Consciousness

What it is like to be conscious is merely how our mental life appears to us. There is nothing special about phenomenology. Experimentally, if an individual denies experiencing anything, we should conclude the individual was not conscious of the stimulus. A state an individual is in no way aware of herself as being in is not – on any reasonable account – a conscious state Example: Inattentional blindness You can report everything For you to be conscious about it you need to have a memory Report paradigm

The phenomenal domain outstrips the cognitive domain: There is A LOT of it. Explaining the phenomenal domain is the real task. And it is a difficult task. The cognitive domain is driven mainly by access conciousness and the phenomenal domain is driven by phenomenal consciousness There are things you cannot report on E.g. flavors, “you should have been there” We were conscious about it but we cannot report it Example: The experiment where they have reported not seeing it but EEG showed they did Is language the problem?

A secondary effect

The ability of one’s mind to represent something

Intense activation, yet confined to sensorimotor processors No reportability

It is a psychological construct arguing that perceptual contents, which are acted upon by localized processors, only become conscious when they are widely broadcasted to other processors across the brain

Testing how clearly people see T2 and report on which of the two options occurred in T1 What they find in this task is that when the duration time is short people will miss T2 If they don’t have a task in T1 they are more likely to see T2 Is report necessary for consciousness?

Since you do not attend to something you do not see it Example: Gorilla while counting basketball passes

Instances of subjective, conscious experience

Because of split-brain patients the right hemisphere is not part of the NCC for visual experience Can be used to argument for Deflationary view: If they cannot report than they have not experiences it Inflationary view: The blindness is caused by failure of reportability by other cognitive processes - there is no effect on the consciousness

Thomas Nagel: Consciousness is only there in an organism, if there is something “it is like” to be that organism

The brain’s ability to perceive and react to stimuli that are below the threshold of conscious awareness. These stimuli are typically so subtle or brief that they do not reach the level of conscious perception, yet they can still influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

The minimal neural mechanisms that are together necessary and sufficient for experiencing any conscious percept

The subjective aspect of experiencing the world. Relates to the ‘feel’. Does not fit an input-output model

There is more in your consciousness than you can access. Availability to other systems e.g. reasoning. Fits an input-output model

What is there and what we can actually access Conscious, preconscious and subliminal processing

Participants report on what they are conscious about

The rapid transfer of visual information through the visual cortex and towards motor areas producing a (potential) response. Within several milliseconds each area extracts information about shape, color, motion, position, objects and faces (see icons). Processing by the feedforward sweep is not, however, accompanied by conscious experience of the visual input

Consciousness

Unconscious

The study of experience What is it like to have an experience? There are things I don’t experience e.g. my body doing certain kinds of things (digestion?)

A method of studying the phenomenal aspect of the mind Often interviews

We have personal access to ourself and we know that we experience things

It is one stream (I feel connected to my younger self - I am the same person throughout life)