The Emergence of Primary Anoetic Consciousness in Episodic memory.

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.

Jaar van publicatie:2014

Trefwoorden:Affective consciousness, Anoetic consciousness, Noetic Consciousness, Semantic memory, Autonoetic consciousness, Episodic memory, Affective memory