Human Consciousness: Where Is It From and What Is It for

Awareness impairment in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia: a systematic MRI review

This review aims to define awareness impairment and related disturbances in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) spectrum of disorders. An update of the available scientific literature on the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the study of awareness in these disorders is also offered. MRI plays an important role in the characterization of neurodegenerative signatures and can increase our knowledge on brain structural and functional correlates of awareness. In the reviewing process, we established a-priori criteria and we searched the scientific literature for relevant articles on this topic. In summary, we selected 36 articles out of 1340 publications retrieved from PubMed. Based on this selection, this review discusses the multiple terms used to define different or overlapping aspects of awareness impairment, and specifically summarizes recent application of MRI for investigating anosognosia, social cognition, including theory of mind and emotional processing, free will, and autonoetic awareness alterations in different neurodegenerative disorders, with most of these studies focused on AD and FTLD. This systematic review highlights the importance of awareness impairment and related domains in neurodegenerative disorders, especially in AD and FTLD, and it outlines MRI structural and functional correlates in these populations.

Art and Perception: Using Empirical Aesthetics in Research on Consciousness

Understanding consciousness is a major frontier in the natural sciences. However, given the nuanced and ambiguous sets of conditions regarding how and when consciousness appears to manifest, it is also one of the most elusive topics for investigation. In this context, we argue that research in empirical aesthetics—specifically on the experience of art—holds strong potential for this research area. We suggest that empirical aesthetics of art provides a more exhaustive description of conscious perception than standard laboratory studies or investigations of the less artificial, more ecological perceptual conditions that dominate this research, leading to novel and better suited designs for natural science research on consciousness. Specifically, we discuss whether empirical aesthetics of art could be used for a more adequate picture of an observer’s attributions in the context of conscious perception. We point out that attributions in the course of conscious perception to (distal) objects versus to media (proximal objects) as origins of the contents of consciousness are typically swift and automatic. However, unconventional or novel object-media relations used in art can bring these attributions to the foreground of the observer’s conscious reflection. This is the reason that art may be ideally suited to study human attributions in conscious perception compared to protocols dedicated only to the most common and conventional perceptual abilities observed under standard laboratory or “natural”/ecological conditions alone. We also conclude that art provides an enormous stock of such unconventional and novel object-media relations, allowing more systematic falsification of tentative conclusions about conscious perception versus research protocols covering more conventional (ecological) perception only. We end with an outline of how this research could be carried out in general.

Meta-criteria to formulate criteria of consciousness

Any neurobiological model claiming explanation of a complex human phenomenon should start with an explicit definition of the explanandum. If a classical intensional definition is impossible, we can use a descriptive definition by listing necessary criteria (e.g., of consciousness). This commentary suggests four meta-criteria that different proposed criteria of consciousness should fulfill: phenomenological consensus, empirical evidence, domain specificity, and non-circularity.

Consciousness Beyond Neural Fields: Expanding the Possibilities of What Has Not Yet Happened

In the field theories in physics, any particular region of the presumed space-time continuum and all interactions between elementary objects therein can be objectively measured and/or accounted for mathematically. Since this does not apply to any of the field theories, or any other neural theory, of consciousness, their explanatory power is limited. As discussed in detail herein, the matter is complicated further by the facts than any scientifically operational definition of consciousness is inevitably partial, and that the phenomenon has no spatial dimensionality. Under the light of insights from research on meditation and expanded consciousness, chronic pain syndrome, healthy aging, and eudaimonic well-being, we may conceive consciousness as a source of potential energy that has no clearly defined spatial dimensionality, but can produce significant changes in others and in the world, observable in terms of changes in time. It is argued that consciousness may have evolved to enable the human species to generate such changes in order to cope with unprecedented and/or unpredictable adversity. Such coping could, ultimately, include the conscious planning of our own extinction when survival on the planet is no longer an acceptable option.

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Renewable Energy Development in the Baltic States

Recently, the approaches of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the renewable energy development have changed with the new global approach to sustainability. Today, CSR is an evolving and dominating business practice that integrates sustainable development into a company’s business model. The main focus of our paper is on the public relations of corporate social responsibility in renewable energy development. We show that a proper approach to public relations and resulting communication and dissemination of products and results should be sustained. This paper assesses the new pathways for executing public relations for CSR with relation to the renewable energy projects. The study analyses the impact of corporate social responsibility on energy companies, which are expected to make a positive contribution to the development of sustainable energy. We use both the overview of the theoretical concepts and literature as well as analyze the case of the “old” and “new” European Union Member countries represented by the Baltic States that yield many similarities but differ in their economic development to show the best practices of promoting CSR in sustainable energy development. Our results demonstrate that the implementation of corporate social responsibility can help to create more ethical and conscious sustainable companies and to build better relationships with the environmentally engaged citizens and loyal customers who are also concerned about the environment, health and well-being of their communities.

Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine

Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories (psychological contents) including the intimate experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate and control actions and psychological contents. This compelling, intuitive consciousness-centric account has, and continues to shape folk and scientific accounts of psychology and human behavior. Over the last 30 years, research from the cognitive neurosciences has challenged this intuitive social construct account when providing a neurocognitive architecture for a human psychology. Growing evidence suggests that the executive functions typically attributed to the experience of consciousness are carried out competently, backstage and outside subjective awareness by a myriad of fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems. While it remains unclear how and where the experience of consciousness is generated in the brain, we suggested that the traditional intuitive explanation that consciousness is causally efficacious is wrong-headed when providing a cognitive neuroscientific account of human psychology. Notwithstanding the compelling 1st-person experience (inside view) that convinces us that subjective awareness is the mental curator of our actions and thoughts, we argue that the best framework for building a scientific account is to be consistent with the biophysical causal dependency of prior neural processes. From a 3rd person perspective, (outside view), we propose that subjective awareness lacking causal influence, is (no more) than our experience of being aware, our awareness of our psychological content, knowing that we are aware, and the belief that that such experiences are evidence of an agentive capacity shared by others. While the human mind can be described as comprising both conscious and nonconscious aspects, both ultimately depend on neural process in the brain. In arguing for the counter-intuitive epiphenomenal perspective, we suggest that a scientific approach considers all mental aspects of mind including consciousness in terms of their underlying, preceding (causal) biological changes, in the realization that most brain processes are not accompanied by any discernible change in subjective awareness.

Preparing managers for a reconfigured world: management education's new gig

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the lack of a clear theoretical framework in management education programs to allow students to understand the world in which gig workers operate. The article asserts the need for practical guidance for pedagogy to prepare students to manage in the gig economy.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper provides a rationale for the assertion that, beyond training students to create their own work configurations in the new world of work, management education should acquaint students with the specific challenges faced by managers responsible for a spectrum of workers in various work configurations. This paper explicates gig work configurations and offers theoretical and practical issues related to worker and manager identity to be considered in the development of an educational framework.

Findings

Management curricula over time have successfully augmented several competencies to the manager identity. Bolstering the competency of simultaneously managing employees working in multiple employment arrangements is the next natural progression of management education.

Practical implications

Particular challenges for prospective “gig managers” may relate to the management of somewhat elusive processes that enhance their own and their workers' organizational identity and related outcomes.

Originality/value

The authors invoke the literature of holding environments for identity development, along with the distinctness and inclusion facets of Kegan's theory of the evolution of consciousness and tenets of institutional theory, in a call for the examination of methods that may help aspirant managers recognize distinction and inclusion needs in others and cultivate tools to assist in their workers' need fulfillment.

The Evolution of Social Beliefs 1960-2016 in the United States and Its Influence on Empathy and Prosocial Expression in Medicine

This perspective surveys healthcare's response to the increased prominence of racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities as well as females in American culture. It argues for understanding physicians both as products of the broader society and its changes. Starting in the 1960s, empiric evidence for the rise of reactionary viewpoints in response to major social movements is outlined. Structural reasons for the prevalence of such ideologies within medicine are highlighted. Its negative consequences for minority health are addressed. Finally, the author turns to compensatory strategies to improve the social environment within healthcare. Alternative selection strategies for medical school are proposed, with a stronger focus on empathetic candidates.