Contents

Vol. 14, No.3, March 2007

Refereed Papers

Eric Schwitzgebel   abstract
Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of your Feet in your Shoes? Or Is Experience Limited to What’s in Attention?
Carole Brooks Platt   abstract
Presence, Poetry and the Collaborative Right Hemisphere
Claire Petitmengin   abstract
Towards the Source of Thoughts: The Gestural and Transmodal Dimension of Lived Experience
Dustin Stokes   abstract
Incubated Cognition and Creativity

Continuing Debate   full text

Robert Arp
Consciousness and Awareness: Switched-On Rheostats: A Response to de Quincey
Gilberto Gomes
Consciousness and its Contents: A Response to de Quincey

Book Reviews   full text

Tim Calton
David Rose, Consciousness
R.K.C. Forman
Jonathan Shear, The Experience of Meditation
Anthony Freeman
Judy Illes (ed.), Neuroethics
John Pickering
W. Wheeler, The Whole Creature
Paavo Pylkkanen
Chris Clarke (ed.), Ways of Knowing
Books received

ABSTRACTS

Eric Schwitzgebel

Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? Or Is Experience Limited to What’s in Attention?

Abstract: According to rich views of consciousness (e.g., James, Searle), we have a constant, complex flow of experience (or ‘phenomenology’) in multiple modalities simultaneously. According to thin views (e.g., Dennett, Mack and Rock), conscious experience is limited to one or a few topics, regions, objects, or modalities at a time. Existing introspective and empirical arguments on this issue (including arguments from ‘inattentional blindness’) generally beg the question. Participants in the present experiment wore beepers during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they were to take note of the conscious experience, if any, they were having at the last undisturbed moment immediately prior to the beep. Some participants were asked to report any experience they could remember. Others were asked simply to report whether there was visual experience or not (and if so, what it was). Still others were asked about experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience, or tactile experience in the left foot. A majority of participants in the full experience and the visual conditions reported visual experience in every single sample. Tactile and peripheral visual experience were reported less often. However, the proper interpretation of these results is uncertain.

Correspondence: Eric Schwitzgebel, Department of Philosophy, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA  92521-0201, USA. Email eschwitz@ucr.edu

Claire Petitmengin

Towards the Source of Thoughts: The Gestural and Transmodal Dimension of Lived Experience

Abstract: The objective of this article is to study a deeply pre- reflective dimension of our subjective experience. This dimension is gestural and rhythmic, has precise transmodal sensorial submodalities, and seems to play an essential role in the process of emergence of all thought and understanding. In the first part of the article, using examples, we try to draw the attention of the reader to this dimension in his subjective experience. In the second part, we attempt to explain the difficulties and describe the interior process of becoming aware of it. Then we describe the structural characteristics of this dimension, and the different types of ‘interior gestures’ which enable us to connect ourselves with it. Finally, we formulate a genetic hypothesis about the role of this dimension in cognition, on the basis of which we suggest some research paths in the neuroscientific, educational and existential domains.

Correspondence: Claire.Petitmengin@shs.polytechnique.fr

Carole Brooks Platt

Presence, Poetry and the Collaborative Right Hemisphere

Neuropsychologist Michael Persinger’s ‘Muse Factor’ experiment holds up in the study of mystics and poets with the added caveats of enhanced temporal lobe lability being preconditioned by adverse childhood circumstances, especially maternal deprivation, and the sexual abuse factor or loss of a significant male figure, in women. The wounded mind searches for enhanced personal meaning and the stabilization of the self through a restorative dialogic with conjured Others and real collaborators. Whether aroused by intense verbal meaningfulness, meditation, pathologies, drug usage, ritualistic behaviours or electromagnetically, the creative output can provide healing perceptions, a change of course and, often, an inspired poetic voice.

Correspondence: Email: carolebrooks.platt@gmail.com

Dustin R. Stokes

Incubated Cognition and Creativity

Abstract: Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist’s scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity.

Correspondence: D.R. Stokes, Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Sussex. Email: d.stokes@sussex.ac.uk

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