Different Concepts of Consciousness Joe Lau Philosophy HKU

Problem set #2 n Hand in next week. n Check course web site for details.

Readings n Excerpt from Pinker n Ned Block’s article on consciousness (on reserve)

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

Consciousness in disrepute n Is consciousness fit for scientific investigation? n During the heyday of behaviorism, questions about the nature of consciousness were considered to be unscientific. n It’s making a comeback.

Consciousness an illusion? n 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.

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

Where are you? Consciousness RealistNon-realist Physicalist Dualist Functionalist Others

What is consciousness? What is consciousness? n OED : n “the state or faculty of being conscious, as a condition and concomitant of all thought, feeling, and volition”, or, n “the state of being conscious, regarded as the normal condition of healthy waking life”.

Creature and state consciousness n Creature consciousness : –Property of an organism –“John is not conscious. He is in a coma.” n State consciousness : –Property of mental state. –“Pain is a conscious mental state.”

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

Synonyms n Consciousness as subjective experience. n Consciousness = awareness? –Depends on what we mean by “awareness”. –A baby in the womb might be conscious but might lack awareness in some sense.

Consciousness and attention n We attend only to a small part of what we are conscious of. –Attention facilitates recall. –Cocktail-party effect

What is it like n 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. n Call this phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness), as equivalent to subjective or qualitative experience. n “qualia”

Other concepts n Self-consciousness : –Possess a concept of the self, and –Able to use this concept in thinking about oneself, e.g. "I am hungry". n P-consciousness without self-consciousness? –Next lecture. n Auto-biographical consciousness –Memory about one’s psychological and physical history.

Monitoring consciousness n 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.” n M-consciousness : High-level state monitors lower-level states. n But a production line or a computer can also have M-consciousness.

HOT consciousness n Rosenthal / Carruthers : Mental state X is a conscious state = there is a higher order thought about X.

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