Contents

REFEREED ARTICLES

David Skrbina    abstract
Panpsychism as an Underlying Theme in Western Philosophy: A Survey Paper
John Smythies    abstract   full text
Space, Time and Consciousness
David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson    abstract
State Dependence of Character Perception: Implausibility differences in dreaming and waking consciousness

CONTINUING DEBATE

Benny Shanon
Three Stories Concerning Synaesthesia: A commentary on the paper by Ramachandran and Hubbard
Karl Pribram
Commentary on ‘Synaesthesia’ by Ramachandran and Hubbard
E.M. Hubbard and V.S. Ramachandran
Refining the Experimental Lever: A reply to Shanon and Pribram

CONFERENCE REPORTS

Peter Århem, Hans Liljenström and B.I.B. Lindahls
Consciousness and Comparative Neuroanatomy
Joel Walmsley
There’s Room in the Lab for an Armchair: ‘Philosophy and Neuroscience’ Conference

BOOK REVIEWS

Alwyn Scott
Ivan M. Havel and Anton Markos, ed. Is There a Purpose in Nature? How to Navigate Between the Scylla of Mechanism and the Charybdis of Teleology
Gary Fuhrman
Jerome Kagan, Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures
Johnjoe McFadden
Stefano Nolfi and Dario Floreano, Evolutionary Robotics
Gary Fuhrman
Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry (ed.), Memory, Brain and Belief
Amy Ione
David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account
Cory Wright
Stephen P. Turner, Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science

ABSTRACTS

David Skrbina

Panpsychism as an Underlying Theme in Western Philosophy. A Survey Paper

Abstract: Panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind, or a mind-like quality. Contrary to the common view that panpsychism is a fringe or ‘absurd’ theory of mind, it in fact has a long and noble tradition within western philosophy. In the forms of animism and polytheism, panpsychism was the dominant view for most if not all of the pre-historical era. In the early years of western thought it was widely accepted though not often explicitly argued for. The emergence of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology subverted it for a number of centuries, but it made a comeback with early Renaissance naturalist philosophers of the sixteenth century. Though still a minority view, it grew steadily in support through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching a zenith in the late 1800s and early 1900s. With the advent of logical positivism and linguistic/analytic philosophy, panpsychism was once again driven down (along with most all metaphysical theories) to a relatively low status. In the past few years, however, panpsychism has once more become the topic of serious philosophical inquiry.

Correspondence: David Skrbina, 42231 Ladywood Dr., Northville, MI  48167, USA
Skrbina@aol.com

John Smythies

Space, Time and Consciousness

This paper describes a new theory of consciousness based on previous work by C.D. Broad, H.H. Price, Andrei Linde and others. This hypothesis states that the Universe consists of three fundamental entities  —  space-time, matter and consciousness, each with their own degrees of freedom. The paper pays particular attention to three areas that impact on this theory: (1) the demonstration by neuroscience and psychophysics that we do not perceive the world as it actually is but as the brain computes it most probably to be; (2) the need to delineate between phenomenal space-time and physical space-time. Recent theories in physics that suggest that the Universe has more than three spatial dimensions are relevant here; (3) the role of consciousness in the block Universe described by Special Relativity. The integration of these topics suggests a new physical theory of the nature of consciousness.

Correspondence: John Smythies, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. E-mail: smythies@psy.ucsd.edu

David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson

State Dependence of Character Perception: Implausibility Differences in Dreaming and Waking Consciousness

Abstract: Dreaming consciousness can be quite different from waking consciousness and this difference must depend upon the underlying neurobiology.  Our approach is to infer the underlying brain basis for this difference by studying dream reports and comparing them with waking. In this study we investigated mentation during dreaming by asking subjects to provide us with dream reports and by asking them to create a dream log. In the dream log, the subjects recorded all implausibility, illogicality or inappropriateness of character during the dream narrative when compared to the character’s real-life waking counterpart.  Thus, the dream acted as its own control in comparing waking and dreaming mentation.

Our results showed that recognition of the implausibility of a character occurred far less often during the dream than outside of the dream when the subject compared the dream character to its real-life waking counterpart. Further, not all kinds of implausibility were equally likely to occur in the dream.  The most common implausibility both during the dream and when compared to the character’s real-life counterpart was a character’s behaviour. Calling on existing imaging data of the brain in REM sleep, we speculate on the brain-basis of these results in terms of the inaccessibility of episodic memory during dreaming and the diminished role of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex during REM sleep.

Correspondence: David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson,
Neurophysiology Laboratory, Dept. of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA 02115, USA.

  • Imprint Academic Home Page
  • JCS Home Page