Consciousness (Psychology)

Consciousness, causality and complementarity

by Max Velmans

This is a clean PDF of my reply to 5 continuing commentaries in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences on my 1991 target article that in various ways expand on the original 36 commentaries and my original reply.

This reply to five continuing commentaries on my 1991 target article on “Is human information processing conscious”... more This reply to five continuing commentaries on my 1991 target article on “Is human information processing conscious” focuses on six related issues: 1) whether focal attentive processing replaces consciousness as a causal agent in third-person viewable human information processing, 2) whether consciousness can be dissociated from human information processing, 3) continuing disputes about definitions of "consciousness" and about what constitutes a “conscious process”, 4) how observer-relativity in psychology relates (and does not relate) to relativity in physics, 5) whether the first-person viewable causal efficacy of consciousness counts as ‘real’ causal efficacy and 6) a clarification of the sense in which first- and third-person causal accounts of mental processing are complementary and mutually irreducible.

Consciousness from a first-person perspective

by Max Velmans

This is a clean PDF of my reply to 36 peer reviews of my target article in BBS, 1991 “Is human information processing conscious?” As it develops quite a few themes that are fundamental to consciousness studies, I have added an Abstract and references so that it can be read as a stand-alone paper. As this paper tries to address all the points raised by the commentaries it ranges widely, and to assist easier reading it has been subdivided into sections that separate experimental issues from the more theoretical and philosophical issues. The commentators included many of the experimentalists and theoreticians that were prominent in consciousness studies at the time, including scientists such as Bernie Baars, Francis Crick, Christoph Koch, John Gardiner, Jeffrey Gray, Marcel Kinsbourne, Ben Libet, Dan Lloyd, George Mandler, Bruce Mangan, Norman Dixon, Howard Shevrin, Keith Stanovich, Geoff Underwood and philosophers such as Ned Block, Fred Dretske, Valery Hardcastle, Georges Rey, Aaron Sloman and Robert van Gulick. Viewed historically, it is interesting to see how confused the literature was at the time concerning how phenomenal consciousness relates to information processing and particularly to attentional processing. Viewed 20 years later, I would still make a similar defence of my original target article although many of the themes introduced in these two papers have now been elaborated in my subsequent writings.

This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?”... more This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1991, pp. 651-669). The target article focused largely on experimental studies of how consciousness relates to human information processing, tracing their relation from input through to output, while discussion of the implications of the findings both for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind was relatively brief. The commentaries reversed this emphasis, and so, correspondingly, did the reply. The sequence of topics in the reply roughly follows that of the target article. The discussion begins with a reconsideration of the details of the empirical findings, whether they can be extrapolated to non-laboratory settings, and the extent to which one can rely on their use of subjective reports. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of what is meant by “conscious processing” and of how phenomenal consciousness relates to attentional processing. We then turn to broader philosophical and theoretical issues. I point out some of the reasons why I do not support epiphenomenalism, dualist-interactionism, or reductionism, and elaborate on how first- and third-person views of the mind can be regarded as complementary and mutually irreducible. I suggest how the relation of conscious experiences to their neural correlates can be understood in terms of a dual-aspect theory of information, and how this might be used to resolve some of the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain. I also suggest that, viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness gives purpose to existence, which allows a different way of viewing its role in evolution.

Reflexive monism

by Max Velmans

This is a summary of some of the main features of reflexive monism published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2008. Some further implications of reflexive monism considered as an integrative philosophical system are summarised in "Reflexive Monism: psychophysical relations among mind, matter, and consciousness" due to be published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in October 2012

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in... more Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “out-thereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

(forthcoming) A case study of primary process language and body boundary imagery in discourses of religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness

by Laura Cariola

Empirical Text and Cultural Research

Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological... more Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological and psychobiological features, including changes in body boundary awareness. This study aimed to assess the frequency and strength of associations between body boundary imagery and primary process language in the discourses of mystical and psychotic-mystical ASC. The mystical discourse examined here is Saint Teresa of Avila’s (1567) mystical writing "The Way of Perfection”, and the psychotic discourse is Daniel Paul Schreber’s (1903) autobiographical writing “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness”. The mystical text differs from the psychotic text in the frequency of primary process language and penetration imagery. Positive associations were also found between primary process language and penetration imagery, and barrier and penetration imagery, whereas the psychotic text yielded a positive association between barrier and penetration imagery only.

Goodbye to Reductionism

by Max Velmans

This paper is based on a plenary talk given at a conference on "Toward a Science of Consciousness: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates" at the University of Arizona in 1996, which was followed by a public debate with the philosopher John Searle. Given the predominance of physicalist reductionism within consciousness studies at that time, the anti-reductionist approach taken in this talk and paper was quite radical. However the challenges posed to reductionism were very simple ones--which, in my view, have never been adequately addressed.

This paper argues that within consciousness studies, dualist vs. reductionist debates typically characterise... more This paper argues that within consciousness studies, dualist vs. reductionist debates typically characterise experience in ways which do not correspond to ordinary experience, and that to understand consciousness one must start with an accurate description of its phenomenology. Only then can one develop an understanding of how experiences viewed from a first-person perspective relate to events in the brain viewed from a third-person perspective. The paper then lists some common arguments for conscious experiences (accurately described) being nothing more than brain states along with their fallacies. It concludes that there are fundamental problems with ontological reductionism of conscious experiences to brain states that cannot be resolved.

The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness

by Scott Bakker

Draft

According to the latest estimates, the human brain performs some 38 000 trillion operations per second. When you... more According to the latest estimates, the human brain performs some 38 000 trillion operations per second. When you compare this to the amount of information that reaches conscious awareness, the disproportion becomes nothing short of remarkable. What are the consequences of this radical informatic asymmetry? The Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness (BBT) represents an attempt to 'explain away' several of the most perplexing features of consciousness in terms of information loss and depletion. The first-person perspective, it argues, is the expression of the kinds and quantities of information that, for a variety of structural and developmental reasons, cannot be accessed by the 'conscious brain.' Puzzles as profound and persistent as the now, personal identity, conscious unity, and most troubling of all, intentionality, could very well be kinds of illusions foisted on conscious awareness by different versions of the informatic limitation expressed, for instance, in the boundary of your visual field. By explaining away these phenomena, BTT separates the question of consciousness from the question of how consciousness appears, and so drastically narrows the so-called explanatory gap. If true, it solves the hard problem. But at what cost?

Wisdom and Futures Studies

by Vahid V. Motlagh

Book Review: Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future by Tom Lombardo. 461 pages. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011. ISBN13: 978-1-4628-8360-8. US$23.99 paper

In the coming decades we will witness a new collective enlightenment which many futurists describe as a “significant... more In the coming decades we will witness a new collective enlightenment which many futurists describe as a “significant jump in the collective mental functioning of humanity”. As expected by many writers, contemporary challenges and evolutionary forces will push humanity to a new level of “cosmic consciousness.” And for Lombardo, a core feature of this evolutionary transformation is “heightened future consciousness.”

Measuring consciousness: Task accuracy and awareness as sigmoid functions of stimulus duration

by Bert Timmermans

Sandberg K, Bibby BM, Timmermans B, Cleeremans A, & Overgaard M. (2011). Measuring consciousness: Task accuracy and awareness as sigmoid functions of stimulus duration. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1659-75.

When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is... more When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is often estimated by calculating task performance at the subjective threshold or by calculating the correlation between accuracy and awareness. However, both these methods have certain limitations. In the present article, we propose describing task accuracy and awareness as functions of stimulus intensity (thus obtaining an accuracy and an awareness curve) as suggested by Koch and Preuschoff (2007). The estimated lag between the curves describes how much stimulus intensity must increase for awareness to change proportionally as much as accuracy and the slopes of the curves are used to assess how fast accuracy and awareness increases and whether awareness is dichotomous. The method is successfully employed to assess consciousness characteristics on data from four different awareness scales.

Higher-Order Thoughts in Action: Consciousness as an unconscious redescription process

by Bert Timmermans

Timmermans B, Schilbach L, Pasquali A, & Cleeremans, A (2012) Higher-Order Thoughts in Action: Consciousness as an unconscious redescription process. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1594), 1412-23. (here only the final draft, as I'm not allowed to post the actual paper)

Metacognition is usually construed as a conscious, intentional process whereby people reflect upon their own mental... more Metacognition is usually construed as a conscious, intentional process whereby people reflect upon their own mental activity. Here, we instead suggest that metacognition is but an instance of a larger class of representational redescription processes that we assume occur unconsciously and automatically. From this perspective, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to anticipate the consequences of action or activity on itself, on the world, and on other people through three predictive loops: An inner loop, a perception-action loop, and a self-other (social cognition) loop, which together form a tangled hierarchy. We ask what kinds of mechanisms may subtend this form of enactive metacognition. We extend previous neural network simulations and compare the model with Signal Detection Theory, highlighting that while the latter approach assumes that both Type I (objective) and Type II (subjective, metacognition-based) decisions tap into the same signal at different hierarchical levels, our approach is closer to dual-route models in that it assumes that the redescriptions made possible by the emergence of metarepresentations occur independently and outside of the first-order causal chain. We close by reviewing relevant neurological evidence for the idea that awareness, self-awareness and social cognition involve the same mechanisms.

Realistic Materialism

by Galen Strawson

'Conceivability, Identity, and the Explanatory Gap' (1998)

by Galen Strawson

Why Physicalism Entails Panspychism

by Galen Strawson

Three laws of qualia: What neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness

by William Hirstein

Consciousness, Brain and the Physical World

by Max Velmans

This is a clean PDF of the first paper I published on consciousness, in Philosophical Psychology in 1990. At the time it was very radical and still has radical elements. In particular it challenged the widely accepted presupposition that all conscious experiences are "in the head", and by implication "located in the brain." Although many of the basic steps it makes are now widely accepted in the field, there is continuing controversy about how best to interpret their broader implications. The basic points made about the phenomenology of consciousness are for example now accepted by both direct realist philosophers such as Michael Tye who believe the qualia of consciousness to be physical properties of the external world, and indirect realist scientists such as Stephen Lehar, Antti Revonsuo and Jeffrey Gray who adopt biological naturalism--the view that the entire phenomenal world is in fact a form of virtual reality contained within the brain. In my 2008 Journal of Consciousness Studies paper on "Reflexive Monism" I compare and contrast both of these positions with the reflexive monist view that the external phenomenal world is a perceptual projection.

Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or... more Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or function of the brain. They assume, however, that the contents of consciousness are separate from the external physical world as-perceived. According to the present paper this assumption has no foundation either in everyday experience or in science. Drawing on evidence for perceptual projection in both interoceptive and exteroceptive sense modalities, the case is made that the physical world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. The physical world as-perceived may, in turn be thought of as a biologically useful model of the world as described by physics. Redrawing the boundaries of consciousness to include the physical world as-perceived undermines the conventional separation of the 'mental' from the physical', and with it the very foundation of the Dualist-Reductionist debate. The alternative Reflexive model departs radically from current conventions, with consequences for many aspects of consciousness theory and research. Some of the consequences which bear on the internal consistency and intuitive plausibility of the model are explored, e.g. the causal sequence in perception, representationalism, a suggested resolution of the Realism versus Idealism debate, and the way manifest differences between physical events as-perceived and other conscious events (images, dreams, etc.) are to be construed.

What are the memory sources of dreaming? (2005)

by Tore Nielsen

Changes in the kinesthetic content of dreams following somatosensory stimulation of leg muscles during REM sleep (1993)

by Tore Nielsen

Minds on the blink: The relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional blink

by Vanessa Beanland

Beanland, V., & Pammer, K. (2012). Minds on the blink: The relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional blink. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 74(2), 322-330. doi:10.3758/s13414-011-0241-4

Failures of conscious visual awareness occur when specific task demands prevent an observer from detecting a stimulus... more Failures of conscious visual awareness occur when specific task demands prevent an observer from detecting a stimulus that would otherwise be clearly visible. Two examples are inattentional blindness and attentional blink. Inattentional blindness is the failure to detect an unexpected stimulus when attention is otherwise engaged. Attentional blink describes the inability to detect a second target that is presented within 180-500 ms of the first target. Previous research suggested that cognitive processes underlie both inattentional blindness and attentional blink; however, they are distinct phenomena and no evidence has directly linked the two. We tested the same group of observers on an inattentional blindness task and an attentional blink task. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that “non-noticers” who failed to detect an unexpected stimulus in the inattentional blindness task also demonstrated a larger attentional blink effect. This suggests that some observers may be more generally susceptible to failures of conscious visual awareness, regardless of specific context.

Musical and non-musical involvement in daily life: The case of absorption

by Ruth Herbert

Now available online, in advance of publication in Musicae Scientiae Vol. 16(1) in 2012

The construct of absorption (effortless engagement) has been the subject of a small number of discipline-specific... more The construct of absorption (effortless engagement) has been the subject of a small number of discipline-specific studies of involvement, including music. This paper reports the results of an empirical project that compared psychological qualities of absorption in everyday music listening scenarios with characteristics of non-music-related involvement. Absorption was located in “real-world” settings, and experiences across different activities in a variety of contexts were tapped as soon as possible after they occurred. The inquiry was designed to test two assumptions that have underpinned previous absorption research: first, that certain activities are inherently particularly absorbing; second, that absorption is best conceptualized primarily as a trait as opposed to a state. Twenty participants kept diaries for two weeks, recording descriptions of involving experiences of any kind. Eight weeks after submitting descriptive reports they completed the Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale (Jamieson, 2005). Diaries indicated that different activities shared a subset of involving features, and confirmed the importance of multi-sensory perception and the imaginative faculty to absorbed experiences. Music may be a particularly effective agent in the facilitation of absorption because it affords multiple potential entry points to involvement (acoustic attributes, source specification, entrainment, emotion, fusion of modalities) and because its semantic malleability makes it adaptable to a variety of circumstances. The MODTAS provided insufficient evidence for establishing correlations between state and trait absorption. It is argued that state and trait divisions are constructs that are inherently problematic.

Attending to music decreases inattentional blindness

by Vanessa Beanland

Beanland, V., Allen, R. A., & Pammer, K. (2011). Attending to music decreases inattentional blindness. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1282-1292. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.04.009

This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious... more This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers’ frequency of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Observers completed an IB task that varied both visual and auditory demands. Listening to music was associated with significantly lower IB, but only when observers actively attended to the music. Follow up experiments suggest this was due to the distracting qualities of the audio task. The results also suggest a complex relationship between IB and TUTs: during demanding tasks, as predicted, noticers of the unexpected stimulus reported fewer TUTs than non-noticers. During less demanding tasks, however, noticers reported more TUTs than non-noticers.

Gorilla watching: Effects of exposure and expectations on inattentional blindness

by Vanessa Beanland

Beanland, V., & Pammer, K. (2010). Gorilla watching: Effects of exposure and expectations on inattentional blindness. In W. Christensen, E. Schier, & J. Sutton (Eds.), ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (pp. 12-20). Sydney: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. doi: 10.5096/ASCS20093

Inattentional blindness (IB) occurs when an individual fails to notice an unexpected object because their attention is... more Inattentional blindness (IB) occurs when an individual fails to notice an unexpected object because their attention is engaged by another task. Most research has excluded participants with IB knowledge on the belief that any knowledge of IB would invalidate experiments by causing participants to “expect the unexpected”. Previous research has shown that expectations can significantly influence IB rates, specifically through determining attentional set. We conducted a series of experiments to determine whether knowledge of and exposure to IB research had any effect on expectations and rates of IB. Experiment 1 compared participants with either little or no preexisting knowledge of IB and found that IB knowledge did not predict experimental rates of IB. Experiment 2 compared first year psychology students with moderate IB knowledge to later-year students with high IB knowledge. Again, knowledge was not a significant predictor of IB rates. Experiment 3 manipulated IB knowledge, with half the participants given detailed information on IB. High knowledge participants were significantly more likely to notice the unexpected stimulus, but primary task accuracy was significantly lower for noticers compared to nonnoticers, suggesting that noticers may have adopted a dual task strategy and been “watching” for the unexpected stimulus. Overall these results suggest that preexisting IB knowledge only affects rates of IB if it allows participants to form specific and accurate expectations about the experiment.