Self, Consciousness, Awareness, Qualia, …

Self Consciousness Body ownership Emotion

P S Churchland: “Self-representation in Nervous Systems”

What is the “Self”?:– “Distributed across brain structures, coordinated only on an ‘as-needed’

basis, and arranged in a loose and loopy hierarchy”

Auditory Hallucination in Schizophrenia:– The “voices” appear to be the patients’ own inner speech, but they suffer

deep confusion about self/nonself boundaries.

Evolution of Self-Representational Capacities:– “Evolution stumbled on solutions for coordinating inner-body signals to

generate survival-appropriate inner regulation.”

Consciousness and Self:– Consciouseness as a system by which the brain distinguishes inner-world

representations from outer-world representations.

M Botvinick: “Probing the Neural Basis of Body Ownership”

How do we distinguish our bodies, but not other objects, as belonging to ourselves?:

• Somatoparaphrenia: Deny ownership of own arm or leg• Rubber-hand illusion: Opposite of Somatoparaphrenia

F Crick & C Koch: “Consciousness and Neuroscience”

NCC (Neural Correlate of Consciousness) and Visual Consciousness:– “Only some types of specific neurons will express the NCC”

– Frontal Lobe Hypothesis

• The Problem of Meaning: A Major Problem- “How does the brain know what the firing of a neuron represents?”

O Sacks “The Mind’s eye: What the blind see”

• J Hull: Deep blindness: the world of vision lost

• Z Torey: Constructing a virtual world of vision, more real, more intense

• S Tenberken: Creating an artistic/novelistic world of vision, via synesthesia

• D Shulman: “I still live in a visual world after thirty-five years of blindness. …, I see the Braiille notes visually—they are visual images, not tactile.”

• A Gordon: “If I move my arms back and forth in front of my eyes, I see them, even though I have been blind for more than thirty years.”

• J Lusseyran: “My screen was always as big as I needed it to be. Because it was nowhere in space and everywhere at the same time…”

• “The world, real or imagined, is a pure illusion, all conjured up inside the head so is the self.” (Anonymous)