Lecture Notes: Virtual Reality, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy of Mind

These flashcards cover the key vocabulary and philosophical concepts from the guest lectures on Virtual Reality, presence, and theories of embodied, inactive, and computational cognition.

CHAIN

The Center for Human Nature Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary center located in Sapporo at Hokkaido University.

Rubber hand illusion

A classic bodily illusion where a participant hides their real hand and views a toy hand being stroked simultaneously, eventually feeling the fake hand is their own.

Sense of Presence

The feeling of being 'here and now' in an environment, often defined as an illusion of non-mediation.

Depersonalization

A clinical symptom where an individual feels detached from their body or feels like a robotic, automatic entity.

Derealization

A clinical symptom where the environment looks unreal, as if there is a bubble between the individual and the world.

Perceptual reality

The level of reality monitoring that distinguishes between sensory perception and internally generated imagery or hallucinations.

Subjective veridicality

A layer of reality related to the feeling that an object has three-dimensional volume, also known as volumetric perception.

Doxastic veridicality

A level of reality concerning the belief or conviction of whether an experience, such as a dream, is real.

Substitutional Reality (SR)

A system that uses omnidirectional 360-degree video cameras to record scenes and then substitute them for live reality to manipulate a participant's conviction.

Goat helmet

An experimental setup using electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe that reportedly induced spiritual experiences, though later studies showed these were largely due to sham effects and suggestibility.

Continuous flash suppression (CFS)

A consciousness study paradigm that uses a dynamic, high-contrast mask in one eye to suppress the visibility of an image in the other eye.

Sensory motor coupling

The coordination between sensory input and motor action which is proposed as a source for the sense of presence and the feeling of 3D volume.

Kluber's form constants

Four specific types of radial and spiral visual patterns commonly experienced under the influence of mescaline or near-death experiences.

Hallucination machine

A simulation created using deep neural networks that processes video to mimic the visual effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD.

Cognitive Science

An interdisciplinary field born in the 1950s that investigates cognition by drawing on psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

Cocktail party effect

The phenomenon of being able to pick out specific sounds or conversations, such as hearing one's own name, in a noisy environment.

Broadbent's filter model

A flowchart model explaining selective attention where information passes through a short-term storage and a selective filter before being processed.

Representational Theory of Mind (RTM)

The philosophical theory that the mind consists of mental representations that carry semantic content about the world.

Computational Theory of Mind (CTM)

The philosophical view that cognition is a computational process determined by algorithms, often described as software running on the brain's hardware.

Internalism

The view that the mind is located entirely in the head and that the brain is the sole organ of cognition.

Brain in a vat

A philosophical thought experiment exploring whether a brain kept alive in a machine and given the correct stimuli would have the same experience as a living person.

Epistemic action

An action performed to solve or facilitate cognitive processes, such as rotating a shape in Tetris to see where it fits.

Pragmatic action

An action performed directly to achieve a specific goal.

Extended cognition

The view that cognition is not confined to the head but extends into the body and the external environment.

Inactive approach

A perspective that views cognitive systems not as computers, but as living biological systems that perform sense-making through embodied action.

Sense making

The process by which an organism creates meaning and differentiates its environment (such as nutrients vs. toxins) based on its bodily structure and survival needs.

Body schema

Implicit bodily skills and senses of scale, illustrated by examples like a woman with a large hat or a driver navigating their car through a tight gap.