It may be that the dramatic events attending birth, including drawing its first breath, are the triggers for its
first conscious experience of life.
In addition to the vast complexity of unconscious experience, I suggested, we can
analyze conscious experience into significantly organized and receptive levels.
Most of us would agree that
conscious experience occurs also without such dearly focused interest, but just how far to extend the term is a matter of reasonable disagreement.
But this much is clear: those factors found on the most basic level
of conscious experience are precisely those that he attributes to the world at large.
Free recall is the ability to remember items from a list, while working memory is a type of short - term memory that involves
immediate conscious experiences.
By this distinction of two modes of passivity — of receiving forms - Aristotle sets off the world of
conscious experience from the world of nature, but in such a way that not only the objects but the very workings of nature are included as part of what is felt.
Then in the mid-forties Pollock, and increasingly Motherwell too, departed from the surrealist concept by using automatism as a device for objectifying an intense
conscious experience as it was unfolding, rather than as a means of bringing forth unconscious material for association or of using unconscious thought processes to modify imagery.
(2) Can we reduce to biology or hope to reduce to biology those subjective
conscious experiences which we may ascribe to animals, and, if question (1) is answered in the affirmative, can we reduce them further to physics and chemistry?
A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates
into conscious experiences (such as redness) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong.
He [Descartes] also laid down the principle that those substances which are the subjects
enjoying conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience.
As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: «Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness,
making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.»
And this precisely is the facet of the object that extends
beyond conscious experience, for it is doubtless true of any arising entity that it must take, and perhaps even take in, the world as it finds it.
Descartes, Whitehead maintains, made a most important philosophical advance when he «laid down the principle, that those substances which are the subjects enjoying
conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience.
These occasions would contribute to
conscious experience only when they were positively prehended by the presiding conscious occasion.
Researchers also tested the validity of
conscious experiences using objective markers for the first time in a large study to determine whether claims of awareness compatible with out - of - body experiences correspond with real or hallucinatory events.
I assume that in my unconscious even now there is a relation to past experiences, also influencing my
present conscious experience, that binds them to me «with some peculiar completeness.»
Our most
fundamental conscious experience has generally been taken to be the perception of sensa, i.e., of relatively clear and distinct objects such as red, bitter, etc..
The most
basic conscious experience is emotional rather than cognitive, an affective response (expansion or retreat) to some vague presence dimly felt (AI 225f, PR 246 - 48).
Below conscious experience, therefore, there are agents but no objects; there are forms transmitted and received, acting and being acted upon, inheritance of a sort, reproduction and assimilation, but there are no forms received and entertained as objects and there is no immanent activity.
When we
take conscious experience as our basis for understanding what experience is, we think of receiving and responding to stimuli from the body and the environment, of emotion, purpose, and thought, of the significant organization of data and the influencing of action.
Gilbert Harman's «Room 306» thought experiment can be revised to
eliminate conscious experience from Harris's moral calculus: You have five patients in the hospital that are dying, each in need of a separate organ.
To a large extent my conscious decisions are made on the basis of memories of
past conscious experiences and anticipations of future ones.
Neuroscience, he says, has shown the dependence of
conscious experience upon the brain but it has not reduced consciousness to observable states of the brain.
In fact, Wolfgang Kohler and other researchers in the holistic tradition have formulated theories that
link conscious experience to brain waves.»
«Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential
for conscious experiences.»
As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, «the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to
perceptual conscious experiences.»