Lecture 10 Flashcards
consciousness (24 cards)
What is creature consciousness?
A person’s level of wakefulness or alertness, such as being asleep or awake.
What is content consciousness?
The subjective experience of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions at a given moment.
What is access consciousness (Block, 1995)?
Mental representations that are available for reasoning, reporting, and decision-making.
What is phenomenal consciousness?
The subjective feel or qualia of experience—what it feels like to see, hear, or taste something.
What is the “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers)?
Explaining why and how physical brain activity gives rise to subjective experience.
What is the “easy problem” of consciousness?
Explaining the mechanisms of information processing, such as attention and control.
What did Nagel’s (1974) bat thought experiment illustrate?
That we cannot know what it’s like to be another creature—pointing to the limits of objective science.
What does the Mary the color scientist scenario show (Jackson, 1986)?
Even with full physical knowledge, first-person experience adds something new—supporting the hard problem.
What is the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1988)?
Consciousness arises when information becomes globally available across the brain, like “fame in the brain.”
What is the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)?
Consciousness occurs when sensory information activates a widespread fronto-parietal network, causing “ignition.”
What is the attentional blink?
A brief period after detecting one stimulus where people fail to detect a second—indicating limited access to consciousness.
What is blindsight?
Condition where people with V1 damage can respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness.
What does Patient DF’s case (visual form agnosia) suggest?
There is a separation between conscious vision (ventral stream) and unconscious vision-for-action (dorsal stream)
What is visual neglect/extinction?
Damage to the parietal lobe causes a failure to attend to one side of space, though some unconscious processing still occurs.
What is the richness vs. sparsity debate in consciousness?
Whether our experience is richer than we can report (phenomenal overflow) or sparser than it feels (illusion).
What is the “refrigerator light illusion”?
The false belief that our consciousness is always full, like a refrigerator light that seems always on when the door opens.
What is the Higher Order Thought (HOT) theory?
A mental state becomes conscious when there is a higher-order thought about it—a kind of meta-representation.
What is illusionism (Dennett, Frankish)?
The view that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist—it’s an illusion created by brain processes.
Which brain regions are involved in the global neuronal workspace?
Frontal and parietal lobes, especially when information becomes globally accessible and reportable.
What does the study of consciousness reveal about the mind?
Consciousness is multi-layered, with both reportable access and unconscious processing playing essential roles in cognition.
Block distinguished between how many forms of consciousness?
Two
A patient has suffered brain damage and, as a result, now seems to ignore all information on the left side of her world. If shown words, she reads only the right half of the word; if asked to copy a picture, she copies only the right half. This patient seems to be suffering from
unilateral neglect syndrome.
Phenomenal consciousness refers to
Our qualitative experiences of stimuli
In the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness results when representations are broadcast across a network of brain areas
