TASK 1 - AWARENESS Flashcards
consciousness
= probed through the subject’s report of his or her own mental states
- not directly and straightforwardly observable
- psychological attributes of conscious processing:
1. active maintenance of mental representations
2. strategical processing
3. spontaneous intentional behaviour
third-person data
= brain processes, behaviour, environmental interaction
- EEG, brain imaging, single cells studies and so on
x stem from technological + ethical limitations rather than conceptual barriers
first-person data
= subjective conscious experience (= central data we want science to explain)
- can’t wholly be expressed in terms of first-person data
- introspection, phenomenologists…
- serious obstacles BUT they should not provide barriers to initial development of methods
first-person data
- obstacles
x all have serious limitations and none have been integrated into contemporary science (e.g. lack of incorrigible access to experience)
(1) lack of access to our experience
(2) introspecting an experience changes the experience
(3) impossibility of accessing all our experience at once
(4) grand illusions
first-person data
- formalism
= simple language that is imprecise + relies on perspective (can the content of experience even be captured in language?)
- obstacles: (greater) whether the content of experience can be captured wholly in language –> easier to capture structural (e.g. structure of visual field) aspects than non-structural (e.g. sensation of a colour) aspects of experience
- even in the non-structural we can find an underlying structure (e.g. decomposing colour experiences into brightness, saturation, and hue)
- -> develop a theory of proto qualia
formalism
- proto qualia
= qualia we experience are systematically built up from simple building blocks which are present across many experiences
science of consciousness
= relating third-person to first-person data
- come up with broad connecting principles: certain experiences go along with certain processes in the brain/ information processing
- be able to formulate simple + universal laws underlying these connecting principles: “fundamental theory” of consciousness
- -> necessary to develop more sophisticated methodologies & formalisms (especially with respect to first-person data)
neural correlate of consciousness
= NCC = neural system/ system primarily associated with conscious experience
- cannot be measured directly
- need to use principle of interpretation (=pre-experimental bridging principles) to determine whether someone is conscious of something
NCC
- pre-experimental bridging principles
= principles of interpretation = by which we interpret physical systems to judge the presence of consciousness
- identify (1) whether or not systems are conscious now + (2) which information they are conscious of, and which they are not
- principles by which we make inferences from facts about processing –> to facts about consciousness
- conceptually prior to experiment
- philosophical reasoning: we have to make leap between (1) conceptual judgements about what counts as a conscious process and (2) information from our first-person perspective of our own consciousness
- -> need to pay careful attention to the reasoning involved
bridging principles
1. principle of verbal report
= when information is directly available for verbal reported, it is conscious
- only subjects that have language
bridging principles
2. principle of global control
= when information is directly available for an arbitrary response OR for global control (any motor modality) in a cognitive system, then it is conscious (first-person evidence)
- primary criterion for consciousness
- applicable when language is not present
NCC
- rational reconstruction
- with these principles we can produce rational reconstructions of the search for the NCC
= maybe things do not work exactly like this in practice, but the rational underpinnings of the procedure have something like this form
1) consciousness global availability (bridging principle)
2) global availability neural process N (empirical work)
3) consciousness neural process N (conclusion)
–> instead of measuring consciousness directly, we detect the functional property (e.g. global availability) –> when present = correlated with a specific neural process
–> combining the pre-empirical premise with the empirical result –> get to the conclusion that this neural process is a candidate for the NCC
NCC
- consequences of rational reconstruction/for bridging principles
1.
- NCC MUST BE a mechanism that subserves global availability in the brain (only other option would be that it’s a symptom of global availability, would be dissociable)
- consciousness can be present even when the neural process in question is not
NCC
- consequences of rational reconstruction/for bridging principles
2.
- neural process associated with consciousness will do 2 things:
1. explain global availability (= how info is made available for global control in the brain)
2. isolate the processes that underlie consciousness itself (if bridging principle is granted) - can never FULLY explain consciousness, it can only isolate the basis for it
NCC
- consequences of rational reconstruction/for bridging principles
3.
- likely that there will be many NCCs:
(1) because there will be many mechanisms of global availability (e.g. mechanisms in different modalities: visual availability, auditory availability, etc.)
(2) many mechanisms at different stages in processing whereby information is made globally available (early/late) - can co-exist because they’re compatible in one way
