Qualia as social effects of minds

Minds as social institutions

I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptanc...

Minds, Machines and Qualia: A Theory of Consciousness

Minds, Machines and Qualia: A Theory of Consciousness

Interactive brains, social minds.

To reveal the neural and behavioral dynamics of social interaction, single-person studies are increasingly complemented by research designs that simultaneously assess two or more interacting individuals. In this article, we review studies on neural mechanisms and markers of social interactions that use multi-person functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrophysiological recordings. We pr...

Individual Minds as Groups, Group Minds as Individuals

Lexical-Conceptual Relations as Qualia Role Encoders

In this paper we show how wordnets can be used for building computational lexica that support generative processes accounting for phenomena such as the creation of meaning in context. We propose the integration of qualia information in wordnets through the association of lexical-conceptual relations to qualia roles, in what is a simple and low cost procedure, as it makes use of information alre...