New approaches in counselling: Healthy diversity or anti-therapeutic?

Concern is expressed about the proliferation of new or 'innovative' approaches in counselling or psychotherapy. Most of these approaches appear to be regressive in that they ignore what we have learned about the importance of certain conditions for the therapeutic relationship. They place the counsellor or therapist in the position of a charismatic expert controlling and directing the lives of his clients. The potential dangers of these methods are noted. Yet there seems to be no good way to protect clients either from well-intentioned but misguided professionals or from the untrained non-professional. If professionals are not successful in policing the field, injured consumers and an aroused public may succeed in imposing unnecessarily rigid restrictions on all practice of counselling and psychotherapy.     

The structure of audio–visual consciousness

Synthese - It is commonly believed that human perceptual experiences can be, and usually are, multimodal. What is more, a stronger thesis is often proposed that some perceptual multimodal...     

The cognitive foundations of visual consciousness: Why should we favour a processing approach?

How can we investigate the foundations of consciousness? In addressing this question, we will focus on the two main strategies that authors have adopted so far. On the one hand, there is research aimed at characterizing a specific content, which should account for conscious states. We may call this the content approach. On the other hand, one finds the processing approach, which proposes to look for a particular way of processing to account for consciousness. . Our aim, in this paper, is to develop arguments for the latter approach. We focus on a criticism of Jesse Prinz’s AIR theory of consciousness. We have chosen Prinz’s theory because it incorporates features of both the content and processing approaches, and discussing it will therefore allow us to compare the advantages and downsides of both. Our argument will focus in particular on the notion of intermediate-level. We will discuss how Prinz characterizes the intermediate-level according to a content approach, and argue that such a characterization is inadequate. Finally, we will argue in favor of processing approach to the problem of consciousness, which also accounts for the massive interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in the brain. Even though consciousness remains an unsolved riddle, we claim that this is the best path towards a solution.     

The neural representation of concrete nouns: what's right and what's left?

In a recent paper, Fiebach and Friederici review the literature in the functional imaging of abstract and concrete nouns, and present an fMRI study. They conclude that (a) there is no evidence for a right hemispheric imaginal system that is specifically associated with concrete nouns, and (b) there is evidence supporting aspects of both the context-availability and dual-coding accounts of noun processing. I relate this result to aspects of process and representation, and the anatomy of the ventral temporal lobe.     

The Trinity: A New Wave?

Books reviewed in this article:
Bruce Marshall, Trinity and Truth
Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition
David S. Cunningham, These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology
Denis Edwards, The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology     

How many kinds of consciousness?

Ned Block's influential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has become a staple of current discussions of consciousness. It is not often noted, however, that his distinction tacitly embodies unargued theoretical assumptions that favor some theoretical treatments at the expense of others. This is equally so for his less widely discussed distinction between phenomenal consciousness and what he calls reflexive consciousness. I argue that the distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, as Block draws it, is untenable. Though mental states that have qualitative character plainly differ from those with no mental qualities, a mental state's being conscious is the same property for both kinds of mental state. For one thing, as Block describes access consciousness, that notion does not pick out any property that we intuitively count as a mental state's being conscious. But the deeper problem is that Block's notion of phenomenal consciousness, or phenomenality, is ambiguous as between two very different mental properties. The failure to distinguish these results in the begging of important theoretical questions. Once the two kinds of phenomenality have been distinguished, the way is clear to explain qualitative consciousness by appeal to a model such as the higher-order-thought hypothesis.     

Exemplarization: a solution to the problem of consciousness?

In recent publications, Keith Lehrer developed the intriguing idea of a special mental process??exemplarization??and applied it in a sophisticated manner to different phenomena such as intentionality, representation of the self, the knowledge of ineffable content (of art works) and the problem of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper I am primarily concerned with the latter issue. The target of this paper is to analyze whether exemplarization, besides explaining epistemic phenomena such as immediate and ineffable knowledge of experiences, can also solve the ontological problem of consciousness. In particular, Lehrer suggests that if we consider exemplarization, zombies cannot provide an argument for anti-physicalism. I argue that exemplarization offers neither a physicalist explanation of the conceivability of zombies nor an elucidating physicalist account of their impossibility. Therefore, exemplarization cannot offer a physicalist solution to the ??hard problem?? of consciousness.     

The function of phenomenal states: is there progress for the "softer problem" of consciousness?

The function of phenomenal states remains a mystery, primarily because of the prevalent, a priori view that these states serve no functional role. This note is a call to arms against this uncorroborated and counterproductive view, which continues to stifle research on the topic. It is proposed that, given what we know and can accomplish with the tools at hand, discovering the function of phenomenal states has become a tractable problem, easier than that of discovering the neural basis of these states--the "hard problem" of consciousness. A simple method that may unveil the function of phenomenal states is presented. It involves contrasting the task demands of conscious and unconscious processes.     

The neural substrate for dreaming: is it a subsystem of the default network?

Building on the content, developmental, and neurological evidence that there are numerous parallels between waking cognition and dreaming, this article argues that the likely neural substrate that supports dreaming, which was discovered through converging lesion and neuroimaging studies, may be a subsystem of the waking default network, which is active during mind wandering, daydreaming, and simulation. Support for this hypothesis would strengthen the case for a more general neurocognitive theory of dreaming that starts with established findings and concepts derived from studies of waking cognition and neurocognition. If this theory is correct, then dreaming may be the quintessential cognitive simulation because it is often highly complex, often includes a vivid sensory environment, unfolds over a duration of a few minutes to a half hour, and is usually experienced as real while it is happening.     

The great subjective back-referral debate: Do neural responses increase during a train of stimuli?

Evidence is summarised for and against the hypothesis that potentiation or facilitation of neural responses during a train of threshold-level stimuli occurred in the experiments reported by . It is concluded that such potentiation probably did occur. Since the main arguments for the existence of subjective backwards referral () take it as given that such potentiation did not occur, it is further concluded that the main arguments for the existence of subjective backwards referral fail.