Papers by Ram L. Pandey Vimal
(Neisser, 2011)’s two proposals are: (A) current neural ‘correlates’ of consciousness (NCC) resea... more (Neisser, 2011)’s two proposals are: (A) current neural ‘correlates’ of consciousness (NCC) research program should be replaced with the neural ‘causes’ of consciousness (NCaC) and (B) only philosophy of science should be practiced, whereas philosophy of mind and metaphysics for consciousness research should be abandoned. These seem untenable because of six reasons: (1) It makes category mistake and has explanatory gap problem. (2) ‘Neural causes’ are NOT ‘real’ causes. (3) The experiential and functional aspects of consciousness co-arise inter-dependently with activities of brain, body, and environment via the doctrine of ‘dependent co-origination’. (4) Both NCC and NCaC are needed. (5) Consciousness research is multi-disciplinary program and hence philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics are needed. And (6) a specific subjective experience is selected from the embedded SEs in neural-networks via the ‘varying degree of matching’/interaction of stimulus-dependent feed forward signals with cognitive feedback signals in a re-entrant manner.
In the philosophies of some religions , such as the Geeta, Samkhya, Dvaita , Advaita and Vishish... more In the philosophies of some religions , such as the Geeta, Samkhya, Dvaita , Advaita and Vishishtadvaita philosophy of Hinduism, dualistic philosophy of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, the metaphysical frameworks include interactive substance dualism where mind (includes all mental entities such as Buddhi, Ahamkāra, Atman, Purusha, Brahman and so on) and matter (both fermions and bosons) are on equal footing; they interact (such as Purusha ‘shines’ on Prakriti for creation of universe) with each other but each can exist without other, i.e., they are separable and independent (Vimal, 2011c). This is because theist religions assume that soul (mental entity) separates from the dead body (physical entity) after death, but interacts when we are alive (Vimal, 2011c). However, this framework has problems such as the association or mind-brain interaction problem, the problem of mental causation, the ‘Zombie’ problem, the ‘Ghost’ problem, the neurophysiological many-one/many relation problem, the causal pairing problem, and the developmental problem (Vimal, 2011c).
We investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is define... more We investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is defined as the mental aspect of a state of brain-system or brain-process from first person perspective. Consciousness has two sub-aspects: conscious experience and conscious function. The necessary conditions for consciousness are those conditions that must be satisfied in order to have consciousness, i.e., if any of them is missing then the entity is not conscious. The sufficient conditions for consciousness are conditions, if satisfied, guarantee that the entity is conscious. The necessary conditions for access (reportable) consciousness are as follows: (1) the formation of neural-networks; (2) wakefulness; (3) reentrant interactions among neural populations; (4) fronto-parietal and thalamic-reticular-nucleus attentional signals that modulate consciousness; (5) integrated information (F) at or above threshold level; (6) working memory; (7) stimulus contrast at or above threshold; and (8) neural-network proto-experiences that are superposed potential subjective experiences (SEs) embedded in a neural-network as pre-cursors of SEs. The necessary conditions for phenomenal (non-reportable) consciousness are (1)-(3) and (5)-(8), i.e., the same as access consciousness except attention. Furthermore, structure, function, and SE are linked and the experiments to investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions of consciousness are proposed.
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Papers by Ram L. Pandey Vimal