Different Concepts of Consciousness

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Different Concepts of Consciousness

• Joe Lau
• PhilosophyHKU

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Problem set 2

• Hand in next week.
• Check course web site for details.

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Readings

• Excerpt from Pinker
• Ned Blocks article on consciousness (on reserve)

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Consciousness and the mind

• Consciousness an obvious and important aspect
  of the mind.
• Freud (Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis)
• what is meant by consciousness we need not
  discuss it is beyond all doubt.
• The most difficult area in cogsci.

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Consciousness in disrepute

• Is consciousness fit for scientific
  investigation?
• During the heyday of behaviorism, questions about
  the nature of consciousness were considered to be
  unscientific.
• Its making a comeback.

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Consciousness an illusion?

• Even now there are philosophers who argue that
  there is no such thing as consciousness.
• Kathleen Wilkes science and ordinary language
  can easily dispense with the vague and imprecise
  concept of consciousness.
• Georges Rey the concept is incoherent and that
  nothing is really conscious.

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Various realist positions

• Can be explained scientifically
• Baars, Searle, Crick and Koch, Johnson-Laird,
  Flanagan
• Beyond human comprehension
• Colin McGinn, Nagel?
• Requires substance dualism
• Eccles
• Requires fundamental changes in science
• Penrose

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Where are you?
Consciousness
Realist
Non-realist
Physicalist
Dualist
Functionalist
Others
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What is consciousness?

• OED
• the state or faculty of being conscious, as a
  condition and concomitant of all thought,
  feeling, and volition, or,
• the state of being conscious, regarded as the
  normal condition of healthy waking life.

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Creature and state consciousness

• Creature consciousness
• Property of an organism
• John is not conscious. He is in a coma.
• State consciousness
• Property of mental state.
• Pain is a conscious mental state.

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Unconscious thoughts?

• It might be true that one must be capable of
  being conscious to have mental states.
• But it does not follow that all mental states are
  conscious.
• Ever since Freud it is widely accepted that there
  are unconscious mental states and processes.

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Synonyms

• Consciousness as subjective experience.
• Consciousness awareness?
• Depends on what we mean by awareness.
• A baby in the womb might be conscious but might
  lack awareness in some sense.

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Consciousness and attention

• We attend only to a small part of what we are
  conscious of.
• Attention facilitates recall.
• Cocktail-party effect

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What is it like

• Thomas Nagel if a creature or a mental state is
  conscious, there is something it is like to be
  that creature or to have that mental state.
• Call this phenomenal consciousness
  (P-consciousness), as equivalent to subjective or
  qualitative experience.
• qualia

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Other concepts

• Self-consciousness
• Possess a concept of the self, and
• Able to use this concept in thinking about
  oneself, e.g. "I am hungry".
• P-consciousness without self-consciousness?
• Next lecture.
• Auto-biographical consciousness
• Memory about ones psychological and physical
  history.

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Monitoring consciousness

• Johnson-Laird
• simple consciousness the bare awareness of
  events such as pain may owe its origin to the
  emergence of a high-level monitor from the web of
  parallel processes.
• M-consciousness High-level state monitors
  lower-level states.
• But a production line or a computer can also have
  M-consciousness.

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HOT consciousness

• Rosenthal / Carruthers Mental state X is a
  conscious state there is a higher order thought
  about X.

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Access consciousness

• Only applies to state with content / information.
• Mental state X is a-conscious the content of X
  is poised for use in reasoning and the rational
  control of speech and behavior.
• Can be explained computationally.
• A good candidate for p-consciousness?