Neural Correlates of Pure Experience, Anesthesia, and Meditation States

摘要

In “Pure Experience and Disorders of Consciousness,” Specker Sullivan (2018) proposes that intransitive conscious experience, or pure experience, confers a patient’s moral status. Based on the work of Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida, pure experience is presented as “consciousness that operates in the background … similar to the experience of meditation, when one quiets the mind without fixating on particular objects or thought” (Specker Sullivan 2018). In light of recent work showing that transitive conscious experiences can be detected in behaviorally unresponsive patients (Monti et al. 2010), the author asks whether pure experience may also be objectively measured.