Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “outthereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory ” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, I develop two theses. The multimodal user interface (MUI) theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner.

There are two quite distinct ways in which events that we normally think of as “physical ” relate in an intimate way to events that we normally think of as “psychological”. One intimate relation occurs in exteroception at the point where events in the world become events as-perceived. The other intimate relationship occurs at the interface of conscious experience with its neural correlates in the brain. The chapter examines each of these relationships and positions them within a dual-aspect, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and external world. The chapter goes on to provide grounds for viewing mind and nature as fundamentally psychophysical, and examines similar views as well as differences in previously unpublished writings of Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

One of the important objectives of business data visualization for decision making is to assist the user in their cognition and recall of prominent features and patterns of data. In this study, we argue that visualization of multi-dimensional data is important and difficult. To be effective, such systems should utilize the inherent human perceptual skills and experience in order to deal with the complexity caused by the “curse of dimensionality. ” We present a theoretical basis from multiples disciplines, supporting the need for a new approach for multi-dimensional data visualization. The new paradigm for visualization presented in this paper (called figural animation) is an attempt to deal with the dimensionality complexity by relying on the ubiquitous human perceptions. Figural animation is an extension of Chernoff faces and glyphs to full-featured animated figures for representing multi-dimensional data. The method is implemented using the poser software and Microsoft technology. The figural animation visualization (FAV) system contains VCR-type controls allowing the user to examine any particular point or play any portion of the video at various speeds. We have applied the FAV system in the visualization of a real-world business case to identify issues related to the data preparation process, data mapping, and cultural and perceptual issues that may rise in such visualization.

neurocomputation involves discrete signals communicated along fixed transmission lines between discrete computational elements. This concept is shown to be inadequate to account for invariance in recognition, as well as for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. A Harmonic Resonance theory is presented as an alternative paradigm of neurocomputation, that exhibits both the property of invariance, and the emergent Gestalt properties of perception, not as special mechanisms contrived to achieve those properties, but as natural properties of the resonance itself.

The question of whether conscious experience has any functional purpose depends on a more fundamental issue concerning the nature of conscious experience. In particular, whether the world of experience is the external world itself, as suggested by direct realism, or whether it is merely a virtualreality replica of that world in an internal representation, as in indirect realism, or representationalism. There is an epistemological problem with the notion of direct realism, for we cannot be consciously aware of objects beyond the sensory surface. Therefore the world of experience can only be an internal replica of the external world. This in turn validates a phenomenological approach to studying the nature of the perceptual representation in the brain. Phenomenology reveals that the representational strategy employed in the brain is an analogical one, in which objects are represented in the brain by constructing full spatial replicas of those objects in an internal representation.

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In [NeuroQuantology 6, 46 (2008): arXiv:0706.4180], a certain natural phenomenon of self-observing consciousness was shown to be incompatible with the standard axioms of quantum theory. In order to consider a possibility of removing this inconsistency, which arises due to the separation between an observing party and a state vector being observed stated in the quantum theory axioms, we provide a conjecture where ‘being’, or existence, is identified with the experience of observing the state vector. That is, the observer is not observing the state vector in terms of the relative difference between reference frames, instead, the experience of observing the state vector should define the observer, or being. It is shown that the Heisenberg picture provides a natural description of this conjecture. 1