The paper briefly reviews the contribution of recent neuroscience findings to our understanding of our human nature – more exactly, to the understanding of the three properties that we conceive of as highly-specifically human: consciousness, freedom, and language. The analysis yields rather surprising results. Self-consciousness is possibly not the highpoint of our sophisticated cognitive funct...

Objectives: Two important aspects of self-consciousness are the sense of one’s own body (socalled ‘body-ownership’) and the sense that one controls one’s own bodily actions (agency). The exact relation between these has been the focus of much speculation, but remains unclear. We distinguish two models of their relation. On an ‘additive’ model, agency and body-ownership are strongly related, bec...

This paper introduces ‘The Self Aware Image’, a creative research project that is part of the Virtual Laboratory for Envisioning Connections (vLEC) consortium. The paper will outline the rationale of the project and locate it within wider debates about the relationship between art, consciousness and technology. The notion of the ‘self-aware image’ is touched on as an art historical trope, and t...

The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains elusive. Here I propose that two steps had to be taken in its evolution. First, living systems evolved an intrinsic goal-directedness by internalizing Darwinian fi...

theory of mind Becomes efficient at theory of mind and has abstract theory of an extended self, thus cantheory of an extended self, thus can now imagine the futurechoice situation for the extended self of another

The experiential and body-involving nature of apparel makes consumers’ product evaluation in the virtual shopping environment a lasting problem. With the newly emerging online pictorial reviews, consumers are more informed about the product. However, how pictorial reviews would influence consumers’ psychological evaluation process and their purchase intention remains unclear. Drawing on the Sel...

This paper presents the hypothesis that concept possession is sufficient and necessary for self-consciousness. If this is true it provides a yardstick for gauging the validity of different research paradigms in which claims for self-consciousness in animals or human infants are made: a convincing demonstration of concept possession in a research subject, such as a display of inferential reasoni...

Mirror Self-Recognition is a well accepted test to identify whether an animal is with self-consciousness. Mirror neuron system is believed to be one of the most important biological foundation for Mirror Self-Recognition. Inspired by the biological mirror neuron system of the mammalian brain, we propose a Brain-inspired Robot Mirror Neuron System Model (Robot-MNS-Model) and we apply it to human...

In this paper, a theoretical account of the functional role of consciousness in the cognitive system of normal subjects is developed. The account is based upon an approach to consciousness that is drawn from the phenomenological tradition. On this approach, consciousness is essentially peripheral self-awareness, in a sense to be duly explained. It will be argued that the functional role of cons...

In this paper I examine William James' concept of the 'warmth and intimacy' of bodily self-consciousness and relate it to recent attempts to recast bodily self-consciousness in strictly neural terms. James takes bodily 'warmth and intimacy' to solve a number of problems related to the material and spiritual aspects of self and personal identity. He mentions but does not fully explore the possib...