Consciousness operationalized, a debate realigned.

Governance in Health – The Need for Exchange and Evidence; Comment on “Governance, Government, and the Search for New Provider Models”

Governance in health is cited as one of the key factors in balancing the concerns of the government and public sector with the interests of civil society/private players, but often remains poorly described and operationalized. Richard Saltman and Antonio Duran look at two aspects in the search for new provider models in a context of health markets signalling liberalisation: (i) the role of the ...

Resolving some confusions over attention and consciousness

There is presently an ongoing debate about the relation between attention and consciousness. Thus debate is being fuelled by results from experimental paradigms which probe various forms of the interaction between attention and consciousness, such as the attentional blink, object-substitution masking and change blindness. We present here simulations of these three paradigms which can all be pro...

A Theoretical Solution of the Mind-Body Problem: An Operationalized Proof that no Purely Physical System Can Exhibit all the Properties of Human Consciousness

This article presents an operationalized solution to the mind-body problem which relies on rigorously defined theoretical reasoning rather than philosophical argument. We identify a specific operation which is a necessary property of all healthy human conscious individuals -specifically the operation of self-certainty, or the capacity of healthy conscious humans to "know" with certainty that th...

Thompson, E. (2015). Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness - The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether consciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya ...

Quantum physics and human consciousness: The status of the current debate