scholarly journals New materialism and postmodern subject models fail to explain human memory and self-awareness: A comment on Tobias-Renstrøm and Køppe (2020)

2020 ◽  
pp. 095935432097375
Author(s):  
Radek Trnka
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
External Observer ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Tobias-Renstrøm and Køppe (2020) show the several conceptual limits that new materialism and postmodern subject models have for psychological theory and research. The present study continues this discussion and argues that the applicability of the ideas of quantum-inspired new materialism depends on the theoretical perspectives that we consider for analysis: be it the first-person perspective referring to the subjective experience of a human subject, or the third-person perspective, in which a human subject is observed by an external observer. While the arguments of new materialism are in accordance with the analysis of the act of observation performed by an external observer, some problems arise when trying to theoretically approach the first-person subjective experience of a human subject. For example, new materialism fails to explain why human minds can maintain the awareness of a subject’s identity throughout their lives and to recall the memories about their past personal experiences.

scholarly journals Awareness is in the Eye of the Observer: Preserved Third-Person Awareness of Deficit in Anosognosia for Hemiplegia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahba Besharati ◽  
Paul Jenkinson ◽  
Michael Kopelman ◽  
Mark Solms ◽  
Valentina Moro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Right Hemisphere Damage ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
Anosognosia For Hemiplegia

In recent decades, the research traditions of (first-person) embodied cognition and of (third-person) social cognition have approached the study of self-awareness with relative independence. However, neurological disorders of self-awareness offer a unifying perspective to empirically investigate the contribution of embodiment and social cognition to self-awareness. This study focused on a neuropsychological disorder of bodily self-awareness following right-hemisphere damage, namely anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). A previous neuropsychological study has shown AHP patients, relative to neurological controls, to have a specific deficit in third-person, allocentric inferences in a story-based, mentalisation task. However, no study has tested directly whether verbal awareness of motor deficits is influenced by either perspective-taking or centrism, and if these deficits in social cognition are correlated with damage to anatomical areas previously linked to mentalising, including the supramarginal and superior temporal gyri and related limbic white matter connections. Accordingly, two novel experiments were conducted with right-hemisphere stroke patients with (n = 17) and without AHP (n = 17) that targeted either their own (egocentric, experiment 1) or another stooge patient’s (experiment 2) motor abilities from a first-or-third person (allocentric in Experiment 2) perspective. In both experiments, neurological controls showed no significant difference between perspectives, suggesting that perspective-taking deficits are not a general consequence of right-hemisphere damage. More specifically, experiment 1 found AHP patients were more aware of their own motor paralysis when asked from a third compared to a first-person perspective, using both group level and individual level analysis. In experiment 2, AHP patients were less accurate than controls in making allocentric, third-person perspective judgements about the stooge patient, but with only a trend towards significance and with no within-group, difference between perspectives. Deficits in egocentric and allocentric third-person perspective taking were associated with lesions in the middle frontal gyrus, superior temporal and supramarginal gyri, with white matter disconnections more predominate in deficits in allocentricity. This study confirms previous clinical and empirical investigations on the selectivity of first-person motor awareness deficits in anosognosia for hemiplegia and experimentally demonstrates for the first time that verbal egocentric 3PP-taking can positively influence 1PP body awareness.

scholarly journals Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Brentyn J. Ramm
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Phenomenology Of The Body ◽  
The World ◽  
The Look ◽  
Body Self

Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of the body and intersubjectivity. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Harding observes that from the first-person perspective, I cannot see my own head. He points out that visually speaking nothing gets in the way of others. I am radically open to others and the world. Neither does my somatic experience establish a boundary between me and the world. Rather to experience these sensations as part of a bounded, shaped thing (a body), already involves bringing in the perspectives of others. The reader is guided through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments to test these phenomenological claims for themselves. For Sartre, the other’s subjectivity is known through The Look, which makes me into a mere object for them. Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for making intersubjective relations primarily ones of conflict. Rather he held that the intentionality of my body is primordially interconnected with that of others’ bodies. We are already situated in a shared social world. For Harding, like Sartre, my consciousness is a form of nothingness; however, in contrast to Sartre, it does not negate the world, but is absolutely united with it. Confrontation is a delusion that comes from imagining that I am behind a face. Rather in lived personal relationships, I become the other. I conclude by arguing that for Harding all self-awareness is a form of other-awareness, and vice versa.

Self-Awareness and the “I” in the Phenomenological Tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 267-286
Author(s):  
Sacha Golob
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Features ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Key Innovations

The Phenomenological tradition is defined by its attempt to rethink the self and self-awareness. This chapter provides an overview of some of the fundamental developments within that tradition running from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to later writers such as Henry. I begin by sketching the key features: its relationship to naturalistic and transcendental approaches, the centrality of the first person perspective, and the hierarchical model which is central to Phenomenology’s vision of experience. I next introduce the specifics of Phenomenology’s picture of self-awareness, positioning it between the spectatorial model found in Brentano and a Kantian intellectualism. I then turn to some key innovations: Sartre’s notion of non-positional self-consciousness, Heidegger on the links between the self and the social, and finally Merleau-Ponty’s conception of embodiment.

scholarly journals How can we capture the subject’s perspective? An evidence-based approach for the social scientist

2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 607-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saadi Lahlou
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
First Person ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
External Observer ◽  
The Social

This paper addresses the methodological gap that impedes the collection of empirical data on subjective experience. It describes a new family of methods for social science research (Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography: SEBE). The methods are based on: first-person audio-visual recording with a miniature video-camera worn at eye-level (‘subcam’); confronting subjects with these first-person recordings to collect their subjective experience; formulating the findings and discussing the final interpretation with the subjects. These procedures enable subjects to reconstruct and describe their psychological state at the moment of action, especially their goals, by reviewing films of their own activity recorded from their own perspective with subcams. These films provide situated records of actual activity in natural environments, without the need of an external observer. This approach, by providing both detailed records of actual activity and evidence-based accounts of the subject’s own mental processes, supports grounded progress in ethnography, psychology, ergonomics, sociology and the social sciences in general. There are also applications for training and cross-cultural contacts. The techniques are described in sufficient detail for the reader to make use of them. Examples of applications are provided and limitations are discussed.

scholarly journals Specifying a causal role for angular gyrus in autobiographical memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi M. Bonnici ◽  
Lucy G. Cheke ◽  
Deborah A.E. Green ◽  
Thomas H.B. FitzGerald ◽  
Jon S. Simons
Keyword(s):  
Free Recall ◽  
Word Pair ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Parietal Lobe ◽  
Cued Recall ◽  
Angular Gyrus ◽  
First Person ◽  
Autobiographical Memories ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective

AbstractConsiderable recent evidence indicates that angular gyrus dysfunction does not result in amnesia, but does impair a number of aspects of episodic memory. Patients with parietal lobe lesions have been reported to exhibit a deficit when freely recalling autobiographical events from their pasts, but can remember details of the events when recall is cued by specific questions. In apparent contradiction, inhibitory brain stimulation targeting angular gyrus in healthy volunteers has been found to have no effect on free recall or cued recall of word pairs. The present study sought to resolve this inconsistency by testing free and cued recall of both autobiographical memories and word pair memories in the same healthy participants following continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) of angular gyrus and a vertex control location. Angular gyrus cTBS resulted in a selective reduction in the free recall but not cued recall of autobiographical memories, whereas free and cued recall of word pair memories were unaffected. Additionally, participants reported fewer autobiographical episodes as being experienced from a first-person perspective following angular gyrus cTBS. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that a function of angular gyrus within the network of brain regions responsible for episodic recollection is to integrate memory features within an egocentric framework into the kind of first-person perspective representation that enables the subjective experience of remembering events from our personal pasts.

scholarly journals Computational animal welfare: towards cognitive architecture models of animal sentience, emotion and wellbeing

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 201886
Author(s):  
Sergey Budaev ◽  
Tore S. Kristiansen ◽  
Jarl Giske ◽  
Sigrunn Eliassen
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Animal Welfare Science ◽  
Definition Of

To understand animal wellbeing, we need to consider subjective phenomena and sentience. This is challenging, since these properties are private and cannot be observed directly. Certain motivations, emotions and related internal states can be inferred in animals through experiments that involve choice, learning, generalization and decision-making. Yet, even though there is significant progress in elucidating the neurobiology of human consciousness, animal consciousness is still a mystery. We propose that computational animal welfare science emerges at the intersection of animal behaviour, welfare and computational cognition. By using ideas from cognitive science, we develop a functional and generic definition of subjective phenomena as any process or state of the organism that exists from the first-person perspective and cannot be isolated from the animal subject. We then outline a general cognitive architecture to model simple forms of subjective processes and sentience. This includes evolutionary adaptation which contains top-down attention modulation, predictive processing and subjective simulation by re-entrant (recursive) computations. Thereafter, we show how this approach uses major characteristics of the subjective experience: elementary self-awareness, global workspace and qualia with unity and continuity. This provides a formal framework for process-based modelling of animal needs, subjective states, sentience and wellbeing.

Perspectival self-consciousness and ego-dissolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Miguel Angel Sebastian
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Altered States ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Minimal Self ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Minimal Form

It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning. This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness (PFP-Awareness): a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms. With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects.

scholarly journals A Constructive Explanation of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 257-275
Author(s):  
Pei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Self Control ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Functional Aspect ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Third Person

This paper describes the consciousness-related aspects of the AGI system NARS, discusses the implications of this design and compares it with other relevant theories and designs. It is argued that the function of consciousness is self-awareness and self-control, and the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person perspective of the same process for which the functional aspect is the third-person perspective.

scholarly journals TEACHING PSYCHOLOGY AT SCHOOL AS A MEANS OF FORMING AN ARBITRARY FORM OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG TEENAGERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 150-159
Author(s):  
L.A. Stepnova ◽  
◽  
Yu.A. Kostyuk ◽  
N.V. Mikityuk ◽  
L.A. Pryadko ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Arbitrary Form ◽  
Mental Functions ◽  
Teaching Psychology ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Historical Theory

Statement of the problem. The authors analyze the problem of forming an arbitrary form of self-consciousness among teenagers in the process of mastering psychology as a school discipline. The purpose of the article is to develop a concept of teaching psychology at school based on the theory of L.S. Vygotsky about the stages of development of mental functions. The research methodology is based on the cultural and historical theory by L.S. Vygotsky, on the analysis and synthesis of research works by international and Russian scientists on the problems of personal development, in particular, self-consciousness, recognized by the scientific community, as well as the experience of teaching psychology at school. Research results. Based on the cultural and historical theory by L.S. Vygotsky about the development of higher mental functions, the authors suggested and theoretically showed that teaching psychology at school can contribute to the formation of an arbitrary form of self-consciousness among adolescents. Self-coaching, as a form of internal self-communication, is a psychological means of developing self-awareness. Based on this, the preparation of psychology teaching programs for grades 5–11 should be based on a system of psychological knowledge, skills and abilities that allow a teenager to achieve a better self-awareness at each age stage. On the basis of this conceptual system, teenagers form their own psychological concept, “psychological theory”, which is the basis for understanding, interpreting and correcting their own thoughts, desires, actions, and behavior of people around them. Conclusion. The authors’ concept of teaching psychology at school, which includes self-coaching as a controlled form of internal dialogue, provides a student with a system of psychological concepts that contribute to the generalization and awareness of the subjective experience of his / her self-feelings, reflections and experiences.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document