Feeling & Knowing

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

two possibilities. One calls for actual neural projections from the “affect complex” to the “posterior sensory set” and vice versa. The other possibility calls for approximate simultaneity of activations in the two sets, resulting in the production of a time-based ensemble. In either option, the ultimate realization of a conscious mind depends on b

Consciousness is a gathering of knowledge sufficient to generate, in the midst of flowing images, automatically, the notion that the images are mine, are happening in my living organism, and that the mind is…well, mine too! The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind. Co

an error that has been repeatedly committed in the quest for consciousness has been to treat it as a “special” function, even a separate “substance,” a fragrance wafting over the mind process but unconnected to it or to its underpinnings.

We should think of wakefulness as the operation that allows us to “inspect” images, a sort of turning on the lights on the set. But the wakefulness process is not involved in putting together the procession of images in our minds, nor is it concerned with telling us that the images we are inspecting are ours.

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to the same process

Mind, as defined earlier, is one way of referring to the active production and display of images arising from actual perception or from memory recall or from both. The images that constitute a mind flow in a never-ending cortege and, as they do so, describe all sorts of actors and objects, all sorts of actions and relationships, all sorts of qualit

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what i