Class Notes: Consciousness

Consciousness

Strictly out of bounds as a research topic during the behaviorist era.
Studies of brain disfunction suggested new, scientific ways to study consciousness
Capgras syndrome, anasognosia:
Ramachandran - Inventing a reality to account for discrepant information
Split-Brain patients: Gazzaniga - The left brain as the “interpreter”

Illusions of Consciousness

Libet (1985): Identify the point in time when you decide to act
Brain imaging shows action potential 300ms prior to the conscious intent
Does consciousness play any causal role in behavior?
Is it merely an epiphenomenon?
Is free will itself merely an illusion?
What, then, of the idea of people being responsible for their actions?

Wegner: “Conscious intent” is a fallible judgment
Under suitable conditions, a subject identifies the cause of an external action as their own will, or the cause of an intended action as an external agent

Wegner: People experience conscious will when they interpret their own thoughts as the cause of their actions

What is Consciousness?

Three different uses of the term:

Self-consciousness
How do we distinguishing self from other
No different from other concept learning

Access consciousness
Why do we become aware of some things and not others?

Subjective experience
“What is it like…?”

Self Consciousness

Studying Self Consciousness

Access Consciousness

Selective attention test (passing the ball)
Change blindness

It’s not just that attention is selective – we do not realize how selective it is.
Talking on a cell phone increases the number of people who fail to see the “invisible” gorilla
Chabris and Simons refer to these as cognitive illusions – they make for more efficient processing, but at a cost

Subjective Experience:The Philosophical Background

Explaining subjective experience is the trickiest problem
It brings into focus the materialism versus dualism debate
Cognitive scientists reject dualism. “Accepting dualism is giving up” (Dennett)
But how then can we account for consciousness
Is there such a thing as free will, or is that too an illusion?
“How can an idea move a muscle?”

"What is it like to be a bat?"

“What is it like…?” How is this different from a simile (bats are like birds with sonar)?
We cannot know what it is like to be a creature with totally different capacities and sensory capabilities
What is it like to be another person? Consider a Capgras patient
What is it like to be you?

Qualia

From physical property to phenomenological experience
What something is “like”

Dualist versus epiphenomenologist
For a dualist, qualia are the mental substance
For a materialist, if they exist, they are an epiphenomenon – an incidental byproduct of consciousness

Dennett’s intuition pump:

A change from disliking something to liking it: What has changed, the quale or the opinion?
It’s an impossible question, because there is no way to answer it.
So we try to settle the issue by thinking about it…

Frank Jackson's hypothetical Mary

Thought experiments: helpful or confusing?
When Mary enters the world of color, does she learn something new?
If so, what? Qualia?
Skeptical Dennett: What does it mean to say Mary knows everything about color?
It must include what it is like to experience color

The Zombie Question

Do zombies exist (philosophical zombies, that is)? Does it matter?
No consciousness, no qualia, nothing it is like
Computer made of silicon? Computer made of biochemical neurons?
This is the zombie, “all dark inside”
Another phony thought experiment? (A logical inconsistency in the assumptions?)

Patricia Churchland: “A demonstration of the feebleness of thought experiments”
Dennett: Based on bogus feats of imagination
‘We’re all zombies.
“Nobody is conscious – not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!’

The zombie is behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious human, but the zombie is not conscious.
Two options:
Consciousness is an inessential optional extra. So why do we have it?
Anything that could perform all the behaviors we perform would necessarily be conscious.So how or why does consciousness come about

Chalmer's "hard problem" of consciousness

Is it really a problem?
The easy problem: What are the neural correlates of consciousness?
The hard problem: How do neurons give rise to consciousness?
If you are a materialist, how does a material body and brain give rise to a mental experience

Responses to the Hard Problem

Insoluble: Are we “cognitively closed” with respect to the hard problem? Should we then just ignore it? Do we lose anything if we do?

Breakthrough: New concept of information? Quantum physics?

Get on with the easy problems: The easy problems can be addressed scientifically
Maybe if we do that the solution to the hard problem will become apparent

There is no hard problem: A hornswoggle? Maybe it’s hard simply because it is ill-defined

Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness

The mistake is believing in the “Cartesian theater” - “The place and time where everything comes together”
This implies some sort of homunculus, which merely raises more problems
Consciousness is like fame: There is no single instant (or place) where one becomes famous
Work done by the imaginary homunculus is distributed in time and space to specialized lesser agencies

Whither Consciousness

Science is full of concepts that seemed to be explanatory, only to turn out to be useless: élan vital (life spirit), caloric fluid, phlogiston, qualia?
Is the “hard problem” a disguised retreat to dualism? “The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”

Free Will and Responsibility

But how does one reconcile a deterministic, materialist view of behavior with the existence of free will?
How can one pursue a career in psychology without assuming that behavior is determined?
And if behavior is determined, what happens to the notion of being responsible?

1. Incompatibilism
a. Hard determinism: free will does not exist
b. Dualism: there is something beyond determinism
2. Compatibilism
Free will and determinism, not free will or determinism
Free will is part of the physical order

How do we recognize free will? The sense that at some point in time we can choose – there are two or more things we could do
But in fact we only choose one. That choice presumably must have a cause
The opposite of determinism is not free will, it is randomness

How Does an Idea Move a Muscle?

Ideas do not move muscles, they move other (unconscious) ideas, and these initiate action. This initiation is not accessible to introspection
Musacchio: Evolution follows the “need to know principle”. We do not need to know how this happens
Free will, then, is simply the knowledge that we could have done something else
And herein lies responsibility