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Thomas Metzinger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire mpe 92m towards a phenomenological profile of pure awareness Experiences in meditators
PLOS ONE, 2021Co-Authors: Alex Gamma, Thomas MetzingerAbstract:Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” Experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were usable. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range: 17–88) and were evenly split between men and women (48.5% vs 50.0%). The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3%), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0%). Vipassana (43.9%) followed by Zen (34.9%) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques. German (63.4%) and English (31.4%) were by far the most frequent questionnaire languages. A solution with 12 factors explaining 44% of the total variance was deemed optimal under joint conceptual and statistical considerations. The factors were named “Time, Effort and Desire,” “Peace, Bliss and Silence,” “Self-Knowledge, Autonomous Cognizance and Insight,” “Wakeful Presence,” “Pure Awareness in Dream and Sleep,” “Luminosity,” “Thoughts and Feelings,” “Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness,” “Sensory Perception in Body and Space,” “Touching World and Self,” “Mental Agency,” and “Witness Consciousness.” This factor structure fit the data moderately well. Conclusions We have previously posited a phenomenological prototype for the Experience of “pure awareness” as it occurs in the context of meditation practice. Here we offer a tentative 12-factor model to describe its Phenomenal character in a fine-grained way. The current findings are in line with an earlier study extracting semantic constraints for a working definition of minimal Phenomenal Experience.
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minimal Phenomenal Experience
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 2020Co-Authors: Thomas MetzingerAbstract:This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious Experience, taking the Phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal Phenomenal Experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space.
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Why are identity disorders interesting for philosophers
2003Co-Authors: Thomas MetzingerAbstract:"Identity disorders" constitute a large class of psychiatric disturbances that, due to deviant forms ofself-modeling, result in dramatic changes in the patients' Phenomenal Experience of their own personal identity. The Phenomenal Experience of selfhood and transtemporal identity can vary along an extremely large number of dimensions: There are simple losses of content (for example, complete losses of proprioception, resulting in a "bodiless" state of self-consciousness, see Cole 1995, Gallagher and Cole 1995, Sacks 1998). There are also various typologies of Phenomenal disintegration as in schizophrenia, in depersonalization disorders and in Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), sometimes accompanied by multiplications of the Phenomenal self within one and the same physical system. It is important to not only analyze these state-classes in terms of functional deficits or phenomenology alone, but as self-representational content as well. For instance, in the second type of cases just mentioned, we confront major redistributions of the Phenomenal property of "mineness" in representational space, of what is sometimes also called the "sense of ownership". Finally, there are at least four different delusions of misidentification (DM1; namely Capgras syndrome, FrA©goli syndrome, intermetamorphosis, reverse intermetamorphosis and reduplicative paramnesia). Being a philosopher, I will discuss two particular types of identity disorder in this contribution - disorders, which are of direct philosophical relevance: A specific form of DM, and the Cotard delusion. Why should philosophers do this? And why should psychiatrists care?
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appearance is not knowledge the incoherent straw man content content confusions and mindless conscious subjects
2003Co-Authors: Thomas MetzingerAbstract:The value of Noe and Thompson’s contribution consists in highlighting a series of important methodological and conceptual issues associated with current research in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. Frequently, these are not seen by empirical scientists attempting to delineate the neural correlate for a given type of Phenomenal Experience. More importantly, they draw attention to a deeper theoretical problem that may soon become even more pressing: What precisely are the identity criteria we can employ in making reference to specific forms of conscious content, both introspectively, when generating the firstperson Experience (or even judgment) of sameness, as well as conceptually, when making explanatory claims from the third-person perspective? However, the paper has a number of shortcomings too. Let us briefly look at them first. The first problem with Noe and Thompson’s strategy is that they persistently equivocate between the two basic notions of ‘intentional content’ and ‘Phenomenal content’. Thus they create a straw man (by misdescribing their opponent’s claim) and their own argument becomes incoherent (by committing a fallacy of equivocation). As a consequence they also misrepresent what actually constitutes their opponent’s epistemic goal. What is intentional content? It is the representational content, which, for instance, a certain neural system in our brain may possess. In accordance with a naturalized version of Franz Brentano’s original definition (Brentano, 1874, II, 1: §5) we may say that the representational or intentional content (IC) of this neural system is what its activity is directed at.It is the object of this activity. Very often this object will be external to the brain, and quite frequently it may not even exist at all. Therefore the most important property of our neural system — namely, if it is a misrepresentation or not, if it constitutes a potential source of knowledge for the organism or not — is often determined by properties external to the brain. What many of us today call ‘a’ content is an abstract property, and one and the same content may be given or represented in a number of different ways. What is Phenomenal content? Phenomenal content (PC) is first-person content, the way a certain state feels from the inside, what it is like to be in that state (as Thomas Nagel put it, exactly one century after Brentano [but cf. Farrell 1950, p. 183]). It is ‘Phenomenal’, because it determines the way reality appears to you. The implicit, but seldom argued assumption behind searching for a neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) is
Gary Hatfield - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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psychological experiments and Phenomenal Experience in size and shape constancy
Philosophy of Science, 2014Co-Authors: Gary HatfieldAbstract:Some experiments in perceptual psychology measure perceivers’ Phenomenal Experiences of objects versus their cognitive assessments of object properties. Analyzing such experiments, this article responds to Pizlo’s claim that much work on shape constancy before 1985 confused problems of shape ambiguity with problems of shape constancy. Pizlo fails to grasp the logic of experimental designs directed toward Phenomenal aspects of shape constancy. In the domain of size perception, Granrud’s studies of size constancy in children and adults distinguish Phenomenal from cognitive factors.
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the reality of qualia
Erkenntnis, 2007Co-Authors: Gary HatfieldAbstract:This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of Phenomenal Experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‚ordinary’ grounds. I␣distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‚representational’ or ‚intentional’ theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia as Phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano’s original sense of ‚intentionality’.
Vladimir Miskovic - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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nondual awareness and minimal Phenomenal Experience
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020Co-Authors: Zoran Josipovic, Vladimir MiskovicAbstract:Minimal Phenomenal Experiences (MPEs) have recently gained attention in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. They can be thought of as episodes of greatly reduced or even absent Phenomenal content together with a reduced level of arousal. It has also been proposed that MPEs are cases of consciousness-as-such. Here, we present a different perspective, that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is, non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind and cannot be adequately specified by the two-dimensional model of consciousness as the arousal level plus the Phenomenal content or by their mental representations. Thus, we suggest that to understand consciousness-as-such, and by extension consciousness in general, more accurately, we need to research it as a unique kind.
Sid Kouider - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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perceptual illusions in brief visual presentations
Consciousness and Cognition, 2009Co-Authors: Vincent De Gardelle, Jerome Sackur, Sid KouiderAbstract:We often feel that our perceptual Experience is richer than what we can express. For instance, when flashed with a large set of letters, we feel that we can see them all, while we can report only a few. However, the nature of this subjective impression remains highly debated: while many favour a dissociation between two forms of consciousness (access vs. Phenomenal consciousness), others contend that the richness of Phenomenal Experience is a mere illusion. Here we addressed this question with a classical partial-report paradigm now modified to include unexpected items in the unreported parts of the stimuli. We show that even in the presence of unexpected pseudo-letters, participants still felt that there were only letters. Additionally, we show that this feeling reflects an illusion whereby participants reconstruct letters using partial letter-like information. We propose that the feeling of seeing emerges from the interplay between partially accessible information and expectations.
Ken Mogi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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cognitive factors correlating with the metacognition of the Phenomenal properties of Experience
Scientific Reports, 2013Co-Authors: Ken MogiAbstract:The awareness of the Phenomenal qualities of one's Experiences can be considered as an instance of metacognition. Although some people take qualia (sensory qualities such as the redness of red) as salient features of Phenomenal Experience, others have expressed views that doubt or deny the central importance of qualia. How do such cognitive heterogeneities occur? What parameters influence them? Here I examine the relationship between the awareness of the Phenomenal qualities of subjective Experience (qualia and free will) and general cognitive tendencies. The awareness of qualia was found to be more varied among subjects compared to the belief in free will. Various cognitive tendencies correlated with the metacognition of Phenomenal Experience. The awareness of qualia was found to increase significantly with age, suggesting a continuous learning process. These results suggest that heterogeneities in the metacognition of Phenomenal properties of Experience are important constraints in human cognition.
