The self in action effects: selective attenuation of self-generated sounds

The immediate experience of self-agency, that is, the experience of generating and controlling our actions, is thought to be a key aspect of selfhood. It has been suggested that this experience is intimately linked to internal motor signals associated with the ongoing actions. These signals should lead to an attenuation of the sensory consequences of one’s own actions and thereby allow classifying them as self-generated. The discovery of shared representations of actions between self and other, however, challenges this idea and suggests similar attenuation of one’s own and other’s sensory action effects.Here, we tested these assumptions by comparing sensory attenuation of self-generated and observed sensory effects. More specifically, we compared the loudness perception of sounds that were either self-generated, generated by another person or a computer. In two experiments, we found a reduced perception of loudness intensity specifically related to self-generation. Furthermore, the perception of sounds generated by another person and a computer did not differ from each other. These findings indicate that one’s own agentive influence upon the outside world has a special perceptual quality which distinguishes it from any sort of external influence, including human and non-human sources. This suggests that a real sense of self-agency is not a socially shared but rather a unique and private experience.     

Veiled Reality and Structural Realism

Abstract

The noted philosopher of science, Bernard d'Espagnat, tries to mediate between objective reality and empirical reality via the notion of veiled reality: namely, while the laws proper to things in themselves are unknown, their existence and interrelated activity can be inferred from observation and analysis of human experience. The author claims that Whiteheadian creativity offers a better candidate for the notion of veiled reality because it is a transcendent activity, not a transcendent actuality. Likewise, a revision of the Whiteheadian category of society as a structured field of activity for its constituent actual entities indirectly confirms Henri Poincaré's notion of structural realism.     

IF OUR GENES ARE FOR US,WHO CAN BE AGAINST US? THOUGHTS OF A PRAGMATIST ON SCIENCE AND MORALITY

Abstract. The philosopher Michael Ruse accounts for the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, and thus the origin of distinctively moral obligations like that of altruism, in genetic terms. This is part of an attempt to develop a philosophy that takes Darwin seriously by substituting respectable scientific entities, specifically those of evolutionary biology, for suspect theological or philosophical ones, like God or the transcendental ego, as a basis for addressing philosophical questions. Pragmatists take Darwin seriously, but in a very different way from that proposed by Ruse. Darwin introduced a “logic” into the study of living things—including human beings, the human mind, and culture— that leads philosophers to ask new and different questions about morality rather than trying to supply new answers to the same old questions. This essay contrasts these two different ways of taking Darwin seriously for purposes of philosophy and claims certain advantages for the pragmatist way over Ruse's.     

On the minimal relative motion principle—the oscillating tilted bar

Beghi, Xausa, Tomat, and Zanforlin (J. Math. Psychol. 41(1997) 11) present a visual stereokinetic illusion. In the image plane, one end of an oblique bar moves horizontally back and forth, while the other end is stationary. Perceptually, this becomes a bar of a constant length rotating in depth around a vertical axis that passes through the stationary end of the bar. Beghi et al. (1997) provide a mathematical model of minimal relative motion to account for this percept. Here we show that the minimal relative motion principle cannot explain the perceptual phenomenon. Specifically, we raise two objections. (1) It is necessary to consider not only the length, but also the direction, of a vector when comparing vector fields. In fact, when directions are taken into consideration, Beghi et al.'s mathematical result diverges from their perceptual experimental result. (2) There is a mathematical inconsistency in Beghi et al. (1997): mixing absolute and relative velocities in their minimization is unwarranted, and does not lead to correct minimization.