Animal Mind: Science,Philosophy, and Ethics

Although 20^th-century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestors – John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, of course, Charles Darwin and George John Romanes. Given the dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned – i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical flaws – is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The “valuational revolution” responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the “reappropriation of common sense” about animal thought and feeling.     

THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS MEANING MAKER IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND RELIGION

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. ¹     

The assessment of recognition memory using the Remember/Know procedure in amnestic mild cognitive impairment and probable Alzheimer’s disease

This study used the Remember/Know (R/K) procedure combined with signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory in 20 elders with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), 10 patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as well as matched healthy older adults. Signal detection analyses first indicated that aMCI and control participants were comparable on general recognition performance. As regards AD patients, they were impaired relative to both aMCI and healthy elders. When assessing Remember and Know responses the aMCI group showed diminished sensitivity for Remember responses but intact Know responses compared to healthy elders. In contrast, AD patients showed decreased sensitivity for both Remember and Know responses compared to control and aMCI participants. The response bias index revealed that AD patients were more liberal than aMCI and control participants when providing Know responses. On the other measures, response bias was comparable between the groups. Overall, this study indicates that the R/K procedure can characterize different aspects of recognition memory performance in persons with aMCI or AD.     

小学四年级儿童简算策略获得的认知过程研究

研究策略获得的过程是了解认知机制的重要途径。本研究采用口语报告和教学实验的结合研究,采用策略意识和策略状况两个维度的评价指标考察,结果表明：策略运用从低到高体现出8级认知序列,策略获得者在策略的掌握过程中有四种认知状态：策略运用初期的倒退状态、策略从不熟练向熟练发展过渡的不稳定状态、策略运用的不彻底状态、有较强的策略意识但缺乏条件化知识的刻板状态。这四种状态反映出,学习者在策略获得过程中策略运用缺陷的常见状况。     

孝意识的时间分析

The reason for the emergence of consciousness of filial piety is that parental care could activate reciprocal filial piety. Parental care and filial piety are two supplementary phenomena caused by the same time consciousness. Phenomenology neglects consciousness of filial piety because it lacks the thinking that sees the fundamental “meaning of time” in the intersection of “past” and “future”. The consciousness of filial piety can only be really constituted by a human being’s personal experience. “Frustrations in personal life” and “breeding of children for oneself” are two occasions for an adult to fight against the separating effect of individualized consciousness and regain awareness of filial piety. Translated by Huang Deyuan from Beijing Daxue Xuebao 北京大学学报 (Journal of Peking University), 2006, (1): 14–24     

"我思":从笛卡儿到萨特

Cogito, as the first principle of Descartes’ metaphysical system, initiated the modern philosophy of consciousness, becoming both the source and subject of modern Western philosophical discourse. The philosophies of Maine de Biran, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others developed by answering the following questions? Is consciousness substantial or not? Does consciousness require the guarantee of a transcendental subject? Is Cogito epistemological or ontological? Am I a being-for-myself or a being-for-others? Outlining the developmental history of the idea of Cogito from Descartes to Sartre is important for totally comprehending the evolution and development of Western philosophy.     

Personal Political Salience: The Role of Personality in Collective Identity and Action

Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.     

On the Correlation between Synchronized Oscillatory Activities and Consciousness

Recent experiments have shown that the amplitudes of cortical gamma band oscillatory activities that occur during anesthesia are often greater than amplitudes of similar activities that occur without anesthesia. This result is apparently at odds with the hypothesis that synchronized oscillatory activities constitute the neural correlate of consciousness. We argue that while synchronization and oscillatory patterning are necessary conditions for consciousness, they are not sufficient. Based on the results of a binocular rivalry study of Fries et al. (1997), we propose that the degrees of oscillatory strength and synchronization of neuronal activities determine the degree of awareness those activities produce. On the other hand, the overal firing rates of neurons in cortical sensory areas are not correlated with the degree of awareness the activities of those neurons produce. The results of the experiment of Fries et al. (1997) appear to conflict with the results of another binocular rivalry experiment, in which monkeys were trained to pull a lever in order to report which stimulus object was being perceived (Leopold & Logothetis, 1996). In the latter experiment, it was demonstrated that the firing rates of neurons in striate cortex did not change during perceptual alterations, while 90% of neurons in inferior and superior temporal cortices changed their firing rate when the perceived image changed. This result led to the conclusion that activities in temporal cortex are correlated with visual awareness, but those in striate cortex are not. We argue that activities in temporal cortex contribute little, if anything, to perceptual awareness, and that their primary function is computational. Thus the correlation between the firing rates of neurons in these areas and the responses of the monkeys is due to the recognition of a particular stimulus object, which in turn is due to the computations made there.