ETH Zürich, Professur für Philosophie, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
Conscious Cogn. 2019 Apr;70:25-38. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2019.02.002. Epub 2019 Feb 26.
There are strong reasons to believe that our conscious inner life is structured, suggested both by introspection as well as scientific psychology. One of the most salient structural characteristics of conscious experiences is known as unity of consciousness. In this contribution, we wish to demonstrate how features of experience that pertain to the unity of consciousness could be made precise in terms of mathematical relations that hold between phenomenal objects. Based on phenomenological considerations, we first outline three such features. These are (i) environmental embedding, (ii) the mutual constraint between local and global representations, and (iii) a top-down process of object formation in consciousness. We then introduce a formal model based on the notion of phenomenal space, defined in terms of a set of quasi-elementary and extended entities. We describe the structure of phenomenal space by appealing to mereological and topological concepts, and we outline a projector-based calculus to account for the idea that the structure of phenomenal space is ultimately dynamical. Using the above concepts, one could approach the mind-matter problem by relating environmentally embedded agents to topologically well-defined objects that result from decompositions of phenomenal space. We conclude our discussion by putting it into the context of some recent conceptual questions that appear in cognitive science and consciousness studies. We opt for the possibility to regard the phenomenon of consciousness not in terms of a singular transition that happens between "brain" and "mind" but rather in terms of a series of transitions between structured layers of experience.
有充分的理由相信，我们的意识内在生活是有结构的，这既可以通过内省，也可以通过科学心理学来证明。意识体验最显著的结构特征之一就是意识的统一性。在本贡献中，我们希望展示如何用在现象对象之间保持的数学关系来精确地描述与意识统一性相关的体验特征。基于现象学的考虑，我们首先概述了三个这样的特征。它们是(i)环境嵌入，(ii)局部和全局表示之间的相互约束，以及(iii)意识中对象形成的自上而下的过程。然后，我们引入了一个基于现象空间概念的形式模型，该模型是根据一组准初等和扩展实体来定义的。我们通过运用整体论和拓扑学的概念来描述现象空间的结构，并概述了一个基于投影器的演算，以说明现象空间的结构最终是动态的。通过使用上述概念，我们可以通过将环境嵌入的代理与从现象空间分解而来的拓扑上定义良好的对象联系起来，从而解决心物问题。最后，我们将讨论置于认知科学和意识研究中出现的一些最近的概念问题的背景下。我们选择了一种可能性，即不是根据“大脑”和“心灵”之间发生的单一转变，而是根据经验的结构化层之间的一系列转变来看待意识现象。
