Conscious Vision in Action

It is natural to assume that the fine‐grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH), according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom‐up spatial information are entirely non‐conscious (Clark, 2007, 2009; Goodale & Milner, 1992, 2004a; Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006, 2008). In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, selecting targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform” (Clark, 2007, p. 570). Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention.     

Gender Conscious

Integration has had a bad press in recent years. Feminists and spokesmen for racial and ethnic minorities express concern that the integrationist agenda requires women and members of minorities to divest themselves of features of their "identities" in order to approximate to a restrictive white male ideal which, they hold, should not be a requirement for fair treatment and social benefits. I argue that this concern is unwarranted and that "Integration" with respect to gender, as I shall understand it, is overall more conducive to the happiness of both men and women than what I shall call "Diversity".     

Conscious Ambivalence

Although ambivalence in a strict sense, according to which a person holds opposed attitudes, and holds them as opposed, is an ordinary and widespread phenomenon, it appears impossible on the common presupposition that persons are either unitary or plural. These two conceptions of personhood call for dispensing with ambivalence by employing tactics of harmonizing, splitting, or annulling the unitary subject. However, such tactics are useless if ambivalence is sometimes strictly conscious. This paper sharpens the notion of conscious ambivalence, such that the above tactics cannot be applied to ordinary moments of explicit and clear ambivalent consciousness. It is shown that such moments reveal ambivalence as an attitude that is part of human life. The argument employs three features of consciousness that together capture its outgoing character (a notion that combines intentionality and self-consciousness). In the last section some of the implications of conscious ambivalence for consciousness and the mind are clarified as the analysis of conscious ambivalence in this paper is compared with Hume’s and John Barth’s phenomenalist conceptions.     

意识思维和无意识思维对复杂决策的影响

以大学生为被试,以汽车作为实验材料,通过对12条汽车属性信息的操纵,设置出四款优差不同的汽车。通过对汽车的优差选择,探察在属性信息逐条呈现的情况下,有意识思维与无意识思维对复杂决策的影响。研究结果表明:在反应时上,无意识思维下的决策时间要比有意识思维下的决策时间长;在选择的正确率上,有意识思维决策的结果要优于无意识思维决策的结果;在信息回忆量上,有意识思维决策的回忆量要多于无意识思维决策的回忆量,这与无意识思维理论是相违背的。     

Fears as Conscious Perceivings

Peter Goldie has argued for the view that the intentionality of emotions is inseparable from their phenomenology (IPE), but certain criticisms have revealed his argument as problematic. I will argue that it is possible to address these problems, at least in the case of the emotion of fear, thereby vindicating IPE, by appeal to a Husserlian version of the perceptual account of emotions, centered on the idea that the contents of perceptual experiences are fulfillment conditions. Fulfillment means the achievement of a kind of immediate, or “full”, experience of an object or some of its aspects. In the case of visual perception, suppose you are looking at an apple. If you turn it around, you will find yourself in full view of its back side, which was previously anticipated “emptily”, fulfilling or disappointing (confirming or disconfirming) some of your anticipations in regard to it. On the Husserlian view, the success or failure of a visual perceptual experience consists in such fulfillments and disappointments. If we can provide an account of the intentionality of emotions along similar lines, it will necessarily involve the phenomenal contrast between fullness and emptiness, enabling us to support IPE.     

Conscious behavior explained.

Current neurobiological research on temporal binding in binocular rivalry settings contributes to a better understanding of the neural correlate of perceptual consciousness. This research can easily be integrated into a theory of conscious behavior, but if it is meant to promote a naturalistic theory of perceptual consciousness itself, it is confronted with the notorious explanatory gap argument according to which any statement of psychophysical correlations (and their interpretation) leaves the phenomenal character of, e.g., states of perceptual consciousness open. It is argued that research on temporal binding plays no role in a naturalistic theory of consciousness if the gap argument can be solved on internal philosophical grounds or if it turns out to be unsolvable at the time being. But there may be a way to dissolve or deconstruct it, and the accessibility of this way may well depend on scientific progress, including neurobiological research on the neural correlate of perceptual consciousness.     

The Zombie Archetype: Living in a Viral Culture

When psyche brings forth monsters, it is always wise to take a close look. When the active imagination of global culture fixates on a particular kind of monster, there's a veritable treasure trove of hidden meaning and valuable psychological information to be unearthed. Zombies warrant closer scrutiny for several reasons: (1) They are currently enjoying a place in the cultural spotlight; (2) they embody the loss of will and the disempowerment that occurs in so many of the situations humans fear and loathe the most; and (3) they are remarkably flexible metaphors that stand in as symbols for social ills as disparate as viral pandemics, the evils of technology, and the chaos that threatens to take over in the face of political collapse. What is behind the popular appeal of the brain-devouring quest of the walking dead? Can the lure be linked to globalization and the inevitable sharing of biohazardous particulates among the people of the world? Or can it be further reduced to a manifestation of the primordial fear of death itself? This article examines zombies across time and place and finds them to be worthy representations of the specters of frightening forces that hunt down and haunt the living.     

Zombie Alleluias: Learning to Live in the Space Between Worlds

This essay was delivered as the Baer Seminar on Pastoral Care at an alumni/ae reunion of Princeton Theological Seminary on October 22, 2013, and at a Princeton Seminary alumni/ae gathering at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, on February 10, 2014. It considers an increasing fascination with zombies in recent American cultural life as a means by which individuals attempt to cope with anxieties related to the rise of political and religious extremism in the post-9/11 landscape. Building on Freud’s recognition of fundamentalist tendencies within the human psyche and his sense that modern persons are living psychologically “beyond their means,” it calls for an empathic embrace of the complexities of what Donald Capps deems the “ecumenical self” as a path toward engaging personal threats within and without.     

依恋表征的意识和无意识性初探

采用关系等级问卷、亲密关系经历问卷和内隐联想测验(IAT)分别作为研究依恋表征的外显和内隐的测量工具,以103名处于恋爱关系中的大学生和研究生为被试,探讨一般依恋表征和特殊依恋表征的意识性与无意识性以及它们的一致性。结果发现:(1)一般依恋表征和特殊依恋表征中,安全型和恐惧型的个体在无意识层面上的反应时表现与外显理论相符,过度投入型的被试意识和无意识的表现不一致;(2)个体在无意识水平上对目标人物积极评价的差异与个体在意识水平上的依恋状况(一般依恋关系和婚恋关系)有关。(3)一般依恋表征中过度投入型和冷漠型被试,内隐联想测验和外显依恋量表结果一致的占33%;特殊依恋表征中过度投入型和冷漠型被试,内隐联想测验和外显依恋量表结果一致的占37%。     

Zombie states: reconsidering the relationship between life and death instincts

Where the dialectical relation of life and death instincts has become dissociated, zombie states result-in which individuals inhabit deadness as if it were a full experience of aliveness. Bypassing reservations about the speculative nature of these instincts, this paper reconsiders their relation in order to highlight certain types of clinical phenomenology that could otherwise be lost to current ways of conceptualizing aliveness and deadness. A clinical vignette illustrates particular countertransference difficulties associated with dichotomizing issues of psychic aliveness and deadness, as well as the powerful contagion associated with what the author terms zombie states.     

Conscious contributions to subliminal priming

Choice reaction times to visual stimuli (targets) may be influenced by preceding subliminal stimuli (primes). Some authors reported a straight priming effect i.e., responses were faster when primes and targets called for the same response than when they called for different responses. Others found the reversed pattern of results. Eimer and Schlaghecken [Eimer, M. & Schlaghecken, F. (2002). Links between conscious awareness and response inhibition: evidence from masked priming. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review, 9, 514-520.] showed recently that straight priming occurs whenever a prime is not efficiently masked thereby the information provided by the prime is accessible for consciousness. In the present study, a hypothesis is tested that straight priming is due to mediation of consciousness. To test this hypothesis, prime validity was manipulated. We showed that even when no mask was used so that participants could fully and consciously perceive the prime and participants were informed that primes were mostly invalid, for the short prime-target ISI interval (100 ms) straight priming occurred. The priming was inverse when the ISI was 800 ms. This indicates that participants were able to use the information provided by the prime to prepare the response opposite to that cued by the prime but only if the time between the prime and the target was long enough.     

Conscious intention and motor cognition

The subjective experience of conscious intention is a key component of our mental life. Philosophers studying 'conscious free will' have discussed whether conscious intentions could cause actions, but modern neuroscience rejects this idea of mind-body causation. Instead, recent findings suggest that the conscious experience of intending to act arises from preparation for action in frontal and parietal brain areas. Intentional actions also involve a strong sense of agency, a sense of controlling events in the external world. Both intention and agency result from the brain processes for predictive motor control, not merely from retrospective inference.     

What is Conscious Attention?

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. William James Principles of Psychology     

自发的类与自觉的类

前几年,关于人类社会由群体本位走向个体本位再走向类本位的思想在哲学界产生过广泛影响.对于这一思想,我基本赞同.但我觉得,在人类社会的起点上似乎应向前再推一步,即人类社会是由类本位走向群本位走向个体本位再向类本位"复归"……这里,前后有两个"类",前一个是自发的类,后一个则是自觉的类,后者比前者发展层次更高.