Yasuko,

Alfredo,

I agree with you. There is a difference between knowledge and experience. Colour is a subjective experience and we learn by examples what is called red or blue and so on. There is no possibility to teach this only by verbal instruction.

Physicists says there is no colour at all, it is only a tricky information process in our eyes which make it possible to distinguish different frequencies of light. We also can not imagine the experience of colour vision of tetrachromatic persons or gold fishes, insects or birds.

I sometimes surely feel that to sometimes discuss unconsciousness is nonsense. Because all the states recognizing a law learned by experience, are conscious.

And, surely the result of the physical action shows the result of the unconscious state.

However, I want to study about more unconsciousness deeply.

Dear Yasuko, many thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Please think of the following situation. You are conscious of a problem, and then, without thinking consciously, suddenly the solution appears to your consciousness. In this case you can be sure that there was an unconscious process leading to the solution, although you cannot tell.

This reasoning can be extended to operations of your body. Your immune system is continuously deciding what belongs to your body and what does not - and should be attacked. If it makes a mistake - attacking elements of your body - a disease may be the result (as in the case of the Hashimoto autoimmune disease, when the immune system destroys cells of the tryreoid). There is a good book on these immune unconscious mental processes called "The Immune Self", please see:

http://books.google.com.br/books/about/The_Immune_Self.html?id=KVLopJJ8OEEC&redir_esc=y

or buy:

http://www.amazon.com/Immune-Cambridge-Studies-Philosophy-Biology/dp/0521574439

Please note that in both cases - solving a problem or distinguishing Self/Non-Self - there are no feelings associated with the brain/body operations while they occur. When there is a feeling, it is always conscious!

Best Regards,

Alfredo Pereira Jr.

Thank you for your comment.

Yes, I was thinking about the process of becoming to consciousness from unconscious. However, my reasoning was only a theory, and was thought can not applying to practice. I knew the basics of the by immunologic self /non-self, but the details to approach a mind function is ignorant. If I can understand a these common basic theory, my problem will be settled.

Thank you so much. sincerely.

Yasuko

Dear Yasuko, there is a conceptual issue here. What is "mental"? I assume that any system that processes information (signals) systematically has mental activity. Therefore the immune system has mental activity of the unconscious kind. What makes mental activity conscious? As I argue in (1), when there is a feeling associated to the content of information (e.g. feeling sad when knowing that a friend died) there is consciousness. In this view, feeling is the mark of consciousness.

Best Regards,

Alfredo Pereira Jr.

(1) Pereira Jr A. Triple-Aspect Monism: A conceptual framework for the science of human consciousness. In: Pereira Jr and Lehmann (Eds.) The Unity of Brain, Mind and World: Current perspectives on a science of consciousness. Cambridge(UK): Cambridge University Press. http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/unity-mind-brain-and-world-current-perspectives-science-consciousness

Yes, I think, that's right. As results, the signals system of the cranial nerve controls human mind.

I am studying now is this. The process of the emotion ( example : libido ). That is uncontrolled consciously, and lead to the consequent conscious action. However, some physical problem occurs when trouble occurs in this process. ( it include the cranial nerve-like problem ) . However after all , these are problems that belongs to the information system.

At present, hurdle is high for me, as knowledge of a immunologic consciousness and unconsciousness.

I am trying to reconsideration of the diagram of " unconsciousness to the consciousness " from classic psychology approach.

Thank you so much.

Yasuko

In our body we have multiple mechanism to stay alive. Our brain is also implemented in this function, but not in all processes. The immune reaction is one of these and also heart beat or breathing. All these are not under the control of the conscious mind. We never could do anything else than turn the buttons of these cybernetical processes.

I think your question belongs to feelings and emotion and their relevance to consciousness. Here we should take a look to the working definitions of these expressions by the authors. Often they use a different meaning than popular language do. What do you like to call "feeling" and what "emotion"?

Most psychologists use emotion as one of the basic emotions like fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, happiness. These emotions could not be unconscious. If we realize such an emotion we feel it. If we do not feel anything like this, there is no emotion at all. The essence of emotion is to perceive (to feel) them. May be you or Damasio expresses the idea that these emotion do not fall from the sky but are prepared in our body or in the brain. Yes, sure, but this will not take a lot of milli seconds because emotions are very rapid reactions - I would call it "cognitive reflexes", so it would not be worth to think about this short time.

Different to emotions are feelings. They are not specifically like emotions, they are more diffuse and it is hard to express these feelings with words. They are like fundamental vibrations, activating or depressing our activities or thoughts. these feelings are like icebergs, 90 % under the waterline (subconscious) and only 10 % in a foggy perception. Unlike emotions are feelings long lasting and slowly emerging.

Dear Wilfried, there are many definitions of feelings and emotions in the literature. When emotions are conceived as physiological (e.g. stress) and behavioral (e.g. laughing), they can be unconscious, since there are many physiological and behavioral processes that happen without our conscious appraisal. The problem with Damasio is that he defines feelings as the subjective aspect of emotion AND claims that these subjective feelings can be unconscious (because of his theory of consciousness, only when we know of these feelings they become conscious). I think there is a mistake in Damasio's theory, because we do not need to know (represent, map, cognize) a feeling to be conscious of it, because a feeling is a lived experience, not an object of knowledge. Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment on Mary the neuroscientist applies here. Mary knows all about the brain, but has never experienced colors (except black and white), because she has always lived in a black-and-white room; she has all representations about color, but when she finds herself in the presence of color, will she be able to identify yellow, blue, red, green, etc.? I would say that she would not. The same applies to feelings. To feel is a lived experience, a diffuse one, like vibrations, as you wrote (and I agree); it is not a matter of knowing. If we had to build knowledge (or mapping, or representing, etc.) of feelings to be conscious of them, we would rarely feel anything!

Alfredo,

I agree, it depends on the working definition, but also on speech competence.

The thought experiment with Mary and the colours is very nice but a little unworldly. Wittgenstein asked „Wie erkenne ich, dass diese Farbe Rot ist. Eine Antwort wäre: ‚Ich habe Deutsch gelernt.‘ “ (PU 381). Translation: 'How do I know that this color is red. One answer would be, I learned English.''(PU 381). So I think, if Mary speaks English AND she is not colour-blind, she knows very well the colours. O.K. let's assume, Mary is totally colour-blind. In this case Mary will have a problem! - I agree - and I do also not agree with Damasio ...

Why do you assign "stress" to the emotions? I would say it is a feeling ...

Dear Wilfried:

The problem with Mary is that although she knows English and brain theory, she had never been exposed to the light wavelength corresponding to "red", and so the link between the referent and the meaning was missing. She is assumed to be not color blind, but her eye receptors and the cortical visual system are not adapted to color vision. Her case is like the case of people who are born blind and begin to see after a surgery - they may know the meaning of "red", but need to learn to what kind of objects the term applies.

Stress (in the physiological sense of the excessive release of cortisol and adrenalin, causing tissue damage) can occur to a person (up to some level) without a feeling of being stressed. I understand that when it is felt (the person feeling tired, no disposition for work) it is a feeling, but when it is not felt it is a unconscious physiological state.

Alfredo,

thanks for your reply. Yes, I agree in all you are saying. Anger may be a better example for a physiological emotion than stress.

One final word to Marys colour problem in a little hairsplitting manner. Mary is not able to use colour expressions correctly, so she is not perfect in English.

Unconscious feelings are very interesting. We do not know (!) the cause of such a mood. Could it be, that the reason for such unconsciousness is the physiological formation of these feelings (body reaction) and not a neuronal result (brain reaction)?

Dear Wilfried, it may be just a linguistic/semantic issue, but I call "unconscious emotion" this kind of physiological activity (that you called "unconscious feeling"), since I claim that all feelings are conscious.

The difference is not between being a brain or a body reaction, because most of brain activity is not conscious. Among this not-conscious activity, there is a coherent (sub)system that is called "the unconscious (mind)" in psychoanalysis. Therefore, we end with three superposed sub-systems, the physiological, the mental unconscious and the mental conscious. We are the result of these three sub-systems operating together. They have differences, but form an integrated unity. All feelings belong to the conscious mind. Unconscious emotions belong to the unconscious mind. This is the framework I am proposing for a science of consciousness. A conscious system has to be studied in these three integrated aspects (or sub-systems), without attempting to reduce one to the other.

Alfredo,

I fully agree with you.

I am not a native speaker, so I am a little in the situation of Mary ... some expressions are similar but not equal (false friends) and each researcher uses his own working definition of expressions therefore some linguistic dissonances may occur.

Dear Wilfried, many thanks for your comments. I am not an English native speaker too, but have been struggling with this language for publication purposes. Unfortunately I do not know German - you have more words for concepts than the English, and you have so many great philosophers. Could you please tell us a bit about your work? Are you involved with "affective computing"?

Dear Mr.Alfredo, Mr.Wilfried

Certainly, I also may error in the interpretation of words. I noticed the other day, the difference between " feeling " and " emotion ". I also am not native language in English.

The following is prose about " Marie ", I wrote at another site.

I had put a little joke in this and this is little long. Would you please to read.

There is a girl called Yasuko who was born and raised in a monochrome room. As for Yasuko, one step has not gone out of this room, too. In other words Yasuko has never watched what's called color in the whole life. Yasuko reads a monochrome picture book and learns various things and learns events of the world through monochrome TV. Yasuko has the technical knowledge of the line level of the world about optic neurophysiology. A characteristic of the light, ocular structure, the connection of structure, optic nerve and the visual cortex of the retina. What the case, do we use the word " to be red " or " to be green ? " Yasuko knows all the physical facts about the sight. Perhaps !!

By the way, at door what will happen if she is freed from this monochrome room? Does Yasuko to see a color, and learn any new thing for the first time in life? It is a physical fact is definition, if Yasuko will knows that something is new. In that case, the materialism ( physicalism ) is fact.

At first , possible of her material learning in the monochromatic room is only ( what of red and green spelling, structure theory of red and a green color, what kind of material, red and green assigned to ) if since she was born. In brief, the learning of visually (sensibility)to recognize a color is impossible. And then, if she goes out from room, she will recognize light than a color. For example, even if , it is rainy day. And of course, the light is a material. Probably she is at a loss for words, and she can not act. Perhaps !!

In other words, she was freed from the monochromatic room is that a only interpretation. In her situation, she is maze in the unknown world, and there is not it by the liberation. She also may not call for help. Somebody speaks to her, and must show an apple.

" This is an apple ( materialism ). Maybe you watch the shape with a picture book and TV, and you may know it. And this color. that you look and, You receive visually the sense just now. These are named red and named green. Here ( materialism ) is red.. and here ( materialism ) is green... "

Thanks.

Yasuko

Dear Yasuko, you made a good effort to describe Mary's condition. Materialism has a bit of the truth in the case she will learn what is "red" and "green". However, Frank Jackson was trying to show that Materialism is wrong (later he changed his mind). He was trying to show that even if Mary knew all about color, as she had never experienced color, she would not be able to tell by herself at the door what is "red"and "green". At the end, this thought experiment is not really about Materialism, but about representation of things against a lived experience (presentation) of things. It suggests that lived experiences are richer than representations.

Dear Mr.Alfredo

Thanks for your reply. And I am so glad , because I thought this my sentence is valueless. And I agree your thought.

When We discuss about the unconsciousness level, often face the wall between Materialism and Idealism. However, in fact, I am thinking that Existence is basis of the Idealism. However certainly, these problem must not be judgement the merits and demerits. And I think that any lived experiences has a rich worth.

Please have a nice day. Thanks so much.

Yasuko

Yasuko,

Alfredo,

I agree with you. There is a difference between knowledge and experience. Colour is a subjective experience and we learn by examples what is called red or blue and so on. There is no possibility to teach this only by verbal instruction.

Physicists says there is no colour at all, it is only a tricky information process in our eyes which make it possible to distinguish different frequencies of light. We also can not imagine the experience of colour vision of tetrachromatic persons or gold fishes, insects or birds.

Alfredo,

I do not understand the relation of Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment on Mary to affective computing. It is only a linguistic problem. Mary do not know what blue (or other colour expressions) means (!) even she knows (!) the word.

Dear Wilfried (and Yasuko):

Wilfried, there is a connection. To know what a color is requires a lived experience, one that goes beyond representing it. A lived experience is one that affects our perceptual systems and elicits a feeling. Some philosophers call it a "presentation". In the presentation of a color, we feel it and acquire knowledge, even if we are not able of defining it linguistically. The implication for language learning is that semantics cannot be learned only from a dictionary (that relates words with other words), but requires lived experiences; maybe "language games"in the second Wittgenstein reefers to these lived experiences. Also the "world of life" (Erlebnis) in the second Husserl (also used by Freud), "aletheia"in Heiddegger, "pre-reflexive" experience in Merleau-Ponty, all these terms seem to have similar meanings. Several philosophers in the first half of the XXth century called attention to this fundamental aspect of the mind, against the Rationalism that prevailed in Modern philosophy (from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries).

Yasuko, I think that recognizing the importance of lived experiences is not a step towards Materialism or Idealism; it is possibly a step from these two pre-XXth century philosophical currents towards a new kind of Monism, that is based on relations between mind and brain and world, assuming that matter/energy, non-conscious information and the conscious mind (including its concepts and ideas) are all fundamental aspects of reality.

Alfredo,

..."To know what a color is requires a lived experience, one that goes beyond representing it. A lived experience is one that affects our perceptual systems and elicits a feeling." yes, I agree, it is the same what I wrote.

I think your half sentence: "... (it) elicits a feeling." is much deeper in semantic than it looks like.

I can look on colours an I know their expression (even our language is not so rich of colour expressions). My problem is now, searching for a feeling in looking colours.

Well, if I am relaxed and in a mood, that colours touch my soul, I feel a kind of esthetical feeling - I like this colour of not or anything in between. This is a association of "affective" in my mind. Obviously I am wrong - am I ...?

The other possibility is the perception itself. Do you mean the quale (lived experience) of such a colour perception? My opinion of qualia is a resonance of an attempted and a picked up sensor stimulus results in a quale. I like this idea very much - why so? We are living in our subjective world, constructed by observations (constructivism). The real world around us (environment/Umwelt) is very dynamical, so our senses are very active. The brain is not able to calculate with all data actually collected by the senses, so we have to reduce this data. One possibility would be to ignore these data stream. This could be dramatic, if we ignore the tiger behind the bush ...

The other possibility is to pick some data and compare these with stored data. If the result is positive the stored data becomes highlighted and the object to which the data bits belongs is recognized. We have an impression of this object. We anticipate things or objects and what we anticipate we are able to realize. If there is an unknown object we have a problem to perceive this object for some parts of a second or we do not perceive anything - you know such pictures. On the other hand there may be perceived objects which are not there (in clouds, in the fog or in the dark forest).

What do you think about that?

Dear Wilfried:

I agree that in the case of color, affective computing = esthetic feeling, and for this reason it is not easy to reproduce it in machines.

The word 'quale' also applies to esthetic feelings, the problem is that it also applies to other conscious contents, e.g. ethical values.

The last alternative, comparison with stored memories, is the solution found by neural network theorists (e.g. Steve Grossberg's ART) to endow a machine with an ability to attribute meaning, but in this case the meaning is not the feeling! It is just a matching of representations. To have a feeling, it is necessary to have a "feeling-supporting system" that digital machines still do not have!

Alfredo,

thank you for your reference to Grossberg. It seemed interesting.

In this field exists only interpretations an no facts. Therefore it is necessary to go further step by step.

I think the feeling-supporting system could run with associations, stored in the memory in early days of the system, where not only the item is stored but also attributes wich were related to bodily states. If a baby suck milk and the room is in a green colour the adult will feel fine out in the gras or in green clothes or a green carpet on the floor, because there is such an association (green) = (sure, full, warm, beautiful) in a diffuse, foggy manner without any concrete recall. The philosophers and the cognitive scientists did not appreciate the worth of such associations.

Dear Wilfried, an association by itself is not a feeling. I understand a feeling as being wavelike, e.g. when you hit a guitar string it vibrates producing sound and this phenomenon would be a proto-feeling. If you hear the sound, attribute a meaning to it and is affected by it then you have a feeling. Living beings developed "feeling systems" during evolution (according to my speculative hypothesis this is the mental function of the astroglial network in the brain), while digital machines still do not have a substrate to instantiate feelings. If you create a machine with an adequate substrate (e.g. vibrating strings) then I would agree that it has feelings or at least proto-feelings.

Alfredo,

I agree with you - do not be surprised. I think our positions are not so far from each other, but the mental pictures are different. I do not agree with the "adequate substrate" and therefore I do not agree, that a machine could not have feelings or such things.

I think, feelings are an information without words, because they are very old, out of a time, where no words exist. An animal is searching for homöostasis, a situation of security and well being. To indicate such a situation a lot of parameters have to be set in a special range, influencing the body and the mind. Perhaps the body is the string - it would not vibrate, but the feedback will result in a special feelings.

I agree, a machine is not so smart as the body of an organism but there are also hundreds of parameters which could be influenced. And a digital machine is also a multivariate system where much more parameters could be set. In this parameter space exists clouds of points which represent such feelings in the unconscious parts of the mind to influence decisions and actions in the conscious parts of the mind.

Feelings and emotions are information, represented in the body and in the unconscious part of the mind.

The only problem is qualia ... How can we imagine that information becomes the impressive quality of perception?

Dear Wilfried, information is structured data (probabilistic relations between sets), it does not have feeling. Feelings occur when information affects a body. You receive the information that your relative died and feel sad. The content of the information affected your physical state. In order to do so, it is necessary a kind of resonance between the form of the information and the activity of the body. To achieve this resonance, a wavelike pattern is needed. Feeling seems simple, but it is the most complex issue of a science of mind and consciousness. Current machines are not equipped to feel. It is necessary an information-processing mechanism and a transduction mechanism to make the system react to the content of the information. Computers do not feel sad if you insert the information that their operational system is outdated...

Dear Mr.Alfredo Mr.Wilfried

Excuse me, Qualia brain sciences are outside of my research. I think, these are in the field of not yet established, this brain science does not apply to my need. However, I am not deny these some study or theory.

Expressed in simply, experience encompass the sense and the knowledges.

And Of course, all of these are taking place in brain functions. If we do not verbalize, senses and feelings are not translate to events. And Sources that give rise to sensation is materialistic.

Thanks.

Yasuko

Alfredo,

I like the resonance idea very much but I think resonance did not need only wave like patterns. It is also possible to act on an information level. I like to explain you my idea:

Information has implications and meanings. Your example of sadness is interesting. What does sadness mean? It is the loss of security, it means loneliness and so on. It means we also will die one (far) day. We lose a crucial social contact and we experiences the shock of our beautiful order of the personal world view and there are many more things I do not note here. This cognitive shock has no words but a bodily reaction and we feel this reaction.

What frustration experienced by a bricklayer when the house he built collapses? All efforts were in vain. He has to rebuild again and so on. This situation is a strong demotivation for all activities.

These sceneries gives an impression of bodily reactions we realize. Now we have the information and their implications an the passivation information of the body feed back which fits to the cognitive information and will amplify its intention. In this case we have a vortex like situation which will become less intense in most cases when habituation takes place.

I think such a feed back loop is a feeling (here like sadness) where resonance will be found. Other feelings have different bodily results and different cognitive implications but also resonance like the example above.

Dear Wilfried, when I mentioned wave-like I was making a reference to brain activity, where information patterns are processed in two complementary ways: digital-like (neuronal action potentials) and wave-like (neuronal dendritic oscillations inducing extracellular ionic waves, astroglial calcium waves). The digital-like modality is used mostly for communication between neurons, and in some cases for communication of neurons with muscles or neurons with astrocytes; the information is encoded in a way that requires specialized receptors to decode the message. I cannot figure how this modality of information encoding could resonate. On the other hand, the wave-like modality is the same modality of acoustic waves, so it seems likely that it can produce resonances.

I am pasting four abstracts below to illustrate what kind of resonance I am talking about:

1) Nat Neurosci. 2014 Feb;17(2):322-9. doi: 10.1038/nn.3620.

Transcranial focused ultrasound modulates the activity of primary somatosensory

cortex in humans.

Legon W, Sato TF, Opitz A, Mueller J, Barbour A, Williams A,

Tyler WJ

Abstract

Improved methods of noninvasively modulating human brain function are needed.

Here we probed the influence of transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) targeted

to the human primary somatosensory cortex (S1) on sensory-evoked brain activity

and sensory discrimination abilities. The lateral and axial spatial resolution of

the tFUS beam implemented were 4.9 mm and 18 mm, respectively.

Electroencephalographic recordings showed that tFUS significantly attenuated the

amplitudes of somatosensory evoked potentials elicited by median nerve

stimulation. We also found that tFUS significantly modulated the spectral content

of sensory-evoked brain oscillations. The changes produced by tFUS on

sensory-evoked brain activity were abolished when the acoustic beam was focused 1

cm anterior or posterior to S1. Behavioral investigations showed that tFUS

targeted to S1 enhanced performance on sensory discrimination tasks without

affecting task attention or response bias. We conclude that tFUS can be used to

focally modulate human cortical function.

2) Entrainment of Brain Oscillations by Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation.

Randolph F Helfrich, Till R Schneider, Stefan Rach, Sina A Trautmann-Lengsfeld, Andreas K Engel, Christoph S Herrmann

Current biology: CB (Impact Factor: 10.99). 01/2014; DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2013.12.041

ABSTRACT Novel methods for neuronal entrainment [1-4] provide the unique opportunity to modulate perceptually relevant brain oscillations [5, 6] in a frequency-specific manner and to study their functional impact on distinct cognitive functions. Recently, evidence has emerged that tACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) can modulate cortical oscillations [7-9]. However, the study of electrophysiological effects has been hampered so far by the absence of concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Here, we applied 10 Hz tACS to the parieto-occipital cortex and utilized simultaneous EEG recordings to study neuronal entrainment during stimulation. We pioneer a novel approach for simultaneous tACS-EEG recordings and successfully separate stimulation artifacts from ongoing and event-related cortical activity. Our results reveal that 10 Hz tACS increases parieto-occipital alpha activity and synchronizes cortical oscillators with similar intrinsic frequencies to the entrainment frequency. Additionally, we demonstrate that tACS modulates target detection performance in a phase-dependent fashion highlighting the causal role of alpha oscillations for visual perception.

3) Neurochem Res. 2014 Mar 15. [Epub ahead of print]

Involvement of Connexin43 in the Infrasonic Noise-Induced Glutamate Release by Cultured Astrocytes.

Jiang S1, Wang YQ, Xu CF, Li YN, Guo R, Li L.

Author information

Abstract

Infrasonic noise/infrasound is a type of environmental noise that threatens public health as a nonspecific biological stressor. Glutamate-related excitotoxicity is thought to be responsible for infrasound-induced impairment of learning and memory. In addition to neurons, astrocytes are also capable of releasing glutamate. In the present study, to identify the effect of infrasound on astroglial glutamate release, cultured astrocytes were exposed to infrasound at 16 Hz, 130 dB for different times. We found that infrasound exposure caused a significant increase in glutamate levels in the extracellular fluid. Moreover, blocking the connexin43 (Cx43) hemichannel or gap junction, decreasing the probability of Cx43 being open or inhibiting of Cx43 expression blocked this increase. The results suggest that glutamate release by Cx43 hemichannels/gap junctions is involved in the response of cultured astrocytes to infrasound.

4) Infralow frequencies and ultradian rhythms.

David Kaiser

Seminars in pediatric neurology 12/2013; 20(4):242-5. DOI:10.1016/j.spen.2013.10.005

ABSTRACT Our brain activity demonstrates amazing stability across multiple time frames ranging from a few milliseconds to several hours. The longer cycles are commonly called ultradian rhythms and they correspond to infralow frequencies (ILFs) in the milli-Hz range (0.001Hz). Ultradian rhythms between 90 minutes and 2 hours or longer are readily observed in our electroencephalogram, and they reflect periods of activity and rest, cycles of cortical excitability and plasticity followed by relative inactivity. Our nightly sleep is organized into similar stages (rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement sleep) as is our daily behavior (ie, the basic rest-activity cycle). Astrocytes often exhibit milli-Hz ILFs, and they play a major role in shaping neuronal plasticity and activity, and thus may organize or influence the basic rhythms of sleep and waking. The nature and importance of astrocytes in human brain functioning is subsequently reviewed.

Alfredo,

I read the abstract of your paper

Triple-Aspect Monism: A Framework for the Science of Consciousness

in the abstract you wrote:

''My short answer to the first question is that mental processes are those that operate with forms (in the Aristotelian sense of the term, discussed in the following) embedded in material systems and with transmission of such forms from one system to another.''

What do you mean by mental processes that operate with forms in an Aristotelian sense?

Dear Louis, I mean that mental processes can be not-conscious and instantiated in living systems or machines like computers, or conscious. I give some examples. In Aristotle, the form of a statue in the mind of the sculptor is transmitted to a material (marble). He called this process "formal causation"and we call it today "information transmission". The form is conscious for the sculptor. A second example: a musical idea in the mind of a composer is transmitted to a paper (musical notation), and then played by an orchestra (a concert), recorded in a tape recorder, digitalized and recorded in the hard disk of a computer, and then copied to a pen drive and played in a mp3 machine. The composer hears it and recognizes his idea (musical form). Parts of this process are not-conscious, but the information pattern is transmitted and recognized by the composer at the end. This example shows that mental processes can be not-conscious and instantiated in machines. Another example I like to give is the operation of the immune system, distinguishing what belongs to the organism (self) and what does not belong and should be attacked (non-self). This process is made not-consciously by signaling macromolecules. Another example is the Freudian unconscious, that operates on emotionally charged patterns instantiated in the brain that resist to be erased during slow-wave sleep and emerge in dreams. One more example: when a machine makes mathematical calculation, it is doing mental operations not-consciously. I propose that all these processes are mental, although some are not conscious. IOW. Most kinds of processes included in what is called "artificial intelligence" are mental not-conscious processes. Adding feeling to these processes, they become conscious.

Dear Louis and All:

Here is a text I prepared for another forum. It is too simple, but gives an idea of my proposal.

The Possibility of Machine Consciousness

Alfredo Pereira Jr. – São Paulo State University (UNESP), Brasil

Currently there is a controversy among scientists and philosophers about the concept of consciousness and what kind of system (besides living individuals) could experience conscious states. Depending on the answers given to these issues, there may be technological developments impacting human life, as the construction of machines with cognitive and affective capabilities affording a degree of consciousness. In science fiction, conscious robots are often present in future scenarios. How to build them?

For some authors, they can be built with already existing digital information technology and mechanical devices (see, for instance, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0QZPbiJhko). However, the assumption behind this claim is that a machine that behaves like being able of conscious cognition and affect is conscious. This is a “behaviorist” assumption, widely accepted in the last century, but nowadays rejected by most consciousness theorists. For these scientists and philosophers - for instance, in the books of Antonio Damásio - feeling pain is considered to be an internal subjective state, not reducible to withdrawal behaviors in the presence of a noxious stimulus.

The hypothesis I present here is that due to structural constraints digital computers cannot consciously experience the world, but once researchers identify the

mechanism that makes consciousness possible, and suitably insert it in a

computer/robot, the machine should develop conscious states. These are likely to be very different from human experiences, but nevertheless possessing some degree of consciousness. In this case, what is the concept of consciousness being used?

In my approach (Pereira Jr., 2013), I agree that digital computers can perform sophisticated information processing, but this processing is not conscious because an essential ingredient is missing: the feeling. Conscious systems are those that associate information (in the sense of physical signals) with meanings, and meanings with feelings. I have claimed that what makes information conscious is the presence of feelings; for instance, I receive the news that a friend died, interpret it as meaning that I will not be able to enjoy her presence anymore, and feel sad. Contrasting with this situation, if I insert in my computer the information that the operational system is outdated, it does not grasp the meaning of the message and does not feel sad. Besides not having a program for the attribution of feelings to messages, the computer also does not have an adequate medium to instantiate them.

In my theoretical framework (Pereira Jr., 2013), I have related feelings with a kind of natural phenomenon that can be found in many natural substrates, such as ionic solutions, metals and nylon strings. In the case of sound and radio waves, this phenomenon has been described in terms of three parameters: frequency, amplitude and

phase. The requirement for a physical instantiation of feelings can be expressed in terms of patterns presenting a suitable combination of

frequency, phase and amplitude modulation (for instance, Chladni patterns; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMIvAsZvBiw). These patterns can be considered as proto-feelings that become conscious feelings when embodied in an adequate information-processing system.

The technical aspect that I would like to stress is the need of *temporal* amplitude modulation. In brain activity, there is an important split of amplitude-modulated (AM) processes in time and space. Neurons display temporal amplitude modulation only in dendritic (graded) potentials, not in axon (action) potentials. Neuronal networks are not temporally amplitude modulated, the relevant consequence being that these networks cannot instantiate feelings. On the other hand, neural populations do present spatial amplitude modulation, as shown in the classical studies by Walter Freeman on the rabbit olfactory system. Patterns embodied in spatially distributed AM dendritic fields can be integrated by the astroglial network, since the latter displays large-scale waveforms (Pereira Jr., 2013).

As a consequence of the above reasoning, once engineers insert a wavelike substrate (e.g. a vibrating violin string) in a machine, suitably connected with the computational machinery and being affected by the content of the processed information, they would endow the machine with a capacity of feeling. The string(s) would be played by one part of the machine. Another captures the sound vibrations and modulates the behaviour of the machine according to the pattern. Combining cognitive (representational) and feeling (presentational) abilities, the machine could construct a machine-like conscious experience of the world.

Reference:

Pereira Jr (2013) Triple-Aspect Monism: a Framework for the Science of

Human Consciousness. In: Pereira Jr, Lehmann (Eds.) The Unity of Brain, Mind and World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Site: http://www.cambridge.org/co/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/unity-mind-brain-and-world-current-perspectives-science-consciousness

Alfredo,

Not until a few months ago , I would oppose the views that machines could have feelings and really be conscious. Like most people, I cannot fully justify why I had this feeling about question and I cannot fully justify now this change of feelings. But I can say a little.

When I am in a dreamless sleep, I am not conscous because although my body is resting and doing something in this sense, me, Louis Brassard , I am not aware of it and this is not part of my life except as a constraint. I am alife/conscious when I am awake and doing something. Even then, I am not aware of all that I am doing when I am doing something but what I am aware is in general what is central and most important to my action. I am an actor and my life is about doing and consciousness is a central aspect of this doing. While doing something, we have the purpose (Aristotle's fourth cause) of doing an action and proceeds by steps (Aristotle's efficient cause) within a mode/method/habit of action (Aristotle's formal cause). The feelings and emotions are my current situation in my action, Am I in control , on track of accomplishing it or I am loosing control ? My feelins thus my attention to where the change of strategies (formal causes) are most needed. For a machine to be an autonomous actor, all these processes are necessary and their implementation/embodiement might be totally different but these process of actions with a center of attention and a sophisticated mode of interaction with the environment constitute a conscious agent.

Wilfried,

Suppose that somebody has a defficient sensory-motor system that double all perception. When you hear one sound, that person hear two identical one. Whe you see one object, that person see two juxtapose to each other. That person does not know that she is different. She can accomplish everything. She goes to school and learn to count. She learn that one there are two objects, this is 1, when there are two pairs, this is 2, etc. So you see for this person numbers internally mean different numbers than it is for you. Maybe her nervous system may from time to time be like us and in such occasion tell you that there is 2 objects while there is only one. The story is to illustrate that there is no such a thing as qualia. Everything is experience and some of these experience can be communicated unambiguously with word such as number, or tree or colour. Why do you put colour into a different category than number. For most people, green means the same thing that for you except a few people with deficient visual system. For certain nordic people, there are many different colour of snows and their vocubularies for these type of experience is very accurate, like number are accurate in the sense that we communicate unambiguously with such a word. But most experiences are not socially important and so no vocabularies were developed in order to discriminate them accurately. There are reseach being done that are now studying the forms of all kind of things such as softness, redness, smoothness, etc because we have to understand these thing in order to provide robot with good contact with their robotic bodies.

Consciousness in Action

By Susan L. Hurley

‘’We tend to think of perception and action as buffer zones mediating between mind and world. We tend to think of perception as input from world to mind and action s output from mind to world. This Input-Output picture of perception and action may hold in place traditional worries about the mind’s place in the world, as well as more specific philosophical assumptions. If perception is input from the world to the mind and action is output from the mind to the world, then the mind as distinct from the world is what the input is to and what the output is from. So, despite the web of causal relations between organisms and environments, we suppose the mind must be in a separate place, within some boundary that sets it apart from the world.

In trying to understand the mind’s place in the world, we thus study the function from input to output, especially the way central nervous systems process and transform inputs to human organisms. We argue about whether central cognitive processes must have a language-like structure that explains the conceptual structure of thought. But we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.

People and other animals with minds can be seen at one level as dynamic singularities: structural singularities in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits. Consider the circus performer who puts the handle of a dagger in her mouth, tips her head back, balances a sword by its point on the point of the dagger, and with the whole kit balanced above her head magisterially climbs a ladder, swings her legs over the top rung, and climbs back down the other side of the ladder. Each move she makes is both the source of and exquisitely dependent on multiple internal and external channels of sensory and motor-signal feedback, the complex calibrations of which have been honed by years of practice. An only slightly less intricate structure of dynamic feedback relations knits the nervous system of a normally active organism into its environment. This is what the contents of the creature’s interdependent perceptions and intentions both depend on. The whole complex dynamic feedback system includes not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning. As a result, external states can be needed to explain patterns of activity at the body surface, even if what is to be explained is not identified in terms of external states. The dynamic singularity is centred on the organism and moves through environments with the organism, but itself has no sharp boundaries.’’

Dear Louis, I am in agreement with Susan's ideas that updated Jakob von Uexkull's concept of a functional cycle making a inner world (Umwelt) emerge.

However, as implicit in your remark below, external feedback only is not sufficient for consciousness. An internal feedback, in the form of feelings driving attention and action, is essential. You wrote: : "My feelins thus my attention to where the change of strategies (formal causes) are most needed. For a machine to be an autonomous actor, all these processes are necessary and their implementation/embodiement might be totally different but these process of actions with a center of attention and a sophisticated mode of interaction with the environment constitute a conscious agent."

Therefore, the conscious cycle is composed of perception -> feeling -> attention -> action -> new perception. By the way, this is approximately what is represented in the diagram of my paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3644675/

A note: I will send privately to you and other RG coleagues (who asked for) the proofs of my chapter on Triple-Aspect Monism, but it is under copyright and cannot be posted in internet sites or forwarded to other people who may post it in the internet. If some of you are interested in writing a review of the whole book, you can contact Cambridge Univ. Press to ask for a free copy of the printed book.

Louis,

I do not agree with your answer to my address. Colour and numbers are different things. Color is a primary quality of the visual system but numbers are a cognitive construct and therefore on a different level. Normal people do not realize numbers like colours. I think it is also not a good example to think hypothetically someone could percept every sensor input double. Our perception is optimized to map the surrounding economically to the mind. Nevertheless I understand your intention but I do not understand why your example should negate qualia. Qualia is an important information what kind of objects are in my next surrounding. The perception of these objects is qualia. The sensors tells me some qualities of these objects. With these data the mind has to calculate whats to do next. It is a situation like children play with toys, but the toys and the playing child are identically because both are "simulated" in the mind of a person.

I agree with S.L.Hurley and Alfredo. "External feedback only is not sufficient for consciousness. An internal feedback, in the form of feelings driving attention and action, is essential." Yes, but this is also not sufficient. I think a feedback between anticipation and perception or something else is also sufficient and on different levels we have feelings, emotions and consciousness, all with feedback loops.

What if awareness was only the attention spotlight we put on the things we experience and are not congruent with what we predicted ?

I would take a view on how attention, awareness and consciousness are all orchestrated around our error in predicting the world.

Although that is just my stone in the lake of your debate... I do not want to enter it ;)

Wilfried,

Redness is an interactional construct as cognitive numbers are. I am supportive of O'reagan ideas on this http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

Our perception is optimized to map the surrounding economically to the mind. This notion of perception is called the sandwich cognitive model by Susan L. Hurley. Seing interaction as a sensacting interactionist process web remove the focus on the body boundary.

Feeling and emotions cannot be separated from these processes but they are not focus on a fixed aspect of it. These cognitive process are 99.9% unconscious and the .1% conscious is never the same. The feelings and emotions are detecting where the unconsious processes are the weakest or failing for the current action and allow to partically adjust what is otherwise automated and set the focus on learning these new adjustment so that the nervous system can be further automated. So we only feel and conscious of what is currently not fully automated and so feel totally free since this is only part we are aware of. We never realized that our visual accuity is low in the periphery of our visual field because we are never fully aware of what is going on in the periphery. This is the same for freedom and consciousness, we are only fully aware of what is in the feeling focus of attention which also correspond to the only part of behavior that is not fully automated at each moment.

Stephane,

It would be a great addition to the forum if you would participate.

Louis,

I disagree with your fist section: "Redness is an interactional construct as cognitive numbers are."

No, it isn't the same cognitive construct. Redness is a signal of our colour receptors in the eyes. There are three different ones, but I think you do know this very well. The relation of these three signals is a property of an object or a part of it which is perceivable. We have learned to name this property and call it "red". The number of similar objects and the ability to count them has not the same quality. We can see each object and we have learned a sequence of numbers words to apply to the situation. Five objects do not have a special perception like a red object.

But I agree with the rest of your answer.

Dear Stephane, what is (for you) the difference between awareness and consciousness? Are feelings essential to which one (or both)?

Wifried,

I was not trying to say that numbers are colours. I was trying to undermine the primary/secondary quality distinction as Locke and other have made.

There is the What we are conscious of . This varies at every instant.

Why we are conscious of a what at that particular instant.

What it feels like to be conscious of a particular aspect of our interaction with the environment

The last question , the qualia question is well addressed with the sensory-motor approach of O'reagan. It is consistent with Hurley, Gibson, Von Uexkull approaches.

http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

Well, first I would say that awareness isn't necessary conscious. If you take the typical case of blindsight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight) for example, one can have the conscious feeling of being blind, although still being able to use the visual modality in reactive tasks. I would say that in such a case, the subject is aware this visual information while not being conscious of it. I've always liked to imagine consciousness as the attention focus directed toward the own brain activation. If you take the consciousness as the only ability to build a coherent view about the world and create a sort of cartesian theater, then awareness and consciousness blend themselves and I would say that we already have "conscious robots" or close. However if you look at the hard problem of consciousness, which is to have the knowledge that you are currently aware of your environment, then you need somehow to represent yourself as the main actor in your cartesian theater.

I would see consciousness as the window on your self...

My ealier point about the error of prediction is that it could be the main driving mechanism for deciding about the next direction where you want to move this window. In order to reduce uncertainty about the world, about yourself and decide which action to take in order to better understand your environement and survive.

Dear Stephane, thank you for the answer. You use "awareness" in the same sense as it was used by Francis Crick, referring to the possession of information by the brain, not necessarily with consciousness of the content of the information. You also relate consciousness with attention, and prediction with self-knowledge.

My only objection is that there are conscious experiences outside the focus of attention; several feelings are experienced while we pay attention to other conscious contents.

My colleague Claudia Carrara-Augustenborg would also object to your concept of awareness, I leave this comment to her (if she is reading this discussion). Our common views can be read in this free book chapter: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=38796&osCsid=3712df5600f98259a8bdc1d9baf202e9

Dear all,

I had a brief exploration of your comments and appreciated their clarity. Among others, the comments on whether awareness can be unconscious. This led me to ask whether one could consider feeling as a mere bias (as in the choice made during blindsight) for which the subject, when asked to give a rationale, will consider his-her decision post hoc and select the most « logical » reason to it. A conscious decision implies that its rationale be the same before and after the action.

I know that this is « bricolage », but I wondered mainly how to relate feeling and emotion...

Til later,

Françoise

"I said that because I was angry" ?

Indeed we are working on an emotional model for synthetic agents, which role is to guide the action selection and the "stance" of a specific action. (e.g grsping an object will be achieved in very different way depending on the mood of a person).

In any case, I would say that most of our actions are unconscious as the cases where you actually analyse what you are doing are rare. Introspection and exploration of our feelings is done mostly when you can totally automatize your physical behaviors, therefore giving you back the ressources necessary for attention.

In this sense again I see the consciousness as the phenomenon of guiding the spotlight of attention on specific parts of theworld state (including the self inner state)

Dear Françoise, the problem with rational decisions is that the rationale may be an emotion that is not rational for third persons, but is well integrated in the "emotional intelligence" of the agent. Regarding the conceptual (or semantic) problem of distinguishing feeling and emotion, I argue that feelings imply a degree of consciousness, e.g. when I feel pain in my stomach when thinking of doing something and then decide not to do. This feeling is obviously conscious. If there is an emotional factor that biases the decision, but I am not conscious if it, then I call it an "unconscious emotion" (this is possibly related to the Freudian unconscious).

Best,

Alfredo

Dear Stephane, we do not need to think about our feelings to feel them; neither to pay attention on our feelings to feel them. I have argued that affective consciousness runs in parallel with cognitive consciousness - the latter closely related to the control of attention and the voluntary component of behavior. Conscious mental life is the result of a combination of these processes, which run in parallel in two brain circuits (neuronal for cognition and glial for feelings). In your synthetic agents, for them to be conscious you need to construct two interacting networks, using different physical and computational principles, one for cognition and another for affect. The cognitive one is like the digital computer, operating on a binary code to construct representations of objects and processes in the environment (as well as intentional objects/processes). The affective one has to be wavelike to be able to instantiate feelings by means of frequency, amplitude and phase modulation, like a vibrating string. This is my view of these issues, further discussed in my recent publications.

Best,

Alfredo

Dear Alfredo,

Yes, I know your view, I went quickly through your book chapter and I find it inspiring. It is true that the glial network seems under-researched. However, I guess that by affective consciousness your imply more than "just" emotions as those could live in the sole substrate of limbic system and the basal ganglia without a specific formulation in the glial cells...

What would be an example for those sentences : "we do not need to think about our feelings to feel them; neither to pay attention on our feelings to feel them."

I cannot find any case when we can have a feeling without focusing your attention on it. But maybe we do use different definition of the term "feeling"...

Dear Stephane,

The limbic system and the basal ganglia are full of glial cells (there are more glial cells than neurons in parts of the brain related with conscious processing; neurons outnumber them only in the cerebellum, a part of the motor system that is not correlated with conscious processing).

In my model of brain function, the "emotional" (limbic, etc.) systems detect and process emotional stimuli, triggering (or not) the formation of a large feeling-wave. The astroglial network, having a hub structure that is not fragmented by synapses, is more adequate than neuronal networks for the instantiation of feeling-waves.

This picture is promising because feelings are not located in specific structures. The fear is not in the amygdala; it is a whole-brain wave that affects the whole living organism. The amygdala just triggers a fear-wave that is (possibly) instantiated in the astroglial network.

One exemple of the kind you required: tooth pain. You are not thinking of your tooth and your attention is directed to a cognitive task. Suddenly the (conscious, of course) tooth pain begins. You have to pay attention to it after the it begins, but it is not the attention that makes pain conscious. What makes it conscious is a large pain wave that is formed in the astroglial network independently of your previous cognitive processes and modulates billions of synapses with neurons, thus interfering with the cognitive process.

Alfredo,

I never have had tooth pain - smile - ....so I have some problems to understand this example. But I have a question to your wave model. How can we distinguish different feeling-waves which throupass the brain? We have good feelings and terrifying feelings. If I understand your model, the waves are ionic (Ca²+), and these ions are all equal.

Stephane,

your answers are very interesting. Is it possible that your focus is the mismatch of anticipation and the reality mediated by sensory input. IMHO these may be alarm signals but not the basic information for consciousness. Could it not on the contrary be the consistency of these two informations?

Dear Wilfried, I claim that the waves are Heraclitian - never the same. The mechanism that I postulate - and requires empirical support, but it is still an open question - is amplitude modulation. For instance, radio waves are different depending on the frequency of the station and the content of the transmission. In AM radios, the content is encoded in variations of amplitude of a carrier wave that operates in a given frequency. Walter Freeman already developed the idea that the meaning of information is instantiated in the spatial distribution of amplitude in a neural assembly. I add to his idea my hypothesis that feelings are instantiated in the temporal amplitude variations of astroglial calcium waves. Technology already allows the register of these waves, now it is necessary to create tools to analyze the existence of amplitude modulation and if different waveforms correlate with reported conscious feelings. I suggest that different feelings correlate with different kinds of waveform, analogously to the correspondence between different sounds of musical instrument and different kinds of waveforms (sine, triangle, sawtooth, etc. kinds of waves).

Alfredo,

your idea is very creative and fascinating (I like the resonance idea). I am curious if you manage to detect different frequencies of the Ca-waves.

I would not be surprised so much if different feelings were detected spatially differentiated, and the calcium-waves could have an activating or damping influence .

Dear Wilfried, it seems that - like quantum theorists say of their field - in the brain everything that is not impossible happens. I have stressed temporal amplitude modulation because it is the well-known mechanism that encodes information (waveforms) in radio transmission and music synthesizers. Also spatial differentiation may occur, and this was the suggestion made by Freeman in his classical studies of the olfactory system. You can find a nice summary here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Freeman's_mass_action

Best,

Alfredo

PS: Please copy and paste the above address on your browser. If you click on the link to be redirected to the page it will not work, for some reason that is unknown to me.

Alfredo,

tank you for your link. It is working precisely.

Alfredo,

Feelings have traditionally be refering to some phenomenal aspects of our awareness and I do not think that it is appropriated for a scientist to attribute this word to something that is unconscious.  It is highjacking the meaning.  An unconscious feeling.  This phenomenologically does not make any sense.  Damasio theory might make sense but to call feeling something that is subconscious is not appropriate.  He should call that things something else.

But sometime we have some feelings that are on the border of consciousness and we decide to ignore them and after a while they are block from the conscious.  The feeling disapears but the source of the feeling are still there, the needs that these feelings where signaling are still there.  

I agree with Louis opinion and signaled that some pages before. 

Such an unconscious state could be an undefined desire or a kind of restlessness. If it would be conscious we could label it but an unconscious state is impossible to declare. 

Dear Louis and Wilfried, I am in agreement, but i note that a peripheral feeling is conscious, maybe in a lower degree (of consciousness) than the attended ones, but still conscious. Thanks for your comments in this thread!

Alfredo,

I agree that a feeling that is the periphery , not in the focus of attention is still conscious since we are vaguely aware of it.  It is calling our attention. 

Dear Wilfried, we do not have labels for many conscious peripheral feelings. For the attendend ones, Spinoza identified dozens of them;  please take a look at the diagram made by Derman in the attached EDGE article (Map of Emotional Feelings, in the middle of the article).

Derman : ''Love is pleasure associated with an external object.''

This is not true.  

First we do not love objects but we love other people or our favorite pet animals but we do not love a rock or a TV.  We may find a rock beautiful and enjoy and have pleasure looking at it, and the same with the TV.  We sometime say that we love an object but what we really mean is that we like so much that object that it is almost like loving.  

Second, when we love someone it is become we have become so intimated with that person that that person is not completely outside anymore but intrinsically part of us. So it is not totally outside but is inside and outside.  It is when our person has partially fused with the other person.  Aristotle spoke of one soul in two bodies.  It is an exageration but it points the way.

Third, Love is a feelings but one associate with a commitment to the other, Instead of speaking of feeling , yes the feeling exist but it is more appropriate to describe love as an act of opening up our being to include (to began the fusing) another being; it is empathy and it is central to our theory of mind which use  our being to impersonate the other and it does that only within the commitment to love.  Love is not something happening to you but a act of openess.

Derman is a mathematician working for money.  What do you expect from such background.  Mathematics is ground on the object side of our theory of mind and when it is overdeveloped it shutt down the love/person side; it creates as dominance of the left/male hemisphere over the right/female hemisphere.  Money is the externalization of human will, its objectivization that control people who have their love side shutt dow.  It create societies based of slave master relationship at the global scale of the planet.  It is an zombification of the whole humanity in the name of freedom.

The article is worth reading and speak of many interesting things but when someone like him is totally insensitive for writing that sentence then you know that he will not rise and stay in the lower places. ''where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.” —Luke 12:33-34 

Louis,

it is great!

I recommended only the diagram, not the whole article!

Alfredo,

it seams to be interesting, but I am not able to enlarge the map of the emotions so I can read nothing.

Alfredo,

I cannot see the content of the diagram.  I agree with the section 6 where he emphasizded the importance of intuition, distinguishing it from expression and modeling.  

Dear Wilfried and Louis, please find attached the diagram with better resolution.

Thanks Alfredo,

Self-reported body maps reveal areas in the body where certain sensations may increase (warm colors) or decrease (cool colors) for a given emotion.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/03/body-emotions-finnish-study-video_n_4532617.html

Thanks Alfredo

Feeling may be sentimental -Emotion joyous outlook -morbid temperament ,tragic ,sorry episode etc .

It depends upon the nature of feeling where individual passes ,depressing unconscious feelings.In this stage although the mind is functioning but unconscious stage is believing in the sleeping stage & sometimes the mind inner behavior is responding in such a feeling stage that the person gets surprise when he comes out from his original consciousness.

In the unconscious feelings the presentation is of negative nature but in other cases such unconscious feelings reflect a positive dimension force of the mind which he feels & comes out under a vision in disguise stage

Dear Rohit, are you able to feel the unconscious feeling?

Alfredo,

"are you able to feel the unconscious feeling?"

I would say yes but I am not able to name the feeling. It is an undefined feeling that has a positive or negative influence to my decisions. Such unconscious feelings are diffuse and not so intense like emotions. They activate or depress my mind.

I think most of these feelings are like alarm signals. If in the forest the birds are suddenly quiet such a feeling may occur, it is terrifying because the tiger may be just behind me... But it is not the unconscious feeling which is terrifying but my anticipation of possible causes (cognition), an now an emotion takes place: fear. Here is a change in the quality of the emotional system like catastrophe theory (cusp catastrophe) describes.

Dear Wilfried, if you can feel them they are not unconscious

nice discussion but are there any studies on it

Dear Syed, This is a conceptual discussion involving different ways of intepretation of data from neuroscience.

I find the notion of ''unconscious feeling'' as nonsensical.  Feeling only exist in consciousness.  It is like saying that somebody would have an unconscious appetite.  He is very hungry but he does not know this.  He is unconsciously hungry. NO.  Your are consciously hungry or your are not hungry.  You have a conscious feeling OR you do not have this feeling. Simple.

Dear Louis, We are completely in agreement on this issue! Best Regards

Dear Alfredo,

It is good to be in agreement for a change.  I also appreciate our disagreements.

Dear Alfredo,

Just in case you do not already know, Arnold Trehub died on April 3th. at 93 of age. http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=185004340

Regard

Louis, I did not know, thanks for the note. A great scientist! I am glad I collaborated and mostly discussed with him frequently.

Alfredo,

Yes a great scientist.  I rarely agreed with him but really appreciated him.  I read the obituary and so discovered that he had been in the US air force in the Pacific during the WWII and that he was a good boxer.  I did not know that but he had realized he was a good scientific boxer that never give up.

Yes, his Retinoid Theory of Consciousness is not the best solution to the Hard Problem, but he tried hard to convince us that it is! He had some papers published in the best journals and was the first supervisor of the founder of the scientific field of Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp, among other achievements. I met him personally only one time at Boston University in 1998, in the Philosophy and Neuroscience Workshop. We interacted closely in discussion groups promoted by the journal Nature in the 2000's - the Online Workshop on Theories of Consciousness organized by Hans Ricke and myself, and the Consciousness Researchers Forum that I organized and resulted in the book The Unity of Mind, Brain and World (link below) to which he contributed a chapter:

Table of Contents

Introduction Alfredo Pereira, Jr and Dietrich Lehmann

1. Body and world as phenomenal contents of the brain's reality model Bjorn Merker

2. Homing in on the brain mechanisms linked to consciousness: the buffer of the perception-and-action interface Christine A. Godwin, Adam Gazzaley and Ezequiel Morsella

3. A biosemiotic view on consciousness derived from system hierarchy Ron Cottam and Willy Ranson

4. A conceptual framework embedding conscious experience in physical processes Wolfgang Baer

5. Emergence in dual-aspect monism Ram L. P. Vimal

6. Consciousness: microstates of the brain's electric field as atoms of thought and emotion Dietrich Lehmann

7. A foundation for the scientific study of consciousness Arnold Trehub

8. The proemial synapse: consciousness-generating glial-neuronal units Bernhard J. Mitterauer

9. A cognitive model of language and conscious processes Leonid Perlovsky

10. Triple-aspect monism: a conceptual framework for the science of human consciousness Alfredo Pereira, Jr.

http://www.cambridge.org/br/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/unity-mind-brain-and-world-current-perspectives-science-consciousness?format=HB&isbn=9781107026292#contentsTabAnchor