Consciousness Flashcards
(40 cards)
What are the arguments for: ‘There is no way of knowing whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness.’ Do you agree?
- Block’s Distinction
- My Objection
- Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm
- Phillips’ Issues
Why does Block want to distinguish between types of consciousness?
In order to disentangle the debate about consciousness.
What is Block’s distinction?
P-consciousness: how it is like to be in a state.
- The kind of consciousness that gives rise to the hard problem of consciousness.
A-consciousness: state used for reasoning, judgement, and action.
- Representational
- The kind of consciousness that gives rise to the easy problem of consciousness.
What are the two problems of consciousness?
Hard problem: there seems to be no reason for there to be p-consciousness. If it wasn’t for our direct evidence of it, there would be no evidence for it in science.
Easy problem: understanding our cognitive abilities to integrate information, categorise stimuli, react to the environment.
What are the key differences between P and A consciousness?
- A-consciousness is representational whilst P-consciousness is phenomenal.
- A-consciousness is functional whilst P-consciousness seems not functional.
What is one way P and A interact?
What is being accessed impacts one’s phenomenal state (example?).
How can we have P without A?
The Drill Case:
Suppose you’re in an intense conversation and at noon you suddenly realise that there has been a drill going off near you for a while. You were hearing it the whole time (P) but you weren’t attentive to it (A) and thus did not conceptualise it, did not think about it.
What is Blindsight?
Subjects that report not being able to see anything in their blind field but when prompted, can reliably guess what simple thing is in their blind field (X or O).
How can we have A without P?
Superblindsight:
A blindsighter that can prompt himself at will to guess what is in his blind field. Thus, interacting in with the world as though they can see.
Is superblindsight real?
No, Block claims it is simply a conceptual possibility.
What is the issues of overflowing consciousness?
If A and P can come apart, then there are some conscious states that don’t or cannot access.
This means that:
- Our reports of our experience may systematically fail to track our experience (Impact on psychology?)
- You may be systematicallly misled about your own conscious experience.
What is your objection to consciousness overflowing access?
Even if Block is right about A and P, we necessarily need A to report our experience.
- If we cannot report experience then it seems that we cannot know that we have conscious states we cannot access.
- We need A to know P.
- Otherwise, we can simply say that we weren’t conscious of it.
How does your objection apply to the Drill Case?
- We can say we were not conscious of it until noon, we did not hear it.
- If we did hear it, we can only know that by having A.
What is Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm?
Supports the claim that consciousness overflows access.
- Grid of 12 letters for 500ms
- Told to report letters, can do 3-4
- Same again but given a prompt for which row
- Can report 3 letter per row.
Conclusion: people experience 9 letters but can only acces 3-4.
What is Phillips’ issue with Sperling’s Partial Report Paradigm?
The assumption that we can sum up the partial reports is threatened by post diction.
This is the phenomenon that your experience is influenced by something later.
What is the counter to Phillips?
Postdiction is mysterious.
What is your conclusion for: ‘There is no way of knowing whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness.’ Do you agree?
Block provides us with a compelling distinction which implies that we can have conscious experience which we cannot access.
- Sperling’s experiment supports this.
Phillips shows that we may not be able to aggregate reports.
- It is not proof that we have conscious experience that we cannot access.
Therefore, due to our inability to know about or report conscious experience that we cannot access, we can never know that we have conscious experience that we cannot access.
What are the arguments for: It seems that there are some things it is impossible to learn from books. What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of consciousness?
- Jackson’s Mary and Her Black and White Room.
- Materialist Responses.
What is Jackson arguing against?
Physicalism/Materialism.
- That all information is physical.
What is Jackson’s thought experiment?
- Mary is a scientist that specialises in vision, learning everything physcial about it.
- She does this without experiencing colour.
- She then experiences colour for the first time.
- It seems as though she learns something new, what it is like to see red.
What is the conclusion of Jackson’s thought experiment?
If Mary learns something new, this information must be non-physical.
Therefore, physicalism is false and the nature of consciousness cannot be known purely physically.
What are the two types of Material responses to Jackson and which will you focus on?
Thin: Mary does not learn something new.
Thick: She learns something new but it is old information.
Focus on Thin
Who claims Thin Materialism?
Dennett
What does Dennett claim?
Whilst the conclusion of Mary is intuitive, we simply fail to properly imagine such a scenario.
