Core consciousness Flashcards
What is consciousness distinguished with 3 possible meanings by Pinker (1997)?
1.Sentience. Subjective experience/phenomenological
awareness [animals likely have this]
2.Access to information. The ability to report our subjective
experience [one defining feature of conscious experience is
that it is verbally reportable]
3.Self awareness. I cannot only feel pain and see red, but
think to myself, hey, here I am, Steven Pinker, feeling pain
and seeing red’ [consciousness comes with a narrative self,
corresponding to the pronoun I]
What are the possible functions of consciousness?
Humphrey (1983) said being conscious with a narrative self (I pronoun) constructed allows us to navigate the social world being a consequence of the theory of mind development
What is the “outside world”/where is our skull?
-Velmans (2009) said it’s a stream of visual consciousness inside our physical skull
-all visual experience as internal as a dream where when awake, is systematically constrained by info coming from sense organs
What is the easy problem of consciousness as said by Chalmer?
-the functions carried out by conscious brain systems e.g., being awake vs being asleep
-according to Chalmers, all attempts to ‘explain consciousness’
focus on the easy problems, and leave the (interesting) hard
problem untouched, or dismiss it rhetorically.
What is the hard problem of consciousness as said by Chalmer?
why is it not all unconscious like our nervous system for example?
the brain would seem to work just the same without consciousness
experience. so what is that extra ingredient?
What did Chalmer say in 1995 which explained the hard problem with consciousness?
“We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery.”
Give 2 key ideas on the debate if consciousness animates the body (causes action e.g. think to look at phone and then does that)
-it feels that conscious thoughts cause actions
-Wegner (2003) said ‘It certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist
to draw the obvious conclusion… consciousness is an active
force, an engine of will. (for free will/a soul/intuition)
-The possibility that this intuition is misleading is another
profound thing psychology can teach us (Blackmore, 2013). (sense of free will is an illusion)
Can we feel the force of will?
-Hume realised that humans infer causation from temporal sequences but they don’t actually see causation (more motion of things) applying also to internally willed causation (we introspect a thought then we observe an action so we infer causation)
-Wegner and Wheatley (1999) think normal introspection leads to the illusion of a force of the will. Some conditions enhance the strength of the illusion.
How is free will the mind’s best trick as said by Wegner (2003)?
because thought procedes action and we infer thought causes action creating the idea of conscious will i.e. free will
Explain the theory of apparent mental causation
-conscious will is experienced when we draw the inference that our thought has caused our action whether correct or not
-inference occurs in accordance with principles following from research on cause perception and attribution – principles of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.
-When a thought appears in
consciousness just before an action (priority), is consistent with the action (consistency), and is not accompanied by conspicuous alternative causes of the
action (exclusivity), we experience
conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action.
What were Benjamin Libet’s readiness potentials?
he measured readiness potentials (preparation for movement) generated from the pre-motor cortex before people were aware of the conscious decision to act.
found the brain initiates action unconsciously> becomes conscious of
a decision to act > action happens. (he gave p’s option of free will to press the button but readiness potential started 1.5s before they acted)
But can we really introspect with such high temporal
resolution (Banks & Isham, 2009)?
After all, the conscious experience of ‘intending’ is
quite thin and evasive (Haggard, 2009).
Explain Wegner’s I spy Experiment
-Confederate and participant in control of mouse cursor listening to music on headphones whilst scrolling through variety of objects displayed on the screen
-Sometimes stopped to click on picture (sometimes initiated by P others by C at precise times) BUT words labelling object on screen would interrupt music on headphones
What were the results of Wegner’s I spy experiment?
-Subjects rated how much they intended stopping events (ownership/control)
-Subjects felt control over the forced stopping events if the word timing was right (priority) and the words were consistent with the objects on the screen (consistency)
-Shows free will illusion
Explain Soon et al.’s MVPA experiment (2008)
-It was a more advanced version of Libet’s using modern multi-voxel pattern analysis fMRI where some methodological worries about Libet do not apply here.
-had to recall letter on screen earliest time they click left or right predicted
-graph shows they can predict what a participant will do 10 seconds before so 8 seconds before consciousness so was done unconsciously. (also against free will)
What does Libet’s EEG study suggest regarding free will?
The brain prepares actions before we experience the urge to act
