Neuroscience of Consciousness Ch 1

The Problem of Consciousness Chapter 1

THE HARD AND EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

INTENTIONALITY: ARE WE ALWAYS CONSCIOUS OF SOMETHING?

TYPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THE PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Defining consciousness

• Definitions of consciousness
• Awareness v. Self-awareness
• The problem of other minds

Defining consciousness

• What is it like to be me?
• Why does it feel like something to be me?
• Awareness v self-awareness
• Awareness of being aware

Science of Consciousness

The problem of other minds

• We know what it is like to be ourselves
• But our experiences are private
• What is it like to be something else?

Key Terms

consciousness

Thomas Nagel

“What is it like to be a bat?” (1974)

Bats use echolocation. Can we appreciate what it is like to be a bat?

Altered Reality

According to a Japanese dictionary, ‘art’ is defined as ‘human activities or works of art that attempt to create and express beauty by means of special materials, methods or forms.’ In this light, it is questionable whether these pieces, a series of drawings on writing pads with no regards to techniques or an aesthetic sense, can be readily treated as art pieces. Rather, they may be more appropriately seen as an illustrated journal of his psychiatric symptoms.

However, this illustrated journal on symptoms offers a compelling charm beyond expression. One gazes at this illustrated journal and starts to imagine and experience his psychiatric symptoms as he might have gone through them. In clinical psychiatric practice, treatment often reaches a turning point when a patient’s inner world and suffering, which are both hard to communicate by words, are visualized and then relived and understood by the family and the therapist.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pcn.13089

After a head injury due to a fall at work, the patient had become delusional and hallucinatory, which had likely been exacerbated by alcohol abuse; this prompted him to be temporarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Ten years later, he was hospitalized again for delusions and hallucinations triggered by trouble with an inheritance. He received a diagnosis of schizotypal disorder and has been treated as an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital for about 10 years now.

The patient kept this illustrated journal for over 20 years. In the journal, every drawing was sequentially numbered, revealing that his inner experience had a sense of continuity. When asked about the reason for his drawing, he says: ‘Drawing this helps me calm down.’ He stopped drawing in 2019, though. ‘I have drawn everything,’ he explains as to why he stopped. It does not go beyond my imagination, but I suspect that by keeping this journal he has finally come to terms with the symptoms that agonized him for so many years.

The hard & easy problems of consciousness

Hard Problem

• why does it feel like something to be me?

“Easy” Problem(s)

• spatial attention
• episodic memory
• visual perception
• wakefulness, etc.

• The hard problem involves explaining HOW physical processes produce subjective experience (the explanatory gap);

• “easy” problems concern mechanisms of cognition (access, & report)

• wake/sleep, attention, memory, control, etc.

• Views diverge:

  • some expect the hard problem to dissolve after solving the “easy” ones;

    • it’s possible that when we fully understand all the “easy” parts and how they add togethere and interact we might realize that there’s no remaining “hard” problem

  • others think it will remain or is forever impossible to solve

• progress so far is mostly on the “easy” problems.

Philosophy and Consciousness

Consciousness is entwined with one of the fundamental concerns of philosophical thought, the problem of free will. Harley, p.4

• What is a “self”? (Is it stable?, permanent?)

• Homunculus or “Cartesian Theater”

  • Dualist concept that there’s a movie screen where all the senses project onto and the human is able to sit and watch.

Philosophy and Consciousness

Consciousness is entwined with one of the fundamental concerns of philosophical thought, the problem of free will. Harley, p.4

Homunculus or “Cartesian Theater”

• Dualist concept that there’s a movie screen where all the senses project onto and the human is able to sit and watch.

What is a “self”? (Is it stable?, permanent?)

• Homunculus suffers from “Infine Regress”

Intentionality: are we always conscious of something?

Often, we do and experience many things more or less reflexively.

• Can you be conscious but not conscious of something in particular?

• Volition is related to intentionality

• Free-will (Ch.3) is related to intentionality

  • Consciousness exhibits aboutness (intentionality): it is directed at thoughts, sensations, or bodily states;

  • many processes (digestion, parsing language) remain inaccessible;

  • skilled performance can degrade under conscious control;

  • attempts at “pure nothingness” become conscious of nothingness as something.

Types of consciousness

Phenomenal and Access consciousness (Ned Block)

Experiencing vs. Attention, memory, language, reason

Seperability of Types of Consciousness

	Access	No	Yes
Phenomenal
No		Tree	Robot
Yes		Rodent	Human

Other types of consciousness

• Self-consciousness (e.g., emotion, identity, narrative, social)
• Secondary consciousness (e.g., past, future, imagined)
• Degrees of consciousness

• Phenomenal consciousness is what we experience:
  • it’s what it’s like to be us.
  • It’s the sensations of perception from the outside, and the experience of wanting, thinking, and feeling from the inside.
  • covered for most of ch 1
  • for many understanding phenomenal consciousness is the central “hard problem”to be addressed.
• Access consciousness concerns language, thought, controlling action, and reasoning.
  • Access consciousness concerns what we talk and think about, and importantly, it’s what we can report
  • so it’s our thoughts, feelings, and desires themselves(rather than our experience of them) and
  • the representations that are manipulated in cognition.
• P-consciousness and A-consciousness typically interact but may, in principle, dissociate; debates center on computability and whether A-consciousness belongs under “consciousness” at all.

A cone of consciousness?

Figure 1.10. Hofstadter’s “consciousness cone”. Most people think that consciousness is a graded phenomena: some organisms have “more” of it than others. Is this lay belief correct?

The “Problems” of Consciousness

• The hard problem

• The temporal problem

• The free will problem

• The why problem

• The self problem

• The unconscious problem

• The cognitive problem

• The binding problem

• The neural correlates problem

• The altered states problem

• The science problem

• The hard problem

Why does it feel like something to be me? Why do sensations appear to us as they are?

• The temporal problem

Why do I have the illusion of choosing to act when my brain has apparently already made that decision moments ago. The brain activity associated with consciousness appears too late for conscious decision making.

• The free will problem

How and why do I have the illusion of choice and control if all of my actions are determined?

• The why problem

Why are do all humans appear to be conscious, but many animals get along just fine without being self-aware or even show many hallmarks associated with consciousness? Why are some really complex things not conscious? Is consciousness automatically associated with consciousness?

• The self problem

Who is this I who thinks they have a choice? Who is experiencing my experiences?

• The unconscious problem

Why are some things conscious and others unconscious? Does consciousness give us anything extra?

• The cognitive problem

does something as complicated as an intact human have to be conscious? What is it about our cognitive machinery? Where does consciousness fit into cognitive processing?

• The binding problem

How do different sensations get bound together so that we perceive one object with all the associated emotions?

• The neural correlates problem

How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Are there certain brain structures we can identify that are active when we engage in certain sorts of processing? What about brain damage?

• The altered states problem

What do we mean by a normal state of consciousness? What causes an alteration in our state of consciousness??

• The science problem

Using the scientific tools we have can we even give a complete account of consciousness?

KEY TERMS

• consciousness

• awareness vs self-awareness

• privacy (first-person)

• other minds problem

• qualia

• free will

• determinism

• personal identity

• homunculus

• infinite regress

• intentionality (aboutness)

• introspection

• explanatory gap

• hard problem

• easy problems

• phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness)

• access consciousness (A-consciousness)

• primary vs secondary consciousness

• altered states

• altered states, dreaming

• anesthesia

• coma

• near-death experience

• metacognition

• cognitive bias

• thought experiment

• neuroimaging/physiology

• temporal/spatial resolution

• neuropsychology

• lesion studies, split-brain

• split-brain

• embodiment

• artificial consciousness

• neuromorphic/brain simulation

• augmentation

KEY TERMS

• consciousness

• awareness vs self-awareness

• privacy (first-person)

• other minds problem

• qualia

• free will

• determinism

• personal identity

• homunculus

• infinite regress

• intentionality (aboutness)

• introspection

• explanatory gap

• hard problem

• easy problems

• phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness)

• access consciousness (A-consciousness)

• primary vs secondary consciousness

• altered states, dreaming

• anesthesia, coma, near-death experience

• metacognition

• cognitive bias

• thought experiment

• neuroimaging/physiology

• temporal/spatial resolution

• neuropsychology

• lesion studies, split-brain

• embodiment

• artificial consciousness

• neuromorphic/brain simulation

• augmentation

Test cross-refs

Consciousness

Subjective experience and awareness of the world and self.

See ?@tip-consciousness…

KEY TERMS

• consciousness: Subjective experience and awareness of the world and self.
• awareness vs self-awareness: Awareness is being conscious of stimuli or states; self-awareness is awareness of oneself as the subject/agent of those states.
• privacy (first-person): Knowledge to which only you have access.
• other minds problem: The challenge of justifying how we know others have minds and experiences like ours.
• qualia: The elements of sensation—the felt qualities of experience.
• free will: The idea that we are free to choose between alternative actions.
• determinism: The notion that every event is fixed by prior events and laws, yielding only one possible outcome.
• personal identity: What makes a person the same individual over time despite change (e.g., psychological or bodily continuity).
• homunculus: A “little creature inside” that would merely duplicate the mind’s functions, leading to a fallacy.
• infinite regress: An explanation that requires the same kind of explainer again and again without end (e.g., a homunculus inside a homunculus).
• intentionality (aboutness): Mental directedness—states are about or directed toward objects, properties, or states of affairs.
• introspection: The process of looking inside to examine the contents of your own mind.
• explanatory gap: The problem of explaining how physical brain processes give rise to phenomenal experience.
• hard problem: Chalmers’s problem of explaining private experience and the quality of qualia.
• easy problems: Explaining cognitive functions (attention, report, control, discrimination) in mechanistic/functional terms.
• phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness): The “what-it’s-like” qualitative feel of experience.
• access consciousness (A-consciousness): Information in the mind that is available for report, reasoning, and control of action.
• primary vs secondary consciousness: Primary is basic, present-moment sensory awareness; secondary is self-reflective, concept-involving, metacognitive awareness.
• altered states, dreaming: Altered state—a state of consciousness that differs markedly from normal waking (beta EEG) activity; dreaming—internally generated experiences during sleep, often modeled as the cortex interpreting largely random activation (activation–synthesis).
• anesthesia, coma, near-death experience: Anesthesia—medically induced loss of sensation and awareness; coma—prolonged unconsciousness typically from severe brain injury; near-death experience—vivid, often life-review or tunnel/light experiences reported near clinical death.
• metacognition: Cognition about cognition—monitoring and controlling one’s own mental states and processes.
• cognitive bias: Systematic deviations from normative reasoning or judgment due to heuristics, emotions, or context.
• thought experiment: A constructed scenario used to probe concepts and intuitions; Dennett calls some “intuition pumps.”
• neuroimaging/physiology: Neuroimaging visualizes structure/function (e.g., PET measuring metabolism, fMRI blood flow); neurophysiology measures neural electrical activity (e.g., EEG, single-unit recordings).
• temporal/spatial resolution: Temporal resolution is precision in time; spatial resolution is precision in space—different methods trade off these.
• neuropsychology: The study of how brain function relates to cognition and behavior, often via patterns after brain injury.
• lesion studies, split-brain: Lesion studies infer function from deficits after damage; split-brain work (after severing the corpus callosum) reveals hemispheric specialization and divided processing.
• embodiment: The view that cognition is grounded in and shaped by the body’s sensorimotor systems and their environmental coupling.
• artificial consciousness: The hypothesized realization of conscious states in artificial systems (software or robots).
• neuromorphic/brain simulation: Neuromorphic—hardware modeled on neural architectures; brain simulation—software modeling of brain dynamics to reproduce functions or possibly consciousness.
• augmentation: A device replacing or extending the brain’s functionality.

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