Imperfect Cognitions

This post is part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media . Today, Qi Wang talks about her research on the triangular self. Her paper, ‘ The triangular self in the social media era ’, is now available open access. Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University. Her research examines how cultural forces, including the Internet technology, impact autobiographical memory and the sense of self. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture (OUP 2013) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition . Qi Wang In the era of social media, we can share online our daily experiences as our lives unfold, at any time and as frequently as we’d like, with diverse audiences physically afar. This way of remembering and sharing personal experiences is unprecedented in human history. It also uniquely contributes to how we view ourselves in a digitally mediated world. I propose a triangular theory of self...

Today’s post is by  Giovanni Boniolo , Professor of Philosophy of Science and Medical Humanities in the Department of Neuroscience and Rehabilitation at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Giovanni Boniolo Since 2018, I have been appointed as Scientific Director of the Civitas Vitae Research Centre ( CVRC ). This is a new department of the Fondazione OIC onlus (Padova, Italy) devoted to seeking, implementing and disseminating sociological and ethical innovative procedures and strategies aimed to improve the quality of life of people who are vulnerable and fragile due to age or disability.  The Fondazione OIC onlus  is an innovative nursing home with about 1500 guests (from about 65 to about 100 years old) and 1700 operators, where the values of longevity as a resource, intergenerationality, positive culture of the limit, and fragility are intended as opportunities for social networking. Since its establishment, the CVRC has been realizing several initiatives and research p...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by  Anastasia Christakou  and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and co...

Today's post is written by Helen de Cruz . Helen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University , UK. Her publications are in empirically-informed Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Religion, Social Epistemology, and Metaphilosophy.  Helen's overarching research project is an investigation of how human engage in thinking about abstract domains such as Theology, Mathematics, and Science, what it means for limited, embodied beings like us to think about these topics, and what epistemic conclusions we can draw from this. Here, she introduces her new book " Religious Disagreement ". I find myself frequently in disagreement about religion with academic colleagues and friends and family. Given that I'm a philosopher of religion, this is not surprising. But my experiences are far from unique: religious disagreement is widespread even among quite homogeneous religious communities. There is disagreement both between and within religi...

This post is by Marc Wittmann , Research Fellow at the Institute of Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Here, he writes about his new book on altered states of consciousness. Subjective time emerges through the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity. This is clearly revealed in everyday states of consciousness such as transiently being in states of boredom or flow. An increased awareness of the self is associated with an increased awareness of time when we are bored. In contrast, we lose track of time and the self when fully immersed in challenging activities accompanied by the feeling of enjoyment – experienced in the state of flow. The relation between self-awareness and time is even more prominently disclosed in anecdotal reports and empirical studies on altered states of consciousness such as in meditative states, in music-induced trance, and after ingestion of psychedelic substances. In peak states the exper...

This post is by Olley Pearson who is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. Olley focuses on metaphysics, though he considers a number of topics from this perspective including the nature of rationality, the self, the emotions, time, and ontological fundamentality. In the post Olley describes some of the core themes of his recent book Rationality, Time, and Self. In this book I provide a new argument for the tensed theory of time and the emergence of the self: there is more to time and ourselves than some philosophers suggest. The basis of this argument is a concern that peculiarities of meaning alone are not enough to account for the special role that is played in our lives by tensed and first-personal utterances and the beliefs they express (here known as tensed and first-personal beliefs). Perry style cases in which a specific individual must perform an action at a specific time have made it clear that we sometimes need tensed ...

This post is by Chris Letheby . In recent decades there has been a growing interdisciplinary attempt to understand self-awareness by integrating empirical results from neuroscience and psychiatry with philosophical theorizing. This is exemplified by the enterprise known as ‘philosophical psychopathology’, in which observations about unusual cognitive conditions are used to infer conclusions about the functioning of the healthy mind. But this line of research has been somewhat limited by the fact that pathological alterations to self-awareness are unpredictable and can only be studied retrospectively—until now. The recent resurgence of scientific interest in ‘classic’, serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin has changed all this. Using more rigorous methods than some of their forebears, psychiatrists have shown that psychedelics can, after all, be given safely in clinical contexts, and may even cause lasting psychological benefits. Small studies have shown ...

This post is by  Raphaël Millière  (University of Oxford), reporting from the interdisciplinary conference The Sense of Self  hosted by the Ertegun Scholarship Programme and held from 29th-31st of May at the University of Oxford.  The idea that a sense of self pervades ordinary conscious experience appears to have at least an intuitive appeal for a number of authors in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The aim of this conference was to investigate the very notion of sense of self, which is notoriously elusive and polysemous.  In order to bring some clarity to these discussions and to bridge the gap between conceptual and experimental approaches to the notion, philosophers and scientists were invited to present their work and participate in this interdisciplinary exchange over the course of three days. The first morning was dedicated to conceptual issues regarding the sense of self. The philosopher Marie Guillot (Un...

In this post I interview Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen . VM: In an interesting study published in Qualitative Health Research you used a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of self, other, and the world in patients who had recently suffered a stroke and were experiencing hemispatial neglect. Could you say a bit more about the study, and expand on the idea that the findings show the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the process of rehabilitation? DZ : In that study we investigated first person accounts of neglect soon after a stroke. Many stroke patients experience hemispatial neglect, that is, they no longer notice the left side of their body and the perceptual field.  We interviewed 12 patients, using an open-ended format. When interviewing the patients, we were guided by phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity, and sought to explore the way these impairments affected the patients’ experiences....

This post is by Kengo Miyazono  (pictured above), an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University. Here he summarises his recent paper ' Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind? ', recently published in Synthese. [Penultimate draft available here ]. Andy Clark and David Chalmers ( 1998 ) present the following famous case. Otto Otto suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and like many Alzheimer's patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. […] Today, Otto hears about the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. He consults the notebook, which says that the museum is on 53rd Street, so he walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. Clark and Chalmers (hereafter C & C) argue that 'Otto believed the museum was on ...

This post is by Cherise Rosen (pictured above). Cherise is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has conducted extensive research on issues involving the symptoms and longitudinal course of psychosis.  Her research has focused on the phenomenological aspects of psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, metacognition, and self-disturbances. Much of her research follows mixed-methods research designs to elucidate findings that include the subjective experience.  Additionally, her research investigates the underlying epigenetic mechanisms of psychosis. In this post, Cherise summarises her recent paper (co-authored with Nev Jones, Kayla A. Chase, Hannah Gin, Linda S. Grossman, and Rajiv P. Sharma) ' The Intrasubjectivity of Self, Voices, and Delusions: A Phenomenological Analysis ', published in Psychosis.  In our recent study, we focused on the phenomenologically complex and nuanced inte...

In this post, Reinier Schuur, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews  Dominic Murphy  (pictured below), Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, on current debates in the philosophy of psychiatry. RS: Many people have said that over the last 20 years, philosophy of psychiatry has grown, as has the interaction between philosophers and psychiatrists. Do you agree? Do you think this interaction will increase, and what should the role of philosophers be in psychiatry, and vice versa? DM: I suppose it has grown. When I started thinking about psychiatry in the mid-90’s (I started my PhD in 1994), back then there very few philosophers of psychiatry. Reznek had just written his  book  ,  Jennifer Radden  and  Stephen Braude  had written, and  Ian Hacking  was about to start his writing. The field was very small and it has certainly grown. I think probably psychiatrists are interacting with philosophy. There h...

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...

I am posting this on behalf of David Uings, who received an MPhil for research into linguistic miscommunication, and went on to investigate the implications of split-brain research and the two visual pathways in the human brain for the philosophy of mind. His MLitt thesis was entitled Consciousness and Vision in Man: where philosophy has gone wrong. In this post David is presenting his forthcoming book, Better Than One (Karnac 2014). Better Than One by David Uing We have known for more than half a century that if the link between the two halves of the human brain is severed, the separate halves reveal all the components of mindedness: perceptions, beliefs, desires, memories, thoughts and will. There are significant differences between the two minds of split-brain patients. The left mind uses language to report its perceptions, the right mind cannot. The right mind is good at visual tasks such as pattern matching at which the left mind is very poor. When the right mind acts on a...

Natalie Gold This week we publish an interview with Natalie Gold , Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, and Principal Investigator of a five-year project on self-control and the person funded by the European Research Council ( TeamControl ). Project team members include: Jurgis Karpus (PhD student), Marcela Herdova (postdoc), and James Thom (postdoc). Natalie held post-doctoral fellowships in the Probability, Philosophy and Modeling group based at the University of Konstanz, and in the Philosophy Department at Duke University. Before joining King’s College London, she was a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in rationality, decision theory, moral psychology, experimental philosophy and collective intentions. LB : The aim of your project is to explain self-control, defined as the capacity to resist a temptation in order to pursue a long-term goal. How did you become interested in self-control? What problems do you think a ...

Jason Braithwaite I am posting this on behalf of Jason Braithwaite , Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and head of the Selective Attention and Awareness Laboratory (SAAL), and Hayley Dewe , PhD student in the SAAL, in the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Hayley Dewe Using modern methods of neuroscience and psychology, we both research the neurocognition of aberrant and anomalous experiences, including (though not restricted to), the out-of-body experience, dissociation, disorders of embodiment, disembodiment, signs of depersonalization / derealization, aberrant emotional salience in hallucinatory experience, cortical hyperexcitability, and multisensory integration, etc. The rubber-hand illusion (RHI) involves experimentally inducing an anomalous body experience in observers ( Botvinick & Cohen, 1998 ). Typically observers report everything from mild sensations such as their real hand getting cold, to more striking experiences whe...

Glenn Carruthers photographed by Patrick Wilken In my first post I suggested that to explain how we come to experience a sense of embodiment in an artificial hand during the rubber hand illusion we need to represent the rubber hand as sufficiently similar to our own real hand. Building from this insight Manos Tsakiris suggested that a series of explicit comparisons between factors such as seen and felt touch as well as the shape of the seen hand and the known shape of one's own real hand would be needed. However, we might worry that any account like this which requires a specific series of discrete matches to be made doesn't give us enough flexibility to understand the illusion. For example, several studies have suggested that we cannot induce the illusion if we use a non-hand shaped object in place of the prosthesis. However, recent studies using virtual reality have shown that the illusion can be induced for non-hand like objects, including cones and feet, if the il...

Glenn Carruthers photographed by Patrick Wilken Here's something cool we can do: we can make people feel like they experience touch in a lifeless prosthetic hand and even that the prosthesis is their own hand. Not only is this pretty cool in itself, but it actually can be used to tell us quite a bit about the mind. We like this illusion, called the rubber hand illusion, because it lets us alter the experience of a hand being a part of one's body. Before the illusion was discovered this really only occurred following stroke or other forms of traumatic injury to the brain, in a delusion know as somatoparaphrenia sufferers of which claim that one of their body parts belongs to someone else. The discovery of the illusion gave us a way to experiment on this kind of experience. We also like the illusion because it involves, as we will see, the use of information from various different senses to produce a representation of a single object. It thus gives us another way of experi...

Caitrin Donovan I am a student in the Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney . In my recently completed honours dissertation, I argued that the delusional phenomenon of thought insertion problematises certain aspects of the 'minimal model' of self. Many philosophers now believe that the self is in some way constructed by narrative; through socio-linguistically mediated story-telling, we achieve diachronic unity by taking a reflective stance on our experiences. According to the strong formulation of this thesis, conscious beings only develop selves once they acquire the higher-order linguistic and reflective capacities required for autobiographical self-understanding. 

My name is Marina Trakas and I am finishing a PhD on philosophy of memory. I am affiliated with the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the Institut Jean Nicod (Paris), working under the supervision of John Sutton and Jérôme Dokic .   My project aims to develop a general framework for understanding the content of autobiographical and episodic memory experiences as they are lived by human beings in everyday situations. In my thesis, first, I defend the idea that our memories can change through time and so their content can be “enriched” as well as the thesis that our episodic and autobiographical memories cannot be always reduced to a simple verbal description of what happened in our past but they are often charged with evaluative and emotional components. Second, I explore the implications of this conceptualization of our autobiographical and personal memories for judging when our memory experience is faithful to our past. For these purposes, ...