Barron and Klein (1) define consciousness very narrowly, excluding most of the attributes commonly associated with it (e.g., self-awareness). By limiting the definition to a form of information processing, they find that insects qualify. However, just to put this conclusion in perspective, by the same definition, some robots are also conscious and capable of subjective experience. Autonomous, s...

Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic is a unique contribution to consciousness studies. The book presents a detailed and far-ranging debate between psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, developer and defender of the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method of introspective reporting, and philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, whose sceptical work challenges the accuracy of any introspec...

Benguigui used the term “middle class” in a way that suggested it exerted signifi-cant social agency in contemporary Tonga (1989). My review of his analysis con-cludes that there is no coherent, durable middle class in Tonga capable of theeffective class action he claimed for it. Instead, the social struggles of recentdecades, typically led by members of commoner educated elites...

The scientific approach to understand the nature of consciousness revolves around the study of human brain. Neurobiological studies that compare the nervous system of different species have accorded highest place to the humans on account of various factors that include a highly developed cortical area comprising of approximately 100 billion neurons, that are intrinsically connected to form a hi...

Despite a burst of work in the past decade or so, some of it by us, there is still no general agreement on what unified consciousness is. This despite increasing recognition of its importance. Once more into the breach! When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a s...

A key contention of Klein & Barron (2016) is that consciousness does not depend on cortical structures. A critical appraisal suggests they have overestimated the strength of their evidence. Sean Hermanson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University in Miami, specializing in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His work on animals includes articles on bees, ...

OBJECTIVE Consciousness is often thought to be that aspect of mind that is least amenable to being understood or replicated by artificial intelligence (AI). The first-personal, subjective, what-it-is-like-to-be-something nature of consciousness is thought to be untouchable by the computations, algorithms, processing and functions of AI method. Since AI is the most promising avenue toward artifi...

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fal...

We suggest a united concept of consciousness and emotion, based on the systemic cognitive neuroscience perspective regarding organisms as active and goal-directed. We criticize the idea that consciousness and emotion are psychological phenomena having quite different neurophysiological mechanisms. We argue that both characterize a unified systemic organization of behavior, but at different leve...

We generalize a recent mathematical analysis of Bernard Baars’ model of human consciousness to explore analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, seem able to multitask, supporting several s...