CITATION: Excessive self grooming in mice has been used as a model for obsessive compulsive disorder. The fact that the prairie voles do this as consoling behaviour does suggest grooming is comforting. But it also seems that in some strains of mice, but not all, barbering is thought to be a sign of dominance and/or aggression. How can you differentiate between a potentially comforting behaviour...

Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No...

1. In thinking about the sources of self-consciousness we need to separate out two dimensions of the problem. There is, first, a genetic dimension. One might wonder about the origins of the capacity to think full-fledged self-conscious thoughts. That is to say, one might be asking about where this capacity comes from. How does it emerge in the normal course of human development? What are the ge...

The purpose of this study was to compare the improvement in visual acuity (VA) with the improvement in contrast sensitivity (CS) with two eyes as compared with one. Computer generated letter charts were used to measure VA and small letter CS (20/25 Snellen equivalent) in 13 emmetropic subjects. Letter size (for VA) and contrast (for CS) were varied in equal log steps making the task comparable ...

Consciousness is the sense of self and the sign of life in natural intelligence. One of the profound myths in cognitive informatics, psychology, brain science, and computational intelligence is how consciousness is generated by physiological organs and neural networks in the bran. This paper presents a formal model and a cognitive process of consciousness in order to explain how abstract consci...

1. Bernard J. Baars: Can physics provide a theory of consciousness? 2. David J. Chalmers: Minds, machines, and mathematics 3. Solomon Feferman: Penrose's Gödelian argument 4. Stanley A. Klein: Is quantum mechanics relevant to understanding consciousness? 5. Tim Maudlin: Between the motion and the act.... 6. John McCarthy: Awareness and understanding in computer programs 7. Daryl McCullough: Can...

Introduction Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an orthodoxy of sorts had gelled in the philosophy of mind around a kind of psychological externalism, the idea that some mental states individuate sensitively to extra-cranial factors. More recently, two trends of thought have departed from this young orthodoxy in opposite directions. On the one hand, a cluster of ideas captured in s...

Introduction Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an orthodoxy of sorts had gelled in the philosophy of mind around a kind of psychological externalism, the idea that some mental states individuate sensitively to extra-cranial factors. More recently, two trends of thought have departed from this young orthodoxy in opposite directions. On the one hand, a cluster of ideas captured in s...

In most current mainstream biophysics research on cognitive processes, the brain is modeled as a neural network obeying classical physics. In contrast, Penrose [1,2], and others have argued that quantum mechanics may play an essential role, and that successful brain simulations can only be performed with a quantum computer. The main purpose of this paper is to address this issue with quantitati...