Consciousness

Question 1

What are the arguments for: ‘There is no way of knowing whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness.’ Do you agree?

Answer 1

1. Block’s Distinction
2. My Objection
3. Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm
4. Phillips’ Issues

Question 2

Why does Block want to distinguish between types of consciousness?

Answer 2

In order to disentangle the debate about consciousness.

Question 3

What is Block’s distinction?

Answer 3

P-consciousness: how it is like to be in a state.
- The kind of consciousness that gives rise to the hard problem of consciousness.

A-consciousness: state used for reasoning, judgement, and action.
- Representational
- The kind of consciousness that gives rise to the easy problem of consciousness.

Question 4

What are the two problems of consciousness?

Answer 4

Hard problem: there seems to be no reason for there to be p-consciousness. If it wasn’t for our direct evidence of it, there would be no evidence for it in science.

Easy problem: understanding our cognitive abilities to integrate information, categorise stimuli, react to the environment.

Question 5

What are the key differences between P and A consciousness?

Answer 5

• A-consciousness is representational whilst P-consciousness is phenomenal.
• A-consciousness is functional whilst P-consciousness seems not functional.

Question 6

What is one way P and A interact?

Answer 6

What is being accessed impacts one’s phenomenal state (example?).

Question 7

How can we have P without A?

Answer 7

The Drill Case:

Suppose you’re in an intense conversation and at noon you suddenly realise that there has been a drill going off near you for a while. You were hearing it the whole time (P) but you weren’t attentive to it (A) and thus did not conceptualise it, did not think about it.

Question 8

What is Blindsight?

Answer 8

Subjects that report not being able to see anything in their blind field but when prompted, can reliably guess what simple thing is in their blind field (X or O).

Question 9

How can we have A without P?

Answer 9

Superblindsight:

A blindsighter that can prompt himself at will to guess what is in his blind field. Thus, interacting in with the world as though they can see.

Question 10

Is superblindsight real?

Answer 10

No, Block claims it is simply a conceptual possibility.

Question 11

What is the issues of overflowing consciousness?

Answer 11

If A and P can come apart, then there are some conscious states that don’t or cannot access.

This means that:
- Our reports of our experience may systematically fail to track our experience (Impact on psychology?)
- You may be systematicallly misled about your own conscious experience.

Question 12

What is your objection to consciousness overflowing access?

Answer 12

Even if Block is right about A and P, we necessarily need A to report our experience.
- If we cannot report experience then it seems that we cannot know that we have conscious states we cannot access.
- We need A to know P.
- Otherwise, we can simply say that we weren’t conscious of it.

Question 13

How does your objection apply to the Drill Case?

Answer 13

• We can say we were not conscious of it until noon, we did not hear it.
• If we did hear it, we can only know that by having A.

Question 14

What is Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm?

Answer 14

Supports the claim that consciousness overflows access.
- Grid of 12 letters for 500ms
- Told to report letters, can do 3-4
- Same again but given a prompt for which row
- Can report 3 letter per row.

Conclusion: people experience 9 letters but can only acces 3-4.

Question 15

What is Phillips’ issue with Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm?

Answer 15

The assumption that we can sum up the partial reports is threatened by post diction.

This is the phenomenon that your experience is influenced by something later.

Question 16

What is the counter to Phillips?

Answer 16

Postdiction is mysterious.

Question 17

What is your conclusion for: ‘There is no way of knowing whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness.’ Do you agree?

Answer 17

Block provides us with a compelling distinction which implies that we can have conscious experience which we cannot access.
- Sperling’s experiment supports this.

Phillips shows that we may not be able to aggregate reports.
- It is not proof that we have conscious experience that we cannot access.

Therefore, due to our inability to know about or report conscious experience that we cannot access, we can never know that we have conscious experience that we cannot access.

Question 18

What are the arguments for: It seems that there are some things it is impossible to learn from books. What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of consciousness?

Answer 18

1. Jackson’s Mary and Her Black and White Room.
2. Materialist Responses.

Question 19

What is Jackson arguing against?

Answer 19

Physicalism/Materialism.

• That all information is physical.

Question 20

What is Jackson’s thought experiment?

Answer 20

• Mary is a scientist that specialises in vision, learning everything physcial about it.
• She does this without experiencing colour.
• She then experiences colour for the first time.
• It seems as though she learns something new, what it is like to see red.

Question 21

What is the conclusion of Jackson’s thought experiment?

Answer 21

If Mary learns something new, this information must be non-physical.

Therefore, physicalism is false and the nature of consciousness cannot be known purely physically.

Question 22

What are the two types of Material responses to Jackson and which will you focus on?

Answer 22

Thin: Mary does not learn something new.

Thick: She learns something new but it is old information.

Focus on Thin

Question 23

Who claims Thin Materialism?

Answer 23

Dennett

Question 24

What does Dennett claim?

Answer 24

Whilst the conclusion of Mary is intuitive, we simply fail to properly imagine such a scenario.

Question 25

What is Dennett’s modified Mary scenario?

Answer 25

• When she is about to experience colour, the scientists play a trick on her.
• They paint a banana blue and tell her it is yellow.
• She claims that she knows that the banana is actually blue because she knows all the physical impressions blue/yellow would have on her.
• Thus she knows everything there is to know.

Question 26

What claim can the thin materialist make that the anti-physicalist cannot?

Answer 26

That we simply have to wait and see what future science discovers.

The anti-physicalist must show that it is impossible to have a purely physicalist understanding of consciousness.

The burden of proof lies with the anti-physicalist.

Question 27

What is your conclusion for: It seems that there are some things it is impossible to learn from books. What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of consciousness?

Answer 27

• Jackson’s thought experiement is an intuitive way of thinking of experience.
• It would show that the nature of consciousness cannot be purely physical.

Dennett shows that the assumption that there is something to learn for Mary lies need to be proved by the anti-physicalist.

Therefore, Jackson fails to prove physicalism false.
- But it does tell us that the intuitive nature of consciousness is some sort of anti-physicalism.

Question 28

What are the arguments for: Is consciousness a matter of having thoughts about one’s own mental state?

Answer 28

1. Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness
2. Issues

Question 29

What are intentional theories of consciousness?

Answer 29

• Believe that all conscious states are intentional.
• Only one type of consciousness.
• Phenomenal states have representational content.

Question 30

What supports the internationalist claim that phenomenal states have representational content?

Answer 30

Changes in intentional content has a phenomenal difference.
- Take hearing a language you don’t understand vs. one you do.

Question 31

What is Higher-Order Thought Theory?

Answer 31

A state is conscious iff one has a non-inferential non-observational thought about it.

Question 32

What is an example of a first-order thought and a higher-order thought?

Answer 32

“Philosophy is cool” - first-order

“I think philosophy is cool” - higher order.

Same for sensations.

Question 33

What different roles do first and higher order thoughts have?

Answer 33

First order thoughts have content (representation).

Higher order thought allows us to experience the content – what it is like (metarepresentation).

Question 34

What are the two issues with Higher-Order Thought Theories?

Answer 34

• There can be unconscious sensory states.
• What about the phenomenology of belief?

Question 35

Why is unconscious sensory states an issue for HOT theories?

Answer 35

It seems as though I do not have to have the thought about pain in order to be in pain.
- It is hard to imagine unconscious pain.

Question 36

What is Rosenthal’s response to unconscious sensory states?

Answer 36

It is hard to conceive of uunconscious pain because every instance of pain you have experienced has been conscious.

(A bit like the overlapping consciousness objection).

Question 37

What is the issue with the phenomenology of belief for HOT?

Answer 37

If HOT gives rise to the phenomenology of sensations, why does it not gove rise to the phenomenology of beliefs.

If content determines phenomenology, beliefs have content, why not phenomenology?

Question 38

Why can’t the HOT theorist claim that beliefs have no phenomenology?

Answer 38

Because then there is something special about sensation.

It cannot be reduced to representation like beliefs.

Question 39

What is the Jerry Example?

Answer 39

Jerry is unconscious but has first-order thoughts all the time.
- One day he has a conscious thought “I think I believe that p”.
- According to HOT, there is nothing it is like to have a belief.
- Therefore, nothing has changed about Jerry’s experience with consciousness.

Question 40

What is your conclusion for: Is consciousness a matter of having thoughts about one’s own mental state?

Answer 40

HOT claims that all states are representational and all conscious states are intentional.

This leads to the unintuitive claim that we have unconscious pain (pain that there is nothing which it is like).
- This is not strong enough.

If the HOT rejects that there is phenomenology of believing, then they are admitting that there is something special of sensations that cannot be reduced to representation.