Abstract: In this talk, I bring together my research experience in affective theories of consciousness, ecological psychology, and dynamical systems theory to assemble a theory of the thick present of conscious experience. The basis of my approach is an affective theory of consciousness which claims that sentient states in mammals were initially the product of valence-conveying interoceptive signals in the midbrain. I assemble a model to account for how phylogenetic and ontogenetic constraints determine the possibilities of sentient experience in humans. A state-space theory of memory is crafted to describe the relational nature of resonance and multiple realizability in the brain. Emphasizing the richness of perception in this scheme allows us to comprehend how consciousness evolved into a medium for the agentive and felt nature of emotions, associations, and imagination. The thickness of human experience is thus enacted by how memory systems frame perception and imagination. I demonstrate the usefulness of this constraint-based method through two research streams: (a) How memory shapes the affordance landscape in spatial and social maps in the hippocampus, (b) How material, practical, and discursive conditions are constitutive in the development of autonoetic capacities.

About the Speaker: Rami Gabriel is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychology and was recently a visiting Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Trained as a cognitive and perceptual scientist, his areas of research include memory, self, emotion, consciousness, affective neuroscience, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is the author of three books: A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and

Cognition (Harvard University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dr. Stephen T. Asma), and Why I Buy: Self, Taste, and Consumer Society in America (Intellect Press, 2013). Dr. Gabriel is an accomplished musician and composer.