Some readers may find this a persuasive rendering of a consciousness subjected to the monotony of 14 years "inside", but to my mind that doesn't make it any better.
For Ramanuja there is nothing like a pure consciousness without subject and without object.
The idea for the novel came after Mr. Lodge read an article by John Cornwell about two scholarly books that demonstrated that scientists were becoming very interested in consciousness, a subject previously thought unsuitable for their investigation.
In particular, communities, Scheler contends, are groups whose members co-experience the same mental states: such collective experiences give rise to a single stream of consciousness, whose subject is the community itself (1913/16, 530).
Nishida is aware of the paradox of such formulations that would make consciousness the subject of sentences that describe it, and he sometimes resorts to explicitly paradoxical descriptions such as "seeing without a seer" and "seeing the form of the formless, hearing the voice of the voiceless".
In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion that is used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.
Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that patients with chronic disorders of consciousness and subjects undergoing general anesthesia present a complex dysfunctionality in the architecture of brain connectivity.
It then turned out that to be capable of self-consciousness the subject had to exist in a world with other embodied subjects whose intentions it could recognize.
And while it's true that the multiple postures and body languages of the figures do convey the complexity of individual consciousness, the subjects' faces are more often contemplative luminous masks rather than emotive, leaving the viewer free to interpret their specific thoughts for themselves.
Then, we recruited Group II patients in order to test, by means of repeated measures, whether changes in effective connectivity are also detectable over time in the brains of individual patients who recover consciousness (within-subjects comparisons).
