Natika Newton

Ralph Ellis

The nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and brain have become the most hotly debated topics in philosophy. This book explains and argues for a new approach called enactivism. Enactivism maintains that consciousness and all subjective thoughts and feelings arise from an organism's attempts to use its environment in the service of purposeful action. The authors admit that their perspective presents many problems: How does one distinguish real action from reaction? Is it scientifically acceptable to say that the whole organism can use its parts, instead of being a mere summation of their separate mechanical reactions? What about the danger that this analysis will imply that physical systems fail to be "causally closed"? How the Mind Uses the Brain tries to answer these questions and represents a sharp break with tradition, arguing that consciousness and emotions are aspects of an organism's ongoing self-organizational activity, driving information-processing rather than merely responding to it.

To Move the Body and Image the Universe

How the Mind Uses the Brain

Ralph D. Ellis

These new studies by prominent neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general, as an aspect of self-organizing, embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities, and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness, which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for 'agency'; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious, behaving organism. (Series B)

Motivation, Affect, and Self-organization : an Anthology

The Caldron of Consciousness

How can symbols have meaning for a subject? Foundations of Understanding argues that this is the key question to ask about intentionality, or meaningful thought. It thus offers an alternative to currently popular linguistic models of intentionality, whose inadequacies are examined: the goal should be to explain, not how symbols, mental or otherwise, can refer to or ‘mean’ states of affairs in the external world, but how they can mean something to us, the users. The essence of intentionality is shown to be conscious understanding, the roots of which lie in experiences of embodiment and goal-directed action. A developmental path is traced from a foundation of conscious understanding in the ability to perform basic actions, through the understanding of the concept of an objective, external world, to the understanding of language and abstract symbols. The work is interdisciplinary: data from the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, and the perspectives of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, are combined with traditional philosophical analysis. The book includes a chapter on the nature of conscious qualitative experience and its neural correlates. (Series A)

Foundations of Understanding

The papers in this volume of Consciousness & Emotion Book Series are organized around the theme of "enaction." Enactive emotional processes are not merely the recipients of information or the passive victims of input and learning. The organism first is engaged in an ongoing, complex pattern of self-organizational activity, for the purpose of maintaining a dynamical continuity of pattern across changes of subserving micro-constituents and environmental conditions, making use of multiple shunt mechanisms, feedback loops, and other complex dynamical features. Self-organizational structure is used to distinguish between action and mere reaction. Accordingly, the papers of this volume by leading students of emotion such as Jaak Panksepp, Luc Ciompi, Thomas Natsoulas, Farzaneh Pahlavan, Michela Balconi, Todd Lubart, Louise Sundararajan, Jordan Petersen and others address three main issues: I. Emotional influences on perception and thought II. Agency and choice III. Agency and moral value

Natika Newton

Books

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