Embodied Human Consciousness, Abrupt Global Climate Change, and Freedom - S. David Stoney, Ph.D.
IV. ANOSOGNOSIA FROM A PROCESS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE - Our ability to consciously know the world is part and parcel of our dynamic interaction with it. This requires that we, as embodied dominant occasions of experience, prehend, via perception in the mode of causal efficacy, the intended aspect. Thus, the knower, the object of knowledge, and the act of knowing form a dynamic whole with a definite duration.
"One of the clearest everyday examples of this nonsensory mode of perception is our perception of our own bodies...I mean when we feel our bodies from the inside - for instance when we feel pain in them, or when we become aware that we see by means of our eyes. In seeing the paper, I am not also seeing the eye. I am seeing the paper by means of the causal efficacy of the eye. Accordingly, I have a (sensory) perception of the paper by means of a (nonsensory) perception of my eye." (David Ray Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pg. 141, 1997.)
Anosognosia I: Extreme Nonparticipation: Discussion of a peculiar neurological condition where a person fails to acknowledge a left sided paralysis and claims, incorrectly, to be able to move his paralyzed limbs.
Anosognosia II: Poster presented at Tucson 2000, Toward a Science of Consciousness, April 10 - 15, 2000: "Anosognosia: A Window on the Bimodal Nature of Embodied Human Consciousness." A peculiar feature of anosognosia is that sensory input that should update the body schema does not do so even though it may reach the level of conscious awareness. This finding denies the sensationalist doctrine. The implication is that the patients are unable to form leftward prehensions or specify affordances, i.e., opportunities for action, on the left side. The denial of paralysis and claims to be able to move suggest that some patients are experiencing a convincing hallucination of an intact left limb. The unawareness of their left side and the dissociation of conscious perception from brain activity seems compatible with the bimodal model of perception proposed by A.N. Whitehead and suggests that conscious awareness is ordinarily localized to a 'virtual body' (or "body-world schema;" see Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993) that normally depends on non-sensory, direct perception between the organism and its world for its updating. The left hemisphere seems to have sacrificed some of its capacity for leftward nonsensory perception (i.e., involving the ipsilateral limb) in order to provide for language function. This makes it incapable of substituting for the injured right hemisphere in these anosognosic patients and leads to a body schema that lacks a left side.
Anosognosia III: Abstract submitted for the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology "Anosognosia for hemiplegia: A Window on Embodied Human Consciousness," Atlanta, GA, April, 2000. A longer, slightly modified version of my abstract for Tucson.
Anosognosia IV: Summary of Points: A draft version of some points to be addressed in the anosognosia articles.
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