisis. The misadventures of Rolin's postmodern, post-industrial, satellite-inspired Phileas Fogg reveal a central conundrum of accelerated globalization: namely, that the informational and technological (...) mastery of our world comes at the price of sacrificing the ability to meaningfully position oneself within it. (shrink)

That our ordinary everyday experience exhibits both unity and continuity is uncontroversial, and on the face of it utterly unmysterious. At any moment we have some conscious awareness of both the world about us, as revealed through our perceptual experiences, and our own inner states – our bodily sensations, thoughts, mental images and so on. Since once wakened we tend to stay awake for several hours, tracing out continuous routes through whatever environment we happen to find ourselves in, it is (...) hardly surprising that our experience itself is continuous rather than discontinuous. (shrink)

Williamson’s “anti-luminosity” argument aims to establish that there are no significant luminous conditions. “Far from forming a cognitive home”, luminous conditions are mere “curiosities”. Even supposing Williamson’s argument succeeds in showing that there are no significant luminous states his conclusion has not thereby been established. When it comes to determining what is luminous, mental events and processes are among the best candidates. It is events and processes, after all, which constitute the stream of consciousness. Judgment, for instance, is (...) plausibly self-conscious. If I am judging then plausibly I must know that I am. Similarly, deliberation is plausibly self-conscious. To be deliberating about some matter I plausibly must know that I am. That one is judging and that one is deliberating are thus plausibly luminous conditions. Furthermore, I argue, Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument fails to speak against this suggestion. This reveals that Williamson’s argument is more limited in scope than has been thought—something likely missed due to a misplaced focus on mental states in the luminosity debate as well as in epistemology and the philosophy of mind more generally. For all Williamson shows, there may be luminous events and processes of a sort apt to constitute a cognitive home. I conclude by considering how the anti-luminosity argument might be reinstated in the judgment case and argue that the natural way to do so fails. (shrink)

The basic components of James’s stream of consciousness are considered concretely and in a way that tends to be relatively neutral from a theoretical perspective. My ultimate goal is a general description of the states of consciousness, but I try here to be more “observational” than “theoretical” about them. Giving attention to James’s reports of his personal firsthand evidence, I proceed as though I were conversing with this most phenomenological and radically empirical of psychological authors. I disagree (...) with James on some points but, also, I find many of his claims acceptable and base my own view on a thesis fundamental to his perspective: A stream of consciousness consists of a succession, one at a time, of unitary states and all of the other mental occurrences that are conscious are features of such states. This is an effort to see more clearly together with James, not an exercise of correcting errors in how he treated of our topic. (shrink)

Locke defined a person as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places”. To many who have been excited by the same thought as Locke, continuity of consciousness has seemed to be an integral part of what we mean by a person. The intuitive appeal of the idea that to secure the continuing identity of a person one experience must flow into the next (...) experience in some ‘stream of consciousoness” is evidenced by the number of attempts in the so-called constructionalist tradition to explain continuity of consciousness in terms of memory, and then build or reconstruct the idea of a person with these materials. The philosophical difficulty of the idea is plain from the failure of these attempts. Hindsight suggests this was as inevitable as the failure of the attempt to make bricks from straw alone—and as a failure just as uninteresting. Which is not to deny that the memory theorist might get from it a sense that some of the difficulties in his programme have arisen from his leaving flesh and bones, the stuff of persons, out of his construction. (shrink)

This short communication explores the idea of “stream of consciousness” and considers some of the ways in which scientific writing relies – even or perhaps especially insofar as it does not signal this fact – on the resources of literary language and literary thinking. Particular attention is given to notions of literal and figurative or metaphorical language, including “hydrological” and “ontic” metaphor. A crucial figure is simile (the “like”), discussed here in relation to the Thomas Nagel’s “What is (...) it Like to Be a Bat?”, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt’s Consciousness Demystified, and Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Neuroethics cannot restrict itself to the domain of technology and the human. The deconstruction of anthropocentrism, already underway in literary modernism, calls for responsibility in relation to non-human as well as human life-forms. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway provides rich and multifarious resources for exploring these issues. Woolf’s novel is considered as a kind of literary water music, in which sense and feeling is not limited to the human, and distinctions between consciousness and the environment are susceptible to dissolution. Woolf’s work is concerned with a conception of stream of consciousness as telepathic fluidity, as “merging minds” but without restitution of the individual or collective. (shrink)

Didier Debaise The Mechanisms of Thought: A Jamesian Point of View on Resnais _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 10, April 2000.

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic (...) conception of attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

One of the aspects of consciousness deserving of study is what might be called its subjective unity - the way in which, though conscious experience moves from object to object, and can be said to have distinct ‘states', it nevertheless in some sense apparently forms a singular flux divided only by periods of unconsciousness. The work of William James provides a valuable, and rather unique, source of analysis of this feature of consciousness; however, in my opinion, this component (...) of James’ theory of the mind has so far gone under-emphasized in the scholarly literature. This paper undertakes some philosophical geography, trying to draw out and elucidate some of the relevant ideas from James’ corpus, and also subjects those ideas to some analysis to try and assist in judgements of their current importance. (shrink)

Throughout history there have been people who say it is all illusion. I think they may be right. But if they are right what could this mean? If you just say "It's all an illusion" this gets you nowhere - except that a whole lot of other questions appear. Why should we all be victims of an illusion, instead of seeing things the way they really are? What sort of illusion is it anyway? Why is it like that and not (...) some other way? Is it possible to see through the illusion? And if so what happens next. (shrink)

Starting from the separation between rational and irrational motivation, Husserl elaborates a formal ethics which justifies the universal validity of its principles on the logical feature of proposition. On the other hand, since the irrationality of motivation represents the associative stream of consciousness constituting the passive background of rational life of subject, the formal aspect of Husserlian ethics seems to be well rooted in the materiality and con-creteness of existen...

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 10, 2015, on page SR9 of the New York edition of The New York Times with the headline : “Rhythms of the Brain”. It is also online here. IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river' or a ‘stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let's (...) call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” - Biologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Process philosophy has emerged as an approach to consciousness within contemporary science although re-consideration of Whitehead and James clearly contrasts with twentieth century materialism. In spite of controversy a number of researchers have described the concept of quantum coherence within living organisms that provides the basis of new process oriented theories. Among these researchers are Penrose and Hameroff who suggest that quantum gravity yields coherent processes fundamental to the idea of consciousness. Pribram emphasizes holographic processes in the brain (...) that give rise to quantum brain dynamics. Bohm also recognizes a central role of holographic processes in physics. The work of these researchers and the convergence with earlier work in metaphysics are described. (shrink)

Anders, Rudi Sometimes it is nice to do something totally unconnected to the usual bustle of life, such as a walk in the park. This time I visit a German Lutheran church in Melbourne; I have never entered it before. The exterior and interior consistently retain the traditional design. The bluestone gives it a sense of permanence - timelessness. I rarely like modern churches; mixing modern and traditional never works for me. This church is not large and has an intimate (...) feel to it. The people are all smiles. I like people, regardless of their beliefs. Family groups look like they feel at home, and visitors like me are made welcome. I sit and admire the skill of the craftsmen who attended to every detail in the church. They didn't have the modern machines we take for granted. (shrink)

Pessoa et al.'s target article shows that although filling-in of various kinds does appear to occur in the brain, it is not required in order to furnish a “bridge locus” where neural events are “isomorphic” to the features of visual consciousness. Some recently uncovered completion phenomena may well play a crucial role in the elaboration of normal visual experience, but others occur too slowly to contribute to normal visual content.

This paper explores the relation of thought and the stream of consciousness in the light of an ontological argument raised against cognitive phenomenology views. I argue that the ontological argument relies on a notion of ‘processive character’ that does not stand up to scrutiny and therefore it is insufficient for the argument to go through. I then analyse two more views on what ‘processive character’ means and argue that the process-part account best captures the intuition behind the argument. (...) Following this view, I reconstruct the ontological argument and argue that it succeeds in establishing that some mental episodes like judging, understanding and occurrent states of thought do not enter into the stream but fails to exclude episodes like entertaining. Contrary to what it might seem, this conclusion fits well with cognitive phenomenology views, given that, as I show, there is a way for non-processive mental episodes to be fundamentally related to processive ones, such that they cannot be excl.. (shrink)