All Themes

Consciousness

6 peer-reviewed articles

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Consciousness

Consciousness refers to our subjective experience, broadly construed. It thus embraces a wide range of phenomena from wakefulness and sentience to what it is like to have a particular experience. Seeing the blueness of the ocean, hearing the sounds of the seagulls, and feeling pure joy: the subjecti

Claire Sergent, Frédérique de Vignemont 13 min

Consciousness and AI

Consciousness is what distinguishes the familiar thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences of waking life from the processes that go on in our brains without our awareness. Conscious experiences feel some way for the subject and seem to afford the subject a distinctive form of first-person access.

Patrick Butlin 7 min
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Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness

Higher-order theories of consciousness seek to explain what it is for a mental state to be conscious. In particular, they seek to explain how mental states that are conscious differ from mental states that are not. All higher-order theories rest on the commonsense observation that whenever a mental

David Rosenthal 11 min
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Infant Consciousness

The study of infant consciousness investigates when subjective experience begins, how it unfolds, and how it maps onto neural and psychological development in the early years of life. In the first year, infants’ sensory, motor, cognitive, and social abilities expand as the brain matures. It is widel

Claudia Passos-Ferreira 11 min
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Self-Consciousness

To be self-conscious is to be aware of oneself. This deceptively simple formulation raises a host of important questions that have long been a central focus within philosophy. Some of these questions are metaphysical, to do with what sort of object, if any, a self is. Others are epistemological, to

José Luis Bermúdez 20 min
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Unconscious Inference

Unconscious inference refers to the rapid and unconscious, high-level choices made by the visual system to quickly organize input from the eyes into a coherent scene comprising objects, depth, light, and action. The core challenge for vision is that each pattern in an image may have many interpretat

Patrick Cavanagh 12 min