An approach to scientific understanding of mind by defining a set of all possible contents of consciousness

• Autorzy: Togawa T.
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

The lack of a well-defined concept of consciousness which could be accessible from both the mental and neural aspects is a serious obstruction in understanding the mind. This article is an attempt to introduce a concept of the content space which is definable from the mental side but also relates to neural models. The content space is defined as a set of all possible contents of consciousness, irrespective of the fact whether the each content corresponds to the already-realized conscious experience or not. The conscious event at any moment can be regarded as a result of the past, including all the effects from the outside and the inside of the brain, and the conscious event tends to produce effects on the inside and outside of the brain. This feature can be interpreted as a mental aspect of the neural activity, so that firing of a specific neuron corresponds to a conscious event specific to a certain element of the content space. By introducing the concept of the content space, the neural and mental facets are understood as two different facets of the same event. A specific feature of the contents of the consciousness in humans is that they can be expressed by language. Thus, the linguistic accessibility or the introspection is limited by the content space. According to this assumption, unconscious events cannot be mental but are purely neural. Consequently, no room remains to suspect any mysterious neural instrument in which unconscious mental processes are took place. The self and subjectivity have been shown to be comprehensible without assuming any unknown function.

Słowa kluczowe

EN

consciousness; content space; language; causal law; self; subjectivity

PL

świadomość; język; subiektywność

• Wydawca: Nałęcz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences ; Elsevier
• Czasopismo: Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering
• Rocznik: 2006
• Tom: Vol. 26, no. 1
• Strony: 5--20
• Opis fizyczny: Bibliogr. 11 poz.

Twórcy

autor

Togawa T.

• School of Human Sciences, Waseda University, 2-579-15 Mikajima, Tokorozawa, Saitama 359-1192, Japan,

Bibliografia

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