Automatic Influences on our actions and perceptions

Cognitive processing, 2018

In this article, I argue that consciousness is a unique way of processing information, in that: it produces information, rather than purely transmitting it; the information it produces is meaningful for us; the meaning it has is always individuated. This uniqueness allows us to process information on the basis of our personal needs and ever-changing interactions with the environment, and consequently to act autonomously. Three main basic cognitive processes contribute to realize this unique way of information processing: the self, attention and working memory. The self, which is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems, maps our body, the environment, and our relations with the environment. It is the primary means by which the complexity inherent to our composite structure is reduced into the "single voice" of a unique individual. It provides a reference system that (albeit evolving) is sufficiently stable to define the variations that will be use...

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

Self Comes to Mind continues a narrative that begins with Descartes Error (1994), continued with The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), and further developed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003). These books are meant to be accessible to the general public, but are also useful to those professionals and researchers, who are not neuroscientists, seeking a review of recent neuroscientific empirical developments and thinking concerning self and consciousness. These books summarizing one person's effort to capture the complex phenomena of self, consciousness and mind totally within the neurological processes of the central nervous system take their place in a large corpus of literature concerning self that is complex and sometimes difficult. “Few ideas are as weighty and as slippery as the notion of self,” to borrow Jerrold Seigel’s apt characterization in the introduction to his account of the western intellectual discussion of its varied and changing ideas of self, The Idea of the Self (Seigel, 2005, p. 3).

2019

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behav...

Antonio Damasio's routine of writing a book every few years addressing the neuroscience of the brain's construction of mind, consciousness, emotions, and self has the fortunate effect of creating some transparency in neuroscientific research. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain is the latest presentation in the narrative that began with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Damasio, 1994), further developed in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , and was followed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain .

This research is an investigation of whether consciousness—one's ongoing experience—influences one's behavior and, if so, how. Analysis of the components, structure, properties, and temporal sequences of consciousness has established that, (1) contrary to one's intuitive understanding, consciousness does not have an active, executive role in determining behavior; (2) consciousness does have a biological function; and (3) consciousness is solely information in various forms. Consciousness is associated with a flexible response mechanism (FRM) for decision-making, planning, and generally responding in nonautomatic ways. The FRM generates responses by manipulating information and, to function effectively, its data input must be restricted to task-relevant information. The properties of consciousness correspond to the various input requirements of the FRM; and when important information is missing from consciousness, functions of the FRM are adversely affected; both of which indicate that consciousness is the input data to the FRM. Qualitative and quantitative information (shape, size, location, etc.) are incorporated into the input data by a qualia array of colors, sounds, and so on, which makes the input conscious. This view of the biological function of consciousness provides an explanation why we have experiences; why we have emotional and other feelings, and why their loss is associated with poor decision-making; why blindsight patients do not spontaneously initiate responses to events in their blind field; why counter-habitual actions are only possible when the intended action is in mind; and the reason for inattentional blindness.

Cognitive neuroscience, 2015

What is the self? This is a question that has long been discussed in (western) philosophy where the self is traditionally conceived a higher-order function at the apex or pinnacle of all functions. This tradition has been transferred to recent neuroscience where the self is often considered to be a higher-order cognitive function reflected in memory and other high-level judgements. However other lines of research demonstrate a close and intimate relationship between self-specificity and more basic functions like perceptions, emotions and reward. This paper focuses on the relationship between self-specificity and other basic functions relating to emotions, reward, and perception. I propose the basis model that conceives self-specificity as a fundamental feature of the brain's spontaneous activity. This is supported by recent findings showing rest-self overlap in midline regions as well as findings demonstrating that the resting state can predict subsequent degrees of self-specifi...

From an embodied point of view, human consciousness can be interpreted as the presence of meaning in phenomenal experience. From a designer's point of view, these meanings can be articulated to improve the design of human thought, action and experience by conjoining subjective and objective thought to realize better ideas, artifacts and outcomes. Both human purposes and the circumstances they address depend on how consciousness is applied to improve interactions between individuals, their environments, other people and things. This paper provides a conceptual model of conscious meaning that is based on the natural development of subconscious thought and conscious action in the body, brain and mind of an autonomous Self as it interacts with itself and environments that contain other selves, subjects, situations and events.

In S. Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self (111-36)., 2011

Applied Sciences

This Special Issue about sub-and unconscious information processing in the human brain finally became a collection of 6 accepted contributions, 2 articles, 2 reviews, 1 opinion and 1 concept paper. Even though more papers were submitted this rather small number of accepted contributions mirrors the still existing lack of focus on non-conscious human brain processes that surely influence human behavior to a much larger extent than one would ever imagine. Our brains contain evolutionary old neural structures that much more primitive organisms have in their brains too and crucially those old structures have more or the less the same functional properties regardless of what brain they belong to. Consciousness as an individual experience is a rather young evolutionary product, which means that those older structures that are strongly involved in the generation of human behavior work largely without being associated with conscious experience. This explains why people not always do what they say. In other words, the brain knows more than it admits to consciousness and since we have more and more access to that knowledge we should be interested in gaining it. The evidence grows that demonstrates how non-conscious processing occurs and influences our decision making.