Consciousness Midterm

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A conscious being has...

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an internal psychological reality consisting of subjective experiences with a stream of consciousness

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Supervenience

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Linkage between conscious events and brain events

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Principle of covariation

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For each and every conscious event, there is a corresponding brain event

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NCC

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Neural correlate of consciousness

minimally sufficient neural system or activity that invariable co-occurs together with a conscious experience of a specific kind

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Consciousness

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Monitoring ourselves and environment (phenomenal awareness) and controlling ourselves and our environments (voluntary action)

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Interactionism (Cartesian dualism)

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There is a two-way causal interaction between the physical and mental, or brain and consciousness, through an unknown process

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Epiphenomenalism

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Mental cannot influence the physical, but physical can influence the mental in an unknown process

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Parallelism

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There is no causal relationship between physical and mental, rather a perfect correlation between the two realms

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Materialism

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Everything can be reduced to its simplest form, consciousness is a very specific mental proceess

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Eliminative reductionism

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There is no consciousness, it is a socially constructed phenomenon, everything is just biological processes and consciousness is no different

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Reductive materialism

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Material world is real, can be reduced to scientific components

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Microphysicalism

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Most extreme materialism, only bottom level of physical universe "really" exists

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Emergent materialism

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Higher level functioning emerges from low level processes

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Functionalism

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Consciousness is neither physical nor immaterial soul-substance, rather an abstract domain of complex causal relationships between any given entities. Mental state is a set of relations

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Hard problem

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We do not know how physical system can produce a subjective, qualitative experiences

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Explanatory Gap

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We can't explain the connection and relationship between physical and mental processes

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Psychophysics

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First measurement of consciousness; physical measurement and quantities can affect mental processes

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Weber's (psychophysical) law

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Allow us to compare acuity across different modalities of sensation and across different species

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Fechner's (psychophysical) law

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Sensation grows more slowly than stimulation

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Steven's (psychophysical) law

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Accomodates exceptions to Fecher's law

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Structuralism

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Connect psychology to the natural sciences both metaphysically and methodologically

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Wundt

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First to use introspection

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Titchener

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Psychology study of consciousness is to (1) analyze mental experience into simplest form (2) discover how simple components create complex processes (3) describe connection between mental experiences and physiology

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Gestalt

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Argued for a top-down, holistic approach to consciousness

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William James's stream of consciousness

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Qualia do not exist on their own, rather thoughts and consciousness in general are dynamically flowing structures

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Qualia

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Phenomenal consciousness in its simplest, most basic, undefinable form

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Center of consciousness

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Explicitly expressing objects in the environment to form complex patterns of the brain

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Peripheral consciousness

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Nebulous shadowy experiences that suggest presence of various perceptual qualities, not explicitly

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Attention

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Selection of some information for further, more detailed processing, amplifies some signal and filters out others

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Change blindness

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Failure to detect even larger changes in successive visual displays

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Inattentional blindness

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Failure to report unexpected stimuli, irrelevant to primary task (think gorilla)

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Introspection

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Choose particular contents of phenomenal consciousness and focus our attention on them

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Analytic introspection

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Analyse an event into qualia

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Interpretive introspection

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Making sense of things, through conscious and unconscious processes

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Descriptive introspection

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Communicate to others the contents of phenomenal experience

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Unconscious

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Temporary absence of consciousness from some entity that can also exist in a conscious state

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Nonconscious

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Permanent absence of consciousness from an entity

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Zombies

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Nonconscious beings that mimic conscious beings in their behavior and information processing

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Dennet's Multiple Drafts Theory

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1. Science is conducted from the objective 3rd person POV, therefore nothing exists in the internal subjective self, no phenomenal world

2. Multiple drafts: multiple streams of information in the brain all compete for "fame," the one that happens to gain access to output system is what we call consciousness

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Noe's Sensorimotor Theory

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1. Consciousness is embodied sensorimotor interaction with the world; ways of acting, something we do

2. No hard problem, because there is no phenomenality

3. Counterargument: dreams are conscious events that do not require sensorimotor stimuli

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Searle's Biological Naturalism

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1. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, all conscious phenomena are emergent properties of neuronal systems

2. Conscious is uniquely subjective, irreducible to any objective neurophysiological phenomenon

3. Consciousness is unified and qualitative subjectivity

4. Unified field theory of consciousness: Explanation for C lies in neural mechanisms

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Chalmers' Naturalistic dualism

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1. Coined the Hard Problem

2. Theory should tell us how consciousness is connected to other phenomena in the world/our brain

3. Phenomenal consciousness has no power over physical phenomena, implying epiphenomenalism

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Crick & Koch's Neurobiological Theory

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1. Neuroscientists should find NCC, which are smallest set of brain mechanisms and events sufficient for some specific phenomenal state

2. Terms: essential nodes, coalition, top-down feedback

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Essential nodes

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Neural populations that express one particular aspect of sensory perception

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Coalition

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Collection of a number of essential nodes in a distributed network

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Top-down feedback

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A mechanism that biases competition and helps one coalition "win" by raising it's activity level over other coalitions, bringing it to full attention

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Tonoi & Edelman's dynamic core

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1. Dynamic core: holistic functional cluster of neural activity in the thalamocortical system

2. It is the integrated activity that correlates with consciousness

3. Quantity of consciousness directly proportional to degree of information integration in system, quality is determined by internal information relationships within the system

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Thalamocortical Binding Theory

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1. Bidirectionality is key; thalamic nucleus receive reciprocal pathways from same cortical areas that they project to

2. Evidence has been shown for this, pathways found

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Damasio's Consciousness as the feeling of what happens

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1. Emphasizes the importance of body and emotion in the making of consciousness

2. Holistic view, and qualia can exist in nonconscious form

3. Nonconscious neural patterns

4. Core consciousness: here and now, relationship between core self and objects present

5. Extended consciousness: operates across autobiographical history and presents temporally continuous self, how it relates to past and future

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Categories of biological theories of consciousness

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1. Externalism vs. internalism

2. Phenomenology vs. Cognition

3. Atomism vs. holism

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Visual achromatopsia

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Person who has seen the world in colors all his life suddenly loses color vision completely, due to damage in visual cortex

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Visual agnosia

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Loss of coherent visual objects, perceptual objects are unrecognizable by visual experience they produce

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Prospagnosia

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Type of visual agnosia, restricted to faces only

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Visual Neglect

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Loss of phenomenal space, parts of perceptual space seem to disappear from consciousness without a trace

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Dissociation

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Situation where one cognitive function is preserved, other is damaged

Double dissociation: two single dissociations that go in opposite directions in at least two different patients

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Blindsight

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Type of dissociation where neural damage is located in visual cortex

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Ventral visual stream

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Specialized in producing visual representations of coherent objects for consciousness

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Dorsal visual stream

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Providing information concerning where the visual objects are located and how to interact with them

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Properties of Qualia

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Ineffable

Intrinsic

Private

Directly Apprehended

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Kant's faculties of the mind

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Knowledge, feeling, and desire

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Conscious inessentialism

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Since consciousness is not necessary for mental functions, consciousness isn't necessary part of mental life

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Piecemeal approach

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Strategy of approaching conscioousness indirectly, through attention, memory

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William James 5 characteristics of consciousness

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Subjectivity, change, continuity, intentionality, and attention

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3 Aspects of introspection

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Qualia, intentionality, and subjectivity

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Ontological vs. epistemic subjectivity

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ontology is observer dependent (consciousness) and epistemic is beliefs that are construed by subjectivity

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Synesthesia

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Stimulation in one modality elicits sensation in another

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Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies

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Each sensory modality is associated with a particular proximal stimulus, sensory receptor, sensory tract, and sensory projection area in the brain

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Absolute vs. relative threshold

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Abs: minimum energy that gives rise to stimulus that can be detected 50% of the time

Rel: minimum amount of change in stimulus that can be detected by people 50% of the time

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Psychophysical principle

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Every psychological quality of a sensory experience is related to physical property of the corresponding stimulus

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3 sorts of psychosomatic effects

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1. Mental states on mental states

2. Mental states on CNS

3. Mental states on physiology outside the CNS

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4 Features of automaticity

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1. Inevitable evocation

2. Incorrigible completion

3. Efficient execution

4. Parallel processing

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Traditional view vs. Revisionist view of Attention & Automaticity

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Trad: elementary processes are preattentive, performed unconsciously

Rev: Elementary processes can be unconsciously performed, and so can complex processes, as long as they are automatized

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Phemonenal consciousness

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One's personal experiences, past present

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Access Consciousness

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Information in mind which interacts with conscious states even though you're not fully aware of it

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Anterograde amnesia

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Cannot remember events since the brain damage, lose long-term memory formation

Think memento

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Explicit memory

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Conscious recolleciton, recall, and recognition

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Implicit memory

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Any effect of past event on current experience that is not in conscious awareness

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Single dissociation

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Independent variable A affects either implicit or explicit memory, but not the other

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Double (twin) dissociation

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Two independent variables affect and don't affect opposite exp/imp memories

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Repetition priming

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Initial presentation of stimulus influences way in which individual responds to that sitmulus (or rleated stimulus) in the future

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Semantic priming

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Meaning of stimulus affects affects a later stimulus

takes more processing than repetition priming

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Intentional blindness

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Paying attention to one stimulus makes you blind to another

Think gorillas!

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Attentional blindness

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Failure to consciously perceive objects, despite attention

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The Attentional Blink

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Presented a list of letters, after you see target letter, there is a period in which you cannot perceive another target letter, the "blink"

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Change blindness

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Subjects won't notice things changed if you show them two pictures with a little intermittent period

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Subliminal or implicit perception

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Below absolute/relative threshold for sensation, but enough to evoke implicit perception

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Multiple Systems theory of Emtion

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3 components

Cognitive (Subjective experience)

Physiological (covert somantic response)

Behavioral (overt behavioral response)

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Implicit Attitude Test

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Meant to measure unconscious emotional states about groups of people