qualia

Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind-body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive indications of a complex relation: mind and matter are one, but they are not the same. They are related in an efficacious yet non-reducible, non-observable, and even non-intelligible manner...

According to Loorits, if we want consciousness to be explained in terms of natural sciences, we should be able to analyze its seemingly non-structural aspects, like qualia, in structural terms. However, the studies conducted over the last three decades do not seem to be able to bridge the explanatory gap between physical phenomena and phenomenal experience. One possible way to bridge the explanatory gap is to seek the structure of consciousness within consciousness itself, through a phenomenal analysis of the qualitative aspects of experience...

Loorits (2014) identifies the solution to the hard problem of consciousness in the possibility of fully analyzing seemingly non-structural aspects of consciousness in structural terms. However, research on consciousness conducted in recent decades has failed to bridge the explanatory gap between the brain and conscious mind. One reason why the explanatory gap cannot be filled, and consequently the problem remains hard, is that experience and neural structure are too different or "distant" to be directly compatible...

While eosinophilic esophagitis (EOE) is defined by histologic presence of eosinophils, a few studies have established the presence of mast cells in EOE and even shown their correlation with symptom persistence despite resolution of eosinophils. Expression of aberrant mast cell markers CD25 and CD2 have not been studied in EOE. This study quantifies the number of hotspot cells per high power field expressing CKIT/CD117, tryptase, CD25, CD2 and CD3 by immunohistochemical stains in endoscopic esophageal biopsies of the following three cohorts: (1) established and histologically confirmed EOE, (2) suspected EOE with biopsies negative for eosinophils, and (3) no history of or suspicion for EOE with histologically unremarkable biopsies...

Recent activities in virtually all fields engaged in consciousness studies indicate early signs of a structural turn, where verbal descriptions or simple formalisations of conscious experiences are replaced by structural tools, most notably mathematical spaces. My goal here is to offer three comments that, in my opinion, are essential to avoid misunderstandings in these developments early on. These comments concern metaphysical premises of structural approaches, the viability of structure-preserving mappings, and the question of what a structure of conscious experience is in the first place...

In China's vigorous development and inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, the sustainability and acceptability of intangible cultural heritage products have become a controversial subject. This study aims to explore the relationship between batik product qualia factors and the purchase intention for batik products and exammine the mediating role of consumer attitude in the relationship. We adopted quantitative research methods and used SPSS 26 and Process 2.15 software to test our hypotheses. We conducted extensive surveys of consumers of different ages, genders, income levels, and educational backgrounds, and finally, a total of 381 valid questionnaires were collected...

Predictive processing is a recent approach in cognitive science that describes the brain as an engine of probabilistic hierarchical inference. Initially proposed as a general theory of brain function, predictive processing has recently been expanding to account for questions of consciousness in philosophy and neuroscience. In my previous work (Kukkonen 2020 Probability designs: literature and predictive processing . New York, NY: Oxford University Press), I have shown how predictive processing can also be used to model our engagement with literary texts...

We live in times when neuroscientific methods have become standard methods that many researchers can easily use. While this offers excellent opportunities to understand brain activities linked with aesthetic processing, we face the problem of using sophisticated techniques without a proper and valid theoretical foundation of aesthetics. A further problem arises from sophisticated methods often demanding strict constraints in presenting and experiencing aesthetic stimuli. However, when experiencing aesthetic items, contextual factors matter, e...

Neurodegenerative disease often affects speech. Speech acoustics can be used as objective clinical markers of pathology. Previous investigations of pathological speech have primarily compared controls with one specific condition and excluded comorbidities. We broaden the utility of speech markers by examining how multiple acoustic features can delineate diseases. We used supervised machine learning with gradient boosting (CatBoost) to delineate healthy speech from speech of people with multiple sclerosis or Friedreich ataxia...

Qualia have traditionally been considered difficult to measure objectively, but with the recent spread of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and other techniques, various experimental efforts have been made. In this paper, focusing on the qualia for color, we created 6 colors with different RGB values for reference colors of RED, light GREEN, BLUE, YELLOW, and PURPLE, and showed them to 306 subjects. For example, for RED and 5 generated colors, we asked them, "Choose a color that you feel is RED," and asked them to choose...

This study investigates bistable perception as a function of the presentation side of the ambiguous figures and of participants' sex, to evaluate left-right hemispheric (LH-RH) asymmetries related to consciousness. In two experiments using the divided visual field paradigm, two Rubin's vase-faces figures were projected simultaneously and continuously 180 s long to the left (LVF) and right (RVF; Experiment 1) or to the upper (UVF) and lower (DVF; Experiment 2) visual hemifields of 48 healthy subjects monitored with eye-tracker...

Can one have a phenomenal experience to which one does not have access? That is, can you experience something without knowing? The dissociation between phenomenal (P) and access (A) consciousness is widely debated. A major challenge to the supporters of this dissociation is the apparent inability to experimentally demonstrate that P-without-A consciousness exists; once participants report having a P-experience, they already have access to it. Thus, all previous empirical support for this dissociation is indirect...

We argue that cognition (information processing) and internal phenomenological sensations, including emotions, are intimately related and are not separable. We aver that phenomenological sensations are dynamical "modes" of firing behaviour that (i) exist over time and over large parts of the cortex's neuron-to-neuron network and (ii) are consequences of the network-of-networks architecture, coupling the individual neuronal dynamics and the necessary time delay incurred by neuron-to-neuron transmission: if you possess those system properties, then you will have the dynamical modes and, thus, the phenomenological sensations...

How do brains create all our different colors, pains, and other conscious qualities? These various qualia are the most essential aspects of consciousness. Yet standard neuroscience (primarily based on synaptic information processing) has not found the synaptic-firing codes, sometimes described as the "spike code," to account for how these qualia arise and how they unite to form complex perceptions, emotions, et cetera . Nor is it clear how to get from these abstract codes to the qualia we experience. But electromagnetic field (versus synaptic) approaches to how qualia arise have been offered in recent years by Pockett, McFadden, Jones, Bond, Ward and Guevera, Keppler and Shani, Hunt and Schooler, et cetera ...

The ultimate goal of the QBIT theory is to provide a scientific solution to the problem of consciousness. The theory assumes that qualia (plural for quale) are real physical entities. Each quale is a physical system consisting of qubits bonded together by quantum entanglement. The qubits of a quale are so intimately bonded together that they collectively form a unified whole that is more than (and different from) the sum of its parts. A quale is a highly organized, coherent system. Organization and coherence are manifestations of information...

Information, the measure of order in a complex system, is the opposite of entropy, the measure of chaos and disorder. We can distinguish several levels at which information is processed in the brain. The first one is the level of serial molecular genetic processes, similar in some aspects to digital computations (DC). At the same time, higher cognitive activity is probably based on parallel neural network computations (NNC). The advantage of neural networks is their intrinsic ability to learn, adapting their parameters to specific tasks and to external data...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to suggest ways in which literary practices such as reading of fiction and creative writing may be beneficial for psychiatrists in their clinical practice. METHODS: Concepts from literary theory, phenomenology, and psychodynamic thinking will be used to move the therapeutic thinking of the medical paradigm beyond the dichotomic body-mind model. The ability to listen and respond to subjective and intersubjective processes, and the understanding of the dynamics and structure of the verbalized qualia will be emphasized...

Vividness in visual mental imagery has been relatively under-explored compared to imagery's representational format and neural mechanisms. In this paper, we take a deeper look at vividness and suggest that in re-framing it, we can potentially reconcile disparate findings regarding visual cortex activation during imagery. Unlike traditional views of vividness that define the concept in terms of perception, we frame vividness in terms of imagery's relation to an internal model; the closer the generated imagery is to this model, the more vivid it is...

In a previous paper, the authors proposed a mathematical definition of a public language and a new model of consciousness based on that public language. Consciousness spans a wide range of disciplines, including medicine, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and psychology, and it is desirable that the model of consciousness should also be able to answer questions of consciousness in each discipline. This paper applies the HLbC model proposed by the authors to the question of psychological consciousness and examines whether it can explain the phenomenon...

Perception of color by humans and other primates is a complex problem, studied by neurophysiology, psychophysiology, psycholinguistics, and even philosophy. Being mostly trichromats, simian primates have three types of opsin proteins, expressed in cone neurons in the eye, which allow for the sensing of color as the physical wavelength of light. Further, in neural networks of the retina, the coding principle changes from three types of sensor proteins to two opponent channels: activity of one type of neuron encode the evolutionarily ancient blue-yellow axis of color stimuli, and another more recent evolutionary channel, encoding the axis of red-green color stimuli...