The Uncanny Valley as Fringe Experience. 2015. Interaction Studies 16:2, pp. 193-199.
The uncanny is one of the most peculiar experiences for which we have a name. It is a striking example of how complex our phenomenology can be, and at the same time how the investigation of our conscious states can go far beyond introspection. MacDorman and Entezari (2015) have shown that the uncanny is amenable to experimental techniques sensitive enough to isolate a number of individual differences. And yet...
Meaning, God, Volition, and Art: How Rightness and the Fringe Bring it All Together. 2014. Journal of Consciousness Studies 21:3–4, pp. 154–176.
This paper investigates how global coherence is represented in consciousness. It summarizes various lines of research that I have developed over the last twenty years, employing a method that intersects phenomenological with bio-functional analysis. The phenomenological analysis derives from William James’s treatment of the fringe...
Representation, Rightness and the Fringe. 2008. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15:9, pp. 75–82.
One of Awret’s epigraphs is by the great Japanese poet Issa; it reminds me of another of Issa’s haiku which I will use here as my own epigraph:
The children imitating the cormorants
Are more wonderful
Than the real cormorants.
Sometimes a representation has more aesthetic power than the thing it represents. Sleek, preening, snake-necked cormorants can elicit a feeling of delight all by themselves. But in this case, when the cormorants are imitated by a children’s dance, the aesthetic zap is intensified. Flowers are intrinsically beautiful, and yet when transformed via oil paint and canvas by Monet or Van Gogh, many people get a more intense aesthetic feeling from the representation than they get from seeing real flowers at Giveny or Arles...
Cognition, Fringe Consciousness, and the Legacy of William James. 2007. In Velmans, M., Schneider, S. (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (pp. 673–685). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
In the West, from the time of the Greeks until the mid-seventeenth century, virtually all human cognitive activity was presumed to be conscious. This view shifted during the Enlightenment as various philosopher-scientists began to see that cognition rested on nonconscious processes. Kant gave the most influential, but highly abstract, expression of this insight, and it was soon reinterpreted in biological terms by Schopenhauer. By the 1870s, Helmholtz had achieved a fully modern view of human cognition: It is a product of the nervous system; only a small part of neural activity is involved with consciousness, and nonconscious neural processes alone are capable of executing what in today's terms we would call complex information processing.
This new understanding of cognition - as an interplay of conscious and nonconscious
domains - spawned a massive research program...
Volition and Property Dualism. 2003. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10:12, pp. 29–34.
My overall aim here is to intersect two issues central to Max Velmans’ (2002) wide-ranging paper. The first concerns one of the most vexing problems in consciousness research — how best to approach the terms ‘mental’ and ‘physical’. The second looks at the phenomenology of volition, and the degree to which information presumably necessary for making voluntary conscious decisions is, or is not, present in consciousness...
The Conscious "Fringe": Bringing William James Up to Date. 2003. In Baars, B.J., Banks W.P., Newman J.B. (Eds.), Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness (pp. 741–759). MIT Press.
To get a sense of fringe experience, we only need to repeat an experiment most of us carried out when we were seven or eight years old: saying the same word over and over again rapidly. After 10 or 20 repetitions, something in the experience of the word definitely begins to change. What were unobtrusive overtones of felt meaning begin to disappear, becoming evident in their absence. In these cases we typically say that the repeated word has become a "mere sound" and has "lost its meaning." Even at the level of folk psychology we naturally distinguish a sensor and nonsensory component in experience...
Sensation's Ghost. 2001. Psyche 7:18.
Non-sensory experiences represent almost all context information in consciousness. They condition most aspects of conscious cognition including voluntary retrieval, perception, monitoring, problem solving, emotion, evaluation, meaning recognition. Many peculiar aspects of non-sensory qualia (e.g., they resist being 'grasped' by an act of attention) are explained as adaptations shaped by the cognitive functions they serve. The most important nonsensory experience is coherence or "rightness." Rightness represents degrees of context fit among contents in consciousness, and between conscious and non-conscious processes. Rightness (not familiarity) is the feeling-of-knowing in implicit cognition. The experience of rightness suggests that neural mechanisms "compute" signals indicating the global dynamics of network integration...
What Feeling is the "Feeling of Knowing?" 2000. Consciousness and Cognition 9(4), pp. 538–544. [Commentary on Brown, S.R. (2000). Tip-of-the-tongue phenomena: An introductory phenomenological analysis. Consciousness and Cognition, 9(4), 516–537.]
Having a word on the tip of our tongue is a mundane and slightly annoying experience. And yet, as Brown’s article helps us see, the theoretical implications of a Tip of the Tongue (TOT) experience range very widely. The study of TOTs may also turn out to be useful for larger methodological reasons. Here, too, Brown recognizes that the investigation of TOTs offers an especially good example of convergent cognitive analysis, a way to combine phenomenology (e.g., James’s treatment of the fringe) with more objective methods of scientific investigation such as experimental psychology and computer modeling. For what it is worth, I am in complete agreement with Brown’s general approach to the TOT experience. And we also agree on various specific points, though in some cases Brown does not see this...
It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing. 1999. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:6–7, pp. 56–58. [Commentary on Ramachandran, V.S., & Hirstein, W. (1999). The Science of Art. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:6–7, pp. 15–51.]
In ‘The Science of Art’ Ramachandran and Hirstein (hereafter R&H) have written a vigorous, thought provoking paper. It raises many issues, but in the interest of brevity, I can only consider a few of them here.
Why is art—or, more broadly speaking, aesthetic experience—important for the study of consciousness? Works of art are usually perceptual objects and they usually evoke emotions. But most of our consciously experienced emotions and perceptual capacities have no unique relationship to art. What art does—when it succeeds—is to intensify or deepen the contents of emotional, perceptual and cognitive experiences that otherwise occur in many non-aesthetic contexts...This analysis also provides a new argument for the efficacy of conscious volition, and a general view of consciousness as a biological, information-bearing medium.
The Fringe: A Case Study in Explanatory Phenomenology. 1999. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:2–3, pp. 249–252. [Commentary on Varela, F. & Shear, J. (1999). First-person methodologies: What, Why, How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:2–3, pp. 1–14.]
William James’ greatest achievement is, arguably, his analysis of the fringe—or, as he sometimes called it, transitive experience. In trying to understand this vague, elusive, often peripheral aspect of consciousness, James broke new ground. But in so doing he also began to lay down the first stratum of a radically new methodology, one that intersects first- and third-person findings in such a way that each is able to interrogate the other, and so further our understanding of both...
Against Functionalism: Consciousness as an Information-Bearing Medium. 1998. In Hameroff, S.R., Kaszniak, A.W., Scott, A.C. (Eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates (pp. 135–142). MIT Press.
In general, the scientific analysis of a biological information-bearing medium (e.g., DNA, neurons, the fluid in the cochlea) aims to answer two related but different questions: (1) What information does the medium bear? (2) In what specific way does the medium bear its information? The "information" in the first question can be realized without loss in a great many other information-bearing media, whether the media are natural or man-made. But this freedom of instantiation is quite beside the point for the second question, which asks about the specific characteristics of a given medium that allow it to bear information in a particular way...
Empirical Status of Block's Phenomenal/Access Distinction. 1997. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20:1, pp. 153–154. [Commentary on Block, N. (1995). On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness. Brain and Behavioral Science 18(2), pp. 227–287.]
P/A (Block’s phenomenal/access) confounds a logical distinction with an empirical claim. Success of P/A in its logical role has almost no bearing on its plausibility as an empirical thesis (i.e., that two kinds of consciousness exist). The advantage of P/A over a single-consciousness assumption is unclear, but one of Block’s analogies for P (liquid in a hydraulic computer) may be used to clarify the notion of consciousness as cognitive “hardware.”
The Dead Hand: Commentary on Baars on Contrastive Analysis. 1995. Psyche 1:14. [Commentary on Baars, B. (1995). A Thoroughly Empirical Approach to Consciousness. Psyche 1:14.]
Behaviorism still threatens consciousness research. On the surface, Baars' "contrastive analysis" may look as if it reduces first-person consciousness to a third-person construct. But once its tacit behaviorism is isolated and overcome, contrastive analysis turns out to give empirical support to the primacy of the first-person stance for the scientific investigation of consciousness.
Language and Experience in the Cognitive Study of Mysticism – Commentary on Forman. 1994. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1:2, pp. 250-252. [Commentary on Forman, R. (1994). "On Capusles and Carts": Mysticism, Language, and the Via Negativa. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1:2, pp. 38–49.]
Forman's theory outlined in 'Mysticism, language and the via negativa' reacts against an earlier account of mysticism which he calls 'constructivism.' Constructivism grew from a book of collected papers, Mysticism and philosophical analysis (1978), contributed to and edited by Steven Katz. According to Forman, 'the constructivist approach is, roughly, that of the historian [of ideas]' (p. 39). But this characterization is much too generous.
Taking Phenomenology Seriously: The "Fringe" and Its Implications for Cognitive Research. 1993. Consciousness and Cognition 2, pp. 89–108.
Evidence and theory ranging from traditional philosophy to contemporary cognitive research support the hypothesis that consciousness has a two-part structure: a focused region of articulated experience surrounded by a field of relatively unarticulated, vague experience. William James developed an especially useful phenomenological analysis of this "fringe" of consciousness, but its relation to, and potential value for, the study of cognition has not been explored. I propose strengthening James' work on the fringe with a functional analysis: fringe experiences (1) work to radically condense context information in consciousness; (2) are vague because a more explicit representation of context information would overwhelm consciousness' limited articulation (processing) capacity; (3) help mediate retrieval functions in consciousness; and (4) contain a subset of monitoring and control experiences that cannot be elaborated in focal attention and are "ineffable." In general, the phenomenology of the fringe is a consequence of its cognitive functions, constrained by consciousness' limited articulation capacity. Crucial to monitoring and control is the feeling of "rightness." Rightness functions as a summary index of cognitive integration, representing, in the fringe, the degree of positive fit between a given conscious content and its parallel, unconsciously encoded context. Rightness appears analogous to the connectionist metric of global network integration, known variously as goodness-of-fit, harmony, or minimum energy.
Some Philisophical and Empirical Implications of the Fringe. 1993. Consciousness and Cognition 2, pp. 142–154. [Reply to commentaries on Mangan, B. 1993. Dennett, Consciousness, and the Sorrows of Functionalism. Consciousness and Cognition 2, pp. 1–17.]
I will respond to the commentaries in the order I received them. Allison Gopnik's "psychopsychology" is an interesting coinage. Probably many new terms will be needed as the scientific study of consciousness matures...
Dennett, Consciousness, and the Sorrows of Functionalism. 1993. Consciousness and Cognition 2, pp. 1–17.
Little is gained, and much lost, by casting an empirical theory of consciousness in a "functionalist" philosophical mold. Consciousness Explained is an instructive failure. It resurrects various behaviorist dogmas: it denies consciousness any distinct cognitive ontology; it obliquely adopts many long-standing research positions relating parallel and sequential processing to consciousness, yet denies the core assumption which produced this research; it takes parallel processing ("Multiple Drafts") to be incompatible with educated common-sense views of consciousness (the "Cartesian Theater"), while in fact parallel processing is compatible with some Cartesian Theater views. Contrary to Dennett, the Cartesian Theater does not necessarily imply that contents must fully "arrive" in consciousness at a single, specifiable instant: criticism of the Cartesian Theater based on this attribution is thus without force. And if consciousness is a distinct information-bearing medium, functionalist attempts to "explain" consciousness are inherently inadequate.
Epi-arguments for Epiphenomenalism. 1991. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14:4, pp. 689–690. [Commentary on Velmans, M. (1991). Is Human Information Processing Conscious? Behavioral and Brain Science 14:4, pp. 651–669.]
Velmans demonstrates a fine grasp of current experimental research as it bears on consciousness. It is crucial to get as clear as possible about what cognitive activities are conscious, what are not conscious, and what relation obtains between conscious and nonconscious domains. One virtue of Velmans's target article is that it brings these issues to the fore. But Velmans thinks his specific analysis supports epiphenomenalism (sect 9.3), and this is a problematic conclusion. Among other difficulties, it rests on a logical misunderstanding and a substantial overgeneralization of the evidence.
With Stephen Palmer. New Science for Old. 1989. Behavioral and Brain Science 12:3, pp. 480–482. [Commentary on Thagard, P. (1989). Explanatory Coherence. Behavioral and Brain Science 12:3, pp. 435–502.]
Thagard's target article embodies a paradox. On the one hand, his theoretical view of the nature of science is progressive: He is at home with Kuhn, Lakatos, Quine, and Duhem, with holistic explanation and Gestalt shifts. His examples of scientific thinking are of the paradigm type, with classic examples drawn from scientific revolutions rather than from the more prosaic realms of "normal science." And of course the model into which Thagard puts his analysis of coherent explanation incorporates one of the newest fields in cognitive theory and computer simulation: connectionism.
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On the other hand, the actual structure of Thagard's simulation looks much closer to Kant...