Transcript Consciousness and Awareness

Self, Consciousness,
Awareness, Qualia, …
 Self
 Consciousness
 Body ownership
 Emotion
P S Churchland: “Self-representation in Nervous Systems”
What is the “Self”?:
– “Distributed across brain structures, coordinated only on an ‘as-needed’
basis, and arranged in a loose and loopy hierarchy”
Auditory Hallucination in Schizophrenia:
– The “voices” appear to be the patients’ own inner speech, but they suffer
deep confusion about self/nonself boundaries.
Evolution of Self-Representational Capacities:
– “Evolution stumbled on solutions for coordinating inner-body signals to
generate survival-appropriate inner regulation.”
Consciousness and Self:
– Consciouseness as a system by which the brain distinguishes inner-world
representations from outer-world representations.
M Botvinick: “Probing the Neural Basis of Body Ownership”
How do we distinguish our bodies, but not other objects, as belonging to
ourselves?:
• Somatoparaphrenia: Deny ownership of own arm or leg
• Rubber-hand illusion: Opposite of Somatoparaphrenia
F Crick & C Koch: “Consciousness and Neuroscience”
NCC (Neural Correlate of Consciousness) and Visual Consciousness:
– “Only some types of specific neurons will express the NCC”
– Frontal Lobe Hypothesis
• The Problem of Meaning: A Major Problem
- “How does the brain know what the firing of a neuron represents?”
O Sacks “The Mind’s eye: What the blind see”
• J Hull: Deep blindness: the world of vision lost
• Z Torey: Constructing a virtual world of vision, more real, more intense
• S Tenberken: Creating an artistic/novelistic world of vision, via synesthesia
• D Shulman: “I still live in a visual world after thirty-five years of blindness. …, I
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see the Braiille notes visually—they are visual images, not tactile.”
A Gordon: “If I move my arms back and forth in front of my eyes, I see them,
even though I have been blind for more than thirty years.”
J Lusseyran: “My screen was always as big as I needed it to be. Because it
was nowhere in space and everywhere at the same time…”
“The world, real or imagined, is a pure illusion, all conjured up inside the head
so is the self.” (Anonymous)