Self, Consciousness, Awareness, Qualia, …  Self  Consciousness  Body ownership  Emotion

P S Churchland: “Self-representation in Nervous Systems” What is the “Self”?: –“Distributed across brain structures, coordinated only on an ‘as-needed’ basis, and arranged in a loose and loopy hierarchy” Auditory Hallucination in Schizophrenia: –The “voices” appear to be the patients’ own inner speech, but they suffer deep confusion about self/nonself boundaries. Evolution of Self-Representational Capacities: –“Evolution stumbled on solutions for coordinating inner-body signals to generate survival-appropriate inner regulation.” Consciousness and Self: –Consciouseness as a system by which the brain distinguishes inner-world representations from outer-world representations.

M Botvinick: “Probing the Neural Basis of Body Ownership” How do we distinguish our bodies, but not other objects, as belonging to ourselves?: Somatoparaphrenia: Deny ownership of own arm or leg Rubber-hand illusion: Opposite of Somatoparaphrenia

F Crick & C Koch: “Consciousness and Neuroscience” NCC (Neural Correlate of Consciousness) and Visual Consciousness: –“Only some types of specific neurons will express the NCC” –Frontal Lobe Hypothesis The Problem of Meaning: A Major Problem - “How does the brain know what the firing of a neuron represents?”

O Sacks “The Mind’s eye: What the blind see” J Hull: Deep blindness: the world of vision lost Z Torey: Constructing a virtual world of vision, more real, more intense S Tenberken: Creating an artistic/novelistic world of vision, via synesthesia D Shulman: “I still live in a visual world after thirty-five years of blindness. …, I see the Braiille notes visually—they are visual images, not tactile.” A Gordon: “If I move my arms back and forth in front of my eyes, I see them, even though I have been blind for more than thirty years.” J Lusseyran: “My screen was always as big as I needed it to be. Because it was nowhere in space and everywhere at the same time…” “The world, real or imagined, is a pure illusion, all conjured up inside the head so is the self.” (Anonymous)