PARTURITION WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS THEREOF.

Working memory without consciousness

Working memory allows individuals to maintain information in the focus of the mind’s eye in the service of goal-directed behavior. Current psychological theories (for example, Baddeley’s influential model of working memory) [1], computational models [2] and neurobiological accounts of working memory are based on the assumption that working memory operates on consciously represented information....

An example of access-consciousness without phenomenal consciousness?

of the original article: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different “consciousnesses.” Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often part...

No credible consciousness without critical thinking.

In their essay, ‘The ubiquity of conscious­ ness’, Trewavas and Baluska ask “on what experimental evidence, other than supposition, do we reject consciousness in other organisms?” [1]. The authors use some examples of adaptive behavioural responses of animals and plants to argue that con­ sciousness is everywhere. Their ambition to approach the question of consciousness without bias is brave, b...

The Free Exercise Thereof

From brain to mind to consciousness – without hard problems

The need and possible sources of the phenomenology of consciousness are stressed. Naturalistic solution to the problem of consciousness is in agreement with the growing number of experimental facts. Mind and brain states are two ways of looking at the same reality. Conscious experience is an experience, i.e. a particular relaxation of the mind/body system. Plausible connection of mental and bra...