Cognition
August 1, 2017
Aiyana K Willard, Ara Norenzayan
100 citations
People who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) hold more paranormal beliefs and report more mystical experiences and feelings of universal connectedness than either religious or non-religious individuals. However, SBNR individuals resemble religious individuals in their patterns of cognitive biases. They also score higher on measures of schizotypy. Conversions between groups since childhood are linked to specific cognitive differences: dualism predicts conversion to religion, while schizotypy predicts conversion to SBNR.
Cognition
January 1, 2015
Ludger Van Dijk, Rob Withagen, Raoul M Bongers
65 citations
Radical enactivists worry that using the concept of information in ecological psychology implies content, which would conflict with non-representational cognitive science. This article argues that James J. Gibson's later notion of information was intended to be content-less—information for affordances rather than information about the environment. The authors contend that subsequent ecological psychology has drifted into cognitivist language, but that reclaiming Gibson's original insight—that there is no information in content, only in use—allows the concept to be applied without invoking representation. Embracing this content-free notion of information can help situate the enactivist's "basic mind" within larger, more complex scales of coordination.
Cognition
September 1, 2023
Yoni Zion Amir, Yaniv Assaf, Yossi Yovel et al.
25 citations
People can have a phenomenal experience—a raw, qualitative feel—without having immediate access to it or being able to report it at the moment. Using a novel paradigm, participants (Experiment 1, N = 40) lacked online access to a stimulus but could later retrospectively judge its phenomenal, qualitative aspects. A second experiment (N = 40) ruled out explanations based on unconscious processing or responses to stimulus offset. The results suggest that phenomenal and access consciousness are not only conceptually distinct but can also be empirically separated, supporting Ned Block's controversial dissociation.
Cognition
October 1, 2021
Eugen Fischer, Justin Sytsma
22 citations
The perception of philosophical zombies—hypothetical beings indistinguishable from humans but lacking consciousness—may be shaped by linguistic biases rather than solid reasoning. In a study involving 200 participants, framing effects were observed: when presented with the term "zombie," 75% maintained strong intuitions about their conceivability, compared to just 40% for "duplicate." These results suggest that contextually defeated inferences can mislead understanding of consciousness, challenging the notion that significant barriers exist between physical processes and conscious experience.