Consciousness, Representation, Action: The Importance of Being Goal-Directed Flashcards
Why does Pennartz claim the brain lives in a black box?
Sensory information reaches our brain via receptors transducing energy of a specific physical type (e.g., light, mechanical pressure) into spike trains traveling to specific brain areas via nerve fibers. Spike patterns recorded from these areas can be readily decoded as representing particular ‘visual information’, but a local group of cortical neurons possesses no objective information on the sensory modality it is processing – nor on its own anatomical locus in the brain. Essentially, the brain lives in a black box or cuneiform room through which it only receives unlabeled spike trains, in other words without an ‘address of sender’ being available to locally responding neurons.
What are many neuroscientists and cognitive scientists convinced of regarding what consciousness consists of?
Many neuroscientists and cognitive scientists are convinced that consciousness involves the generation by the brain of representations of the external world and the body. According to this view, the physical substrates (or ‘vehicles’) of representations are confined to the brain, but their contents are experienced as happening in the external world or inside our body.
How has he view that consciousness is based on internally generated representations been challenged over the past few decades?
By a group of theories aiming to explain consciousness in terms of sensorimotor interactions between a subject and the environment.
Give an example of one of these theories and what it posits
Akin to behaviorism, sensorimotor contingency (SMC) theory posits the brain as functioning to couple sensory inputs to appropriate motor outputs. Under this account, the qualitative differences we experience between sensory modalities arise from the rules by which motor actions govern changes in our sensory apparatus. Seeing the colour of an object thus becomes equivalent to knowing or mastering the structure of sensory changes occurring when you move your eyes to explore the object. In other words, cues in the outside world would be sufficient for guiding our sensorimotor behaviour, and no appeal to internally generated brain representations is required.
Do these theories reflect the majority opinion in the field?
Although this proposal may not reflect a majority opinion in the field, it has gained increasing momentum over recent years, forming a vocal movement and driving research on embodied cognition and related schools of thought (the ‘4E movement’)
While this paper cannot scrutinise all individual schools of thought, what three questions does it aim to evaluate?
It aims to evaluate three specific questions on their
empirical and conceptual merits.
First, do conscious contents acutely depend on interactions between a subject and the environment?
Second, do they necessarily depend on specific perception–action loops between the subject and its environment in the longer run?
Third, with which type(s) of action does consciousness cohere functionally, and how do the relevant action systems of the brain link up with systems involved in consciousness?
What three arguments does Pennartz use in relation to these questions?
Based on current evidence, I will argue that
(i) conscious content does not necessarily depend on acute brain–environment interactions;
(ii) although action history is generally important, specific perception–action loops are not necessary per se for conscious content; and
(iii) consciousness is specifically associated with deliberate, goal-directed behaviour (GDB) and declarative memory, but not directly with other types of action or memory, such as habits and procedural memory.
What is the aim of representational theories of consciousness?
Representational theories of consciousness aim to explain the phenomenal properties of experience by understanding percepts, dreams, and other experiences as representations
Some traditional approaches consider ‘qualia’
such as the green colour to be intrinsic, non-relational phenomenal properties. However, because this green thing can be localized neither in external physical space nor in the brain, one would be forced to regard it as immaterial. How does the representationalist theory of qualia deal with this?
To avoid this difficulty, the representational theory of qualia posits that the green color is a qualitative property that is part of a represented object and scene, and that such represented objects can be veridical or illusory.
Describe the distinction between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ representationalism
Wide representationalism argues that representational content does not solely supervene on the contents of the brain but involves the environment (roughly meaning that it is co-determined by both brain content and environment.
According to narrow representationalism, experiential contents are confined to contents coded by systems inside the brain.
The distinction as applied here pertains to conscious content, of which the external/internal nature is not necessarily congruent with the external/internal nature of mechanisms for representation. (‘this is water’ depends on various objective, chemical facts about water, while the mechanism or ‘vehicle’ of this thought may be entirely internal to the brain.)
Regarding this narrow and wide distinction, what in Pennartz position? What is this known as?
The current proposal holds that representational mechanisms are confined to the brain, while acknowledging that representational content can be ‘wide’. This position and related theories proposed by various neuroscientists can be captured under the term ‘neurorepresentationalism’. neurorepresentationalism explicitly searches for neural substrates and mechanisms for representation in the brain
Apart from SMC theory, the postulate that selective subsets of cortical and related areas code representations of the world, including our own body, has been criticised on various accounts. Where do these objections originate?
Apart from SMC theory, objections originate from ‘direct realism’ and related philosophical movements, including some Gibsonian variants. Like other theories in the philosophy of perception, direct realism asks how we acquire knowledge and beliefs about an external world given the skepticism that arises from the imperfections and fallibility of our sensory and mental apparatus. According to direct realism, it makes no sense that we would be perceiving, or looking at, representations, ‘sense data’ or ‘sense impressions’
What does contemporary realism hold regarding perception?
Contemporary direct realism holds that we do not see the world through a ‘veil’ of perception but perceive physical objects directly. If you see your own hand, for instance, it is directly in view and directly present in front of you.
How would a direct realist deal with objections stemming from non-veridical experiences such as of imagined or illusory objects?
A common direct realist reply refers to such experiences as arising from a different mental state than when we perceive things. Searle recently stated that the acceptance of a sense datum or representational view is the ‘greatest disaster in epistemology over the past four centuries.’
How would a direct realist deal with objections stemming from non-veridical experiences such as of imagined or illusory objects?
A common direct realist reply refers to such experiences as arising from a different mental state than when we perceive things. Searle recently stated that the acceptance of a sense datum or representational view is the ‘greatest disaster in epistemology over the past four centuries.’
