Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Chi Kung Facilitates Integral Growth: An Empirical Investigation, Arnold, C., Bruggerman, E., Kim, H., Combs, A.

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Chi Kung Facilitates Integral Growth: An Empirical Investigation C. Arnold, E. Bruggerman, H. Kim, & A. Combs[1]

Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1949/1986) proposed a theory of the evolutionary development of structures of consciousness that describes the common ways people living in different periods of history interpreted reality and constructed their worldviews. These included four major structures corresponding to four historical epochs, an archaic, magic, mythic, and mental structure which remains dominant today. Citing changes in art, literature, and scientific during the 20th century, Gebser also proposed the emergence of a forthcoming fifth structure, that he termed integral consciousness.

The …

Internal Alchemy, With Michael Winn, Published In "The Empty Vessel"

Journal of Conscious Evolution

No abstract provided.

Alchemical Transformation: Consciousness And Matter, Form And Information, Peat, F. David

Journal of Conscious Evolution

There has grown up, relatively recently, a nucleus of interests called ìconsciousness studiesî in which physicists and mathematicians, as well as neuroscientists and psychologists, attempt to discover the origins of ìconsciousnessî within the brain. A variety of approaches are employed, some based upon neural networks, others that argue that consciousness must have a quantum mechanical basis, or involve self-organization arising out of non-linearity. A common thread is a certain sense of optimism that ìthe question of consciousnessî will yield its secrets in the same way as, for example, the genetic code or sub-atomic matter. I must confess that I find …

Transition To Transcendence: Franklin Merrell-Wolff's Mathematical Yoga, Baruss, Imants

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Mathematicians--those who develop new mathematics--spend much of their time proposing the existence of mathematical constructions whose existence they then proceed to try to prove from the mathematics that has already been developed. Following that, they often try to prove that those mathematical constructions are unique, that there are no other constructions with the same characteristics. In practice, it is often easier to prove the uniqueness of a mathematical construction than its existence, so a mathematician may proceed by first proving uniqueness, as though the mathematical construction existed, and then using clues from the uniqueness proof to prove existence. I want …

The End Of Death? Conscious Life In Global Cyberspace, Purdy, Michael

Journal of Conscious Evolution

In The Ever-Present Origin, Jean Gebser, in talking about the magical structure of consciousness[1], states: "All directing implies a consciousness process" (EPO 49). And so to die is to become not consciousness, to lose the power to direct, ultimately to lose control over our own destiny. Being only human, and realizing that death is often more real than an afterlife that we cannot experience while alive[2], we actively fight any loss of control-we fight the passage to death. In that directedness, the glimmerings of which began with magical consciousness, and that came to full awareness …

Being In Performance: A Philosophical Account Of The Embodied Actor, Brad M. Krumholz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I present and analyze three distinct actor-training exercises primarily through the lens of the Embodied Cognition (EC) branch of contemporary philosophy, which attempts to frame human understanding as a fully embodied interaction with the environment. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and other branches of philosophy, EC provides both an excellent set of tools and a strong theoretical framework to help explain how people encounter meaning in life. I apply its unique perspectives to this philosophical account of the embodied actor as I analyze the various elements at play in actor training praxis, which allows me to shed …

Tasseography From Jung's Perspective, Avetisian, Elizabeth

CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century

Approaching from Jung’s perspective this paper aims to understand how the unconscious communicates through symbolism that may be the basis for synchronicity arising from mantic procedures. A particular ritual of divination called tasseography will be studied whereby the seer interprets patterns in coffee grounds intuitively and by following a standard system of symbolism to foretell the seeker’s future life events or provide answers to seeker’s pressing life questions. The paper will examine various processes involved in the experience of tasseography and its ritual that enable the reader to predict the seeker’s future or bring light to the present or past …

Chickens Play To The Crowd, Cinzia Chiandetti

Animal Sentience

The time was ripe for Marino’s review of chickens’ cognitive capacities. The research community, apart from expressing gratitude for Marino’s work, should now use it to increase public awareness of chickens’ abilities. People’s views on many animals are ill-informed. Scientists need to communicate and engage with the public about the relevance and societal implications of their findings.

Post-Darwin Skepticism And Run-Of-The-Mill Suicide, John Hadley

Animal Sentience

Peña-Guzmán’s depiction of the opponent of animal suicide as a conservative is a straw man. It is possible to accept that animals are self-conscious and reflexive yet still reject the view that they have the mental wherewithal to commit run-of-the-mill suicide. That animal behaviour can be positioned on a continuum of self-destructive behaviour does not establish that animals can intentionally kill themselves.

An Adaptationist Perspective On Animal Suicide, Timothy P. Racine

Animal Sentience

Peña-Guzmán’s discussion of suicide in nonhuman animals has broad implications. In this commentary, I focus on the logical relation between suicide and intention. Proximate cause must be distinguished from ultimate function in explanations of suicide. I briefly discuss two adaptationist accounts of suicidal behavior.

Lessons From Chimpanzee Sign Language Studies, Mary Lee Jensvold

Animal Sentience

Claims are often made about behaviors being unique to humans; the evidence usually shows they are not. Sign language studies on chimpanzees may provide a useful model for comparative studies of suicide. A productive approach to comparative studies is to focus on observable behaviors rather than getting lost in the pitfalls of vague definitions and changing measures.

Can Nondolphins Commit Suicide?, David M. Peña-Guzmán

Animal Sentience

This Response addresses the scientific and philosophical criticisms of my 2017 target article “Can nonhuman animals commit suicide?” It defends my key claims and explores topics (such as animal judgment, animal theory of mind, and the evolution of suicide) that did not appear in the original article. It also points out areas in which further research is needed and concludes that we should be wary of accusations of “anthropomorphism” in debates about animal suicide.

Sourcing Enchantment: From Elemental Appropriation To Imaginal Symbolics, Schwartz, Michael

CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century

Critical theorists and social commentators agree that modernity and postmodernity suffer from historical pathologies of world disenchantment. What might be done? Drawing on John Sallis’ phenomenology of the elemental and Tibetan Buddhist teachings on elemental practices, this paper investigates the imagination in its doubling as imaginal in generating a symbolics of the self, world, and other that is always already enchanted; an aesthetics of existence where the world itself shows forth like a work of art replete with exorbitant logics.

Animal Suicide: Evolutionary Continuity Or Anthropomorphism?, Antonio Preti

Animal Sentience

Evolutionary processes are characterized by both continuity and discontinuity. Evidence on suicide in nonhuman animals is faint and often rests on the metaphorical or anthropomorphic use of the term. Suicidal behavior might be an evolutionary jump relatively recent in our species: a byproduct of living in groups of people who are not as closely related genetically as in social groups of nonhuman mammals.

Animal Suicide And "Anthropodenial", Ryan Hediger

Animal Sentience

Increasing understanding of the impressive cognitive and social capacities of nonhuman animals suggests the possibility that they may sometimes commit suicide. Such notions tend to be dismissed as “anthropomorphism.” That interpretive hazard, I argue, must be weighed against the opposite hazard of “anthropodenial” — “the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals” (de Waal 2006). If animals do commit suicide, how often is it motivated precisely by the impact of humans on animal life?

Continuum And Temporality, Gerard Kuperus

Animal Sentience

I fully support the continuum proposed in the target article and argue along the same lines that we should be suspicious of drawing any strict borders between human and non-human animals. Since we can say very little with absolute certainty about human intentions regarding suicide, we have no certainty about the intentions of non-human animals. Although I am very sympathetic to Peña-Guzmán’s overall argument, I suggest that time could be taken into consideration as well.

Thinking About Thinking Chickens, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

This response focuses on three major conceptual threads that run through the peer commentary on my target article: (1) how the use of chickens influences our views of them, (2) whether education is effective, and (3) what components of chicken psychology are most relevant to understanding who chickens are.

Both Facts And Feelings: Emotion And News Literacy, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for addressing …

If Nonhuman Animals Can Suicide, Why Don’T They?, C. A. Soper, Todd K. Shackelford

Animal Sentience

An evolutionary analysis suggests that selection is unlikely to have tolerated the capacity for intentional self-killing in nonhuman animals. The potential to escape pain by suicide would have presented a recurrent and severe adaptive problem for an animal with a reproductive future to protect. If the potential for suicide arose in the evolutionary past, anti-suicide mechanisms may have co-evolved, as we believe they have in adult humans. Peña-Guzmán’s (2017) argument that some nonhuman animals can suicide is incomplete without an account of the defences that result in the vast majority opting not to.

Chicken Minds And Moral Standing, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

Some of the cognitive traits that Marino reviews are not in themselves relevant to ethics, either for chickens or human infants, but affective traits are, among them desires.

Can A Dog Be Jealous?, Yaoguang Jiang, Annamarie W. Huttunen, Michael L. Platt

Animal Sentience

Whether humans alone experience complex emotions like jealousy or envy remains hotly debated, partly because of the difficulty of measuring them without a verbal report. Cook, Berns and colleagues use functional brain imaging to identify in dogs neural responses very similar to those evoked by jealousy in humans. When dogs see their caregiver reward a facsimile dog, their amygdala is activated and the strength of this response predicts aggressive behavior — just as jealousy leads to aggression in humans. The authors conclude that dogs feel something very similar to human jealousy. This novel and creative study tackles one of the …

Jealousy, Competition, Or A Contextual Cue For Reward?, Thomas R. Zentall

Animal Sentience

Emotions are difficult to assess, even in humans. The attribution of jealousy in an animal like a dog is especially difficult because performance of a particular behavior in the context of another animal receiving a reward may not be easily distinguishable from intra-species competition or simply a response to a contextual cue for the availability of reward. The authors provide distinguishing evidence in the form of fMRI data to show that in the presence of a “fake” dog being fed, there is bilateral activation in the amygdala, an area associated with anxiety, anger, fear, and even jealousy in humans.

Sentience, The Final Frontier...., Shelley Adamo

Animal Sentience

Arguments for fish sentience have difficulty with the philosophical zombie problem. Progress in AI has shown that complex learning, pain behavior, and pain as a motivational drive can be emulated by robots without any internal subjective experience. Therefore, demonstrating these abilities in fish does not necessarily demonstrate that fish are sentient. Further evidence for fish sentience may come from optogenetic studies of neural networks in zebrafish. Such studies may show that zebrafish have neural network patterns similar to those that correlate with sentience in humans. Given the present uncertainty regarding sentience in fish, caution should be applied regarding the precautionary …

On Crabs And Statistics, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I respond to commentaries by Elwood and Seth & Dienes and to a recent critique by Diggles, discussing the link between avoidance learning and sentience, the relevance of the clash between frequentist and Bayesian statistics, the risks to decapod welfare in aquaculture, and the broader concerns one may have about a “precautionary” approach to protecting invertebrates.

On Jealousy, Envy, Sex Differences And Temperament In Humans And Dogs, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Sylvia K. Harmon-Jones

Animal Sentience

Cook, Prichard, Spivak, and Berns (2018) find that dogs’ levels of trait aggression are positively correlated with their amygdala activation when observing their caregivers giving a food to a fake dog. The authors conclude that this may provide neural evidence in dogs for the experience of jealousy, an emotion that some psychologists consider to be unique to humans. Here we explain the difference between the emotions of jealousy and envy, suggesting some ideas for future experiments that may help disentangle the experience of jealousy from that of envy in dogs. We also propose ideas for future research that may yield …

How To Foster Respect For Animals? Superiority, Dissimilarity, And Prejudice, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (C & H) might be taken to argue as follows: Humans may treat animals however they want only if humans are superior to animals. But humans are not superior to animals. Therefore, humans may not treat animals however they want. Whatever its merit, this is not C & H’s actual argument. Their point, instead, is that humans often mistreat animals because they tend to perceive them as inferior. A remedy for animal mistreatment would then be acknowledging the deep similarities between us and animals. But is C & H’s suggested remedy likely to be effective to foster …

Researchers, Not Dogs, Lack Control In An Experiment On Jealousy, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Cook and colleagues (2018) have developed a clever method to measure fMRI in awake dogs in response to a number of interesting stimuli. As a result, they are able to determine neural correlates of observable behavior. They report that dogs may experience something akin to jealousy because they show greater amygdala activation in response to food being given to a fake dog versus food being placed in a bucket. However, several critical controls are missing which prevent the authors from being able to speak of jealousy.

What Can The Social Emotions Of Dogs Teach Us About Human Emotions?, Dean Mobbs

Animal Sentience

It has long been believed that social emotions such as guilt and jealousy are only expressed in humans. In the case of jealousy, its adaptive value has been linked to the prevention of sexual infidelity or fairness. So why would dogs feel jealousy? I suggest that understanding how social emotions have been bred into dogs can help us understand our own emotions, including their functionality — and potentially their mechanisms.

Lessons From Behaviour For Brain Imaging, Carolyn J. Walsh

Animal Sentience

Integrating physiological and behavioural arousal with social context is fundamental to understanding affect in dogs. Cook et al. (2018) have made a worthy start towards illuminating the neural basis of dog affect underlying resource loss. However, their study depends on retrospective behaviour reports versus direct testing, and an interpretation of differential neural activation that is based on too few dogs. Research groups conducting canine brain-imaging work might: (1) consider collaborative approaches to augment sample sizes and replicability, and (2) take a recent lesson from dog behavioural research regarding a more cautious approach to applying functional labels to physiological and/or behavioural …

What Would We Like To Know By Imaging The Brains Of Dogs?, Ralph Adolphs

Animal Sentience

Using fMRI to study emotions in animals is important, fascinating, and fraught with methodological and conceptual problems. Cook et al. are doing it, and there is no question that they and others will be doing it better and better as time goes on. Where will this lead us? What could fMRI in principle tell us about the minds of nonhuman animals?