Discrepancy between subjective autobiographical reliving and objective recall: The past as seen by Alzheimer’s disease patients

This paper investigated whether Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients may demonstrate a discrepancy between subjective autobiographical reliving and objective recall. To this end, 31 AD patients and 35 controls were asked to retrieve three autobiographical memories. For each memory, participants were asked to rate its subjective characteristics (e.g., reliving, travel in time, visual imagery…). Besides this subjective assessment, we analyzed recall objectively with regard to specificity. Results showed poorer subjective autobiographical reliving and objective recall in AD patients than in controls. A discrepancy (i.e., higher level of subjective reliving than of objective recall) was observed in AD but not in control participants. Despite a compromise in their objective recall, AD patients seemed to attribute a high value to their subjective autobiographical experience. This discrepancy can be attributed to a potential genuine consciousness experience in which mild AD patients can, to some extent, experience some subjective features of the past.     

Impure temporalities in the history of political philosophy: the historiography of dēmokratia in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT

Building on Bernard Williams’ thesis about the intertwining of history and political philosophy, the essay explores how the problem of the history of dēmokratia after the late-eighteenth and over the nineteenth-century in Britain constituted a primary and critical field in which the philosophical meaning of democracy was debated. Configuring a new temporal perspective grounded in the relationship between ancient and modern democracy, historiographical works by John Gillies, William Mitford, and George Grote put forth an understanding of the concept as a battlefield, involving several conflicting meanings, narratives and historical forces. This historiographical tradition highlighted the tensions underpinning the definition of democracy in the long-term temporal frame linking antiquity and modernity. So even more than contemporary philosophical and political writings, historical understanding constituted a unique concept of democracy that both concentrated and dispersed meaning; it was not just one vision of democracy, among others, but one that acquired the paradoxical power to forge some semantic stability and coherence over time, and to accentuate the threat of the concept’s break up into distinct political premises and historical moments that constituted it.     

Birthing consciousness: A lacuna in evolutionary psychological science

In this article, I argue that there is a lacuna in evolutionary psychological science. Women most likely adapted, via natural selection processes, to handle the birthing process successfully; not only physically and culturally, but also psychologically and behaviorally. However, current literature of evolutionary psychology largely ignores this reasonable assumption. A look at current prominent literature from the field revealed a consensus that women before and after birth are functioning subjects, shaped by natural selection to maximize success in reproduction. However, it appears that the same literature has little to say about the behavioral and psychological responses of women during birth itself. This is the lacuna discussed in the article. In other fields of research, different behaviors and mental processes have been found to correlate with a successful natural birth. Selection would likely have favored women who had such positive responses during birth because it is a process that all individuals must go through; natural childbirth was an integral part of reproductive success before modern obstetrics existed. Implications for resolving this lacuna vary widely and may contribute to our understanding of how selection might have shaped the human mind in general, as well as the female mind in particular.     

Women,philosophy and the history of philosophy*

ABSTRACT

It is only in the last 30 years that any appreciable work has been done on women philosophers of the past. This paper reflects on the progress that has been made in recovering early-modern women philosophers in that time and the role of the history of philosophy in that process. I argue that as women are integrated into the broader picture of philosophy, there is a danger of overlooking the different conditions under which they originally philosophized and which shaped their philosophies. Having retrieved them from oblivion, we now face the challenge of avoiding a ‘new amnesia’ by developing historical narratives and modes of analysis which acknowledge the different conditions within which they worked, without diminishing their contribution to philosophy. I offer these remarks as a contribution to current debates about the forms that historical narrative should take, and the best way to promote women in philosophy today, in the belief that we can learn from our own more recent history.     

The temporally-integrated causality landscape: A theoretical framework for consciousness and meaning

Theoretical approaches to understanding consciousness have begun to converge upon areas of general agreement, yet substantive differences remain. Here, I introduce a new theoretical framework for the emergence of consciousness from the functional integration of the thalamocortical system: the Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape (TICL). TICL presents a novel perspective which addresses important phenomenological characteristics of consciousness that other frameworks, such as IIT, do not. First, the TICL is based upon the observation that conscious experiences are temporally continuous, not discrete. Secondly, the TICL establishes a thalamocortical basis for the point-of-view. According to TICL, consciousness is composed of contents that arise from neuronal subsystems that have meaning from the point-of-view of the larger, integrated system in which they are nested. Meaningful contents emerge from the subsystems because they exhibit a level of temporally-integrated causality (TIC) that is distinguishable from that of the larger system.     

Elisabeth of Bohemia's Neo-Peripatetic account of the emotions

ABSTRACT

This article examines Elisabeth of Bohemia's account of the emotions. I argue that Elisabeth's objections against Descartes' ethics, which is often characterized as ‘Neo-Stoic’, show striking similarities to the arguments that the ancient Peripatetics made against classical Stoic approaches. Like the Peripatetics, she challenges the feasibility as well as the desirability of Descartes' ethical injunctions regarding emotional control. In particular, Elisabeth joins the Peripatetics in holding that certain external goods are essential for happiness and that the emotions are necessary for motivating, guiding and correcting action. In aligning Elisabeth's thinking about the emotions with the Aristotelian tradition, I depart from various other interpretations, especially from those who see her position as a precursor of later feminist accounts, or as embodying a distinctively female perspective.     

Evoked and event-related potentials in disorders of consciousness: A quantitative review

Sixty-one publications about evoked and event-related potentials (EP and ERP, respectively) in patients with severe Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) were found and analyzed from a quantitative point of view. Most studies are strongly underpowered, resulting in very broad confidence intervals (CI). Results of such studies cannot be correctly interpreted, because, for example, CI > 1 (in terms of Cohen’s d) indicate that the real effect may be very strong, very weak, or even opposite to the reported effect. Furthermore, strong negative correlations were obtained between sample size and effect size, indicating a possible publication bias. These correlations characterized not only the total data set, but also each thematically selected subset. The minimal criteria of a strong study to EP/ERP in DoC are proposed: at least 25 patients in each patient group; as reliable diagnosis as possible; the complete report of all methodological details and all details of results (including negative results); and the use of appropriate methods of data analysis. Only three of the detected 60 studies (5%) satisfy these criteria. The limitations of the current approach are also discussed.     

Singularity and consciousness: A neuropsychological contribution

In common sense experience based on introspection, consciousness is singular. There is only one ‘me’ and that is the one that is conscious. This means that ‘singularity’ is a defining aspect of ‘consciousness’. However, the three main theories of consciousness, Integrated Information, Global Workspace and Recurrent Processing theory, are generally not very clear on this issue. These theories have traditionally relied heavily on neuropsychological observations and have interpreted various disorders, such as anosognosia, neglect and split-brain as impairments in conscious awareness without any reference to ‘the singularity’. In this review, we will re-examine the theoretical implications of these impairments in conscious awareness and propose a new way how to conceptualize consciousness of singularity. We will argue that the subjective feeling of singularity can coexist with several disunified conscious experiences. Singularity awareness may only come into existence due to environmental response constraints. That is, perceptual, language, memory, attentional and motor processes may largely proceed unintegrated in parallel, whereas a sense of unity only arises when organisms need to respond coherently constrained by the affordances of the environment. Next, we examine from this perspective psychiatric disorders and psycho-active drugs. Finally, we present a first attempt to test this hypothesis with a resting state imaging experiment in a split-brain patient. The results suggest that there is substantial coherence of activation across the two hemispheres. These data show that a complete lesioning of the corpus callosum does not, in general, alter the resting state networks of the brain. Thus, we propose that we have separate systems in the brain that generate distributed conscious. The sense of singularity, the experience of a ‘Me-ness’, emerges in the interaction between the world and response-planning systems, and this leads to coherent activation in the different functional networks across the cortex.     

Breaking Surface Feature Continuity of Previewed Mask Reinstates Object Substitution Masking12

Perception of a briefly presented target is impaired when a sparse surrounding mask (e.g., four-dot) persists after target offset compared to when the target and mask offset together (i.e., object substitution masking [OSM]). Previous studies have reported a mask preview effect in which OSM is largely attenuated by prior presentation of the mask. Here, we investigated how breaking object continuity of the previewed mask affects the mask preview effect. Introducing an abrupt surface color change of the previewed mask at target onset disrupted the beneficial effect of mask preview, that is, OSM was reinstated (Experiment 1). The masking induced by mask color change exhibited the same two characteristics as conventional OSM: target location specificity and non-necessity of voluntary attention to the mask (Experiment 2). These results suggest that a sudden change in surface color breaks object continuity of the previewed mask and causes the mask to be represented as a new one, which triggers OSM anew.