Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research

Subjekt und Selbstmodell. Die Perspektivität phänomenalen Bewußtseins vor dem Hintergrund einer naturalistischen Theorie mentaler Repräsentation

This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences

Extending the Explanandum: A Commentary on Andy Clark

In this commentary, I suggest that the predictive processing framework (PP) might be applicable to areas beyond those identified by Clark. In particular, PP may be relevant for our understanding of perceptual content, consciousness, and for applied cognitive neuroscience. My main claim for each area is as follows:PP urges an organism-relative conception of perceptual content.Historical a priori accounts of the structure of perceptual experience converge with results from PP. There are a number of areas in which PP can find important practical applications, including education, public policy, and social interaction

The Myth of Cognitive AgencySubpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that most of what we call conscious thought is better analysed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition, such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called conscious thought in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like mind wandering into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness.. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the self-representational blink (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological unit of identification (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind

Extending the Explanandum: A Commentary on Andy Clark

In this commentary, I suggest that the predictive processing framework (PP) might be applicable to areas beyond those identified by Clark. In particular, PP may be relevant for our understanding of perceptual content, consciousness, and for applied cognitive neuroscience. My main claim for each area is as follows:PP urges an organism-relative conception of perceptual content.Historical a priori accounts of the structure of perceptual experience converge with results from PP. There are a number of areas in which PP can find important practical applications, including education, public policy, and social interaction

The Bottom-Up Approach: Benefits and Limits

Cruse H, Schilling M. The Bottom-Up Approach: Benefits and Limits. In: Metzinger TK, Windt JM, eds. Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group; 2015.Aaron Gutknecht supports our bottom-up approach, specifies possible limits and highlights interesting future aspects. His added perspective is valuable and interesting to us. As we fully agree with his view, we only add some complementary remarks

P300

The concept of self and self-referential processing has a growing explanatory value in psychiatry and neuroscience, referring to the cognitive organization and perceptual differentiation of self-stimuli in health and disease. Conditions in which selfhood loses its natural coherence offer a unique opportunity for elucidating the mechanisms underlying self-disturbances. We assessed the psychoactive effects of psilocybin (230 μg/kg p.o.), a preferential 5-HT1A/2A agonist known to induce shifts in self-perception. Our placebo-controlled, double-blind, within-subject crossover experiment (n = 17) implemented a verbal self-monitoring task involving vocalizations and participant identification of real-time auditory source- (self/other) and pitch-modulating feedback. Subjective experience and task performance were analyzed, with time-point-by-time-point assumption-free multivariate randomization statistics applied to the spatiotemporal dynamics of event-related potentials. Psilocybin-modulated self-experience, interacted with source to affect task accuracy, and altered the late phase of self-stimuli encoding by abolishing the distinctiveness of self- and other-related electric field configurations during the P300 timeframe. This last effect was driven by current source density changes within the supragenual anterior cingulate and right insular cortex. The extent of the P300 effect was associated with the intensity of psilocybin-induced feelings of unity and changed meaning of percepts. Modulations of late encoding and their underlying neural generators in self-referential processing networks via 5-HT signaling may be key for understanding self-disorders. This mechanism may reflect a neural instantiation of altered self-other and relational meaning processing in a stimulus-locked time domain. The study elucidates the neuropharmacological foundation of subjectivity, with implications for therapy, underscoring the concept of connectedness