Title Participants Abstract "Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness: A Vision of Unknowing (Anoetic) and Knowing (Noetic) Consciousness in the Remembrance of Things Past and Imagined Futures" "Marie Vandekerckhove, Jaak Panksepp" "In recent years there has been a expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving (2004, 2005), we look at the phenomena starting from primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awakeness or unknowing (anoetic) consciousness, with a fundamental form of first-person self-experience which relies on affective experiential states and raw sensory-perceptual mental existences, to higher forms of knowing and self-aware consciousness. Since current scientific approaches are most concerned with the understanding of higher declarative states of consciousness, affective and perceptual anoetic forms of consciousness are vastly underestimated that may be foundational for all forms of higher knowing consciousness such as semantic and episodic memories permitting humans to experience mental time travel--namely an autonoetic form of consciousness based on thought and self-awareness." "A continuum of consciousness: from wakefulness and sentience towards anoetic consciousness" "Marie Vandekerckhove" "The concept of sentience proposed by Pereira Jr. (this issue) partially overlaps with the concept of anoetic consciousness that I have proposed in previous work. This commentary focuses on functional and phenomenological similarities and differences between them." "A continuum of consciousness : from wakefulness and sentience towards anoetic consciousness" "Marie Vandekerckhove" "The concept of sentience proposed by Pereira Jr. (this issue) partially overlaps with the concept of anoetic consciousness that I have proposed in previous work. This commentary focuses on functional and phenomenological similarities and differences between them." "The flow of anoetic to noetic and autonoetic consciousness : a vision of unknowing (anoetic) and knowing (noetic) consciousness in the remembrance of things past and imagined futures" "Marie Vandekerckhove, Jaak Panksepp" "Memory, autonoetic consciousness and the self : consciousness as a continuum of stages" "Marie Vandekerckhove" "Memory, Consciousness and the Self. Consciousness as a continuum of states." "Marie Vandekerckhove" "This article addresses some open questions about the self, development, consciousness and memory, especially episodic memory, and is meant to make an attempt to clarify on a descriptive manner these phenomena and especially the relationship between them. In particular, cognitive child development of memory and current theorizing on semantic and episodic memory and related developmental states of consciousness teaches us here to see how different levels of development of the self, identity and memory relate to the ontogenetic development of different stages of consciousness of being in the world. A gradual distinction becomes outlined: from a rudimentary state of autonomic awakeness or unknowing consciousness as a biological adaptive function with a first sort of ""self-experience"" already apparent at an anoetic level of consciousness relying on implicit experiential and procedural memory, towards ""knowing consciousness"", including ""noetic"" and ""autonoetic"" consciousness based on semantic and episodic memory systems." "Collective Consciousness Supported by the Web: healthy or toxic?" "Shima Beigi, Francis Heylighen" "We define the noosphere as the conscious level of the web, where global conversations are being held about collective challenges. To understand its dynamics, we review three neuroscientific theories of consciousness: in-formation integration, adaptive resonance, and global workspace. These suggest that conscious thoughts are characterized by a “resonant”, self-maintaining pattern of circulating information. This pattern should be suffi-ciently stable to be examined and dependably stored, yet sufficiently plas-tic to adapt to new input. The self-organizing dynamics of ideas circulating on the web, however, may settle in an attractor that is too resistant to ac-commodate new information. This results in a closed, toxic form of collec-tive consciousness exemplified by conspiracy theories. We review the global discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate healthy and un-healthy forms of noospheric consciousness. We then argue for the need to promote the healthy form via the modelling of the dynamics of idea propa-gation and the dissemination of narratives promoting open conversation." "Methods and models for brain connectivity assessment across levels of consciousness" "Enrico Amico" "The human brain is one of the most complex and fascinating systems in nature. In the last decades, two events have boosted the investigation of its functional and structural properties. Firstly, the emergence of novel noninvasive neuroimaging modalities, which helped improving the spatial and temporal resolution of the data collected from in vivo human brains. Secondly, the development of advanced mathematical tools in network science and graph theory, which has recently translated into modeling the human brain as a network, giving rise to the area of research so called Brain Connectivity or Connectomics. In brain network models, nodes correspond to gray-matter regions (based on functional or structural, atlas-based parcellations that constitute a partition), while links or edges correspond either to structural connections as modeled based on white matter fiber-tracts or to the functional coupling between brain regions by computing statistical dependencies between measured brain activity from different nodes. Indeed, the network approach for studying the brain has several advantages: 1) it eases the study of collective behaviors and interactions between regions; 2) allows to map and study quantitative properties of its anatomical pathways; 3) gives measures to quantify integration and segregation of information processes in the brain, and the flow (i.e. the interacting dynamics) between different cortical and sub-cortical regions. The main contribution of my PhD work was indeed to develop and implement new models and methods for brain connectivity assessment in the human brain, having as primary application the analysis of neuroimaging data coming from subjects at different levels of consciousness. I have here applied these methods to investigate changes in levels of consciousness, from normal wakefulness (healthy human brains) or drug-induced unconsciousness (i.e. anesthesia) to pathological (i.e. patients with disorders of consciousness)." "Interpreting China as a regional and global power: nationalism and historical consciousness in world politics" "This volume is a collection of essays that discuss the rise of China in the contemporary global world against the country's Confucian imperial past and its nationalist past (historical consciousness) and that provide possible interpretations of nationalism in contemporary China. Special focus goes to China's geopolitical position and the functioning of China in organizations of global governance." "The Emergence of Primary Anoetic Consciousness in Episodic memory." "Marie Vandekerckhove, Luis Carlo Bulnes, Jaak Panksepp" "Based on an interdisciplinary perspective, we discuss how primary-process, anoetic forms of consciousness emerge into higher forms of awareness such as knowledge-based episodic knowing self-aware forms of higher-order consciousness like autonoetic awareness. Anoetic consciousness is defined as the rudimentary state of raw affective, homeostatic and sensory-perceptual mental experiences, which we surely share with other, evolutionarily related animals. It can be considered as the autonomic flow of primary-process phenomenal experiences that reflects a fundamental form of first-person ""self-experience,"" a vastly underestimated primary form of phenomenal consciousness. We argue that this anoetic form of evolutionarily refined consciousness constitutes a critical antecedent that is foundational for all forms of knowledge acquisition via learning and memory, giving rise to a knowledge-based, or noetic, consciousness as well as higher forms of ""awareness"" or ""knowing consciousness"". We summarize the conceptual advantages of such a multi-tiered neuroevolutionary approach to psychological issues, namely from genetically controlled primary (instinctual) and secondary (learning and memory), to higher tertiary (developmentally emergent) brainmind processes, along with suggestions about how affective experiences becomes more cognitive and object-oriented, allowing the developmental creation of more subtle higher mental processes such as episodic memory which allows the possibility of autonoetic consciousness, namely looking forward and backward at one's life within the mind's eye."