Abstract
Aaron Sloman begins his stimulating article from the very negative claim: \... the notion of consciousness is so ill-de ned (...) that there is no point even discussing it except to show why it is worthless in scienti c contexts, though the adjective ‘conscious' has many uses in ordinary conversation and medical contexts. [Sloman, 2009]. So he both has his cake and eats it, this would seem to imply. It is alright to employ \conscious in matters of life and death (as in determining whether a patient is in a vegetative state or not, or in understanding the experiences of a schizophrenic), but not in polite scienti c discourse (at least when Aaron Sloman is around). Instead we must create models of all possible \competences of animals (including humans) and then we have done the necessary work. These competences need not have behavioral results, i.e. they could be \non-behavioral competences, according to Sloman. It is not clear exactly what is a \non-behavioral competence, since that is not explicitly de ned in the article, but it seems to include some level of introspection or inner report. Sloman's claim that if such a modeling program is completely carried out \... then there will be nothing left to be explained about human consciousness. [Sloman, 2009]. If the notion of a competence is expanded to also include the results obtained by brain imaging from all possible sources (fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG, multielectrode-based MUAs and LFPs and synchronizations, causal °ows of brain activity and e®ects of TMS) then I would agree that such would be the set of all possible objective observables. At the same time the inner report of subjects in these various states must also be used to justify them. The results of these myriads of experiments must therefore be modeled accurately in order to have a beginning basis of brain activity supporting the various states of consciousness (provided the measurements are taken in all possible states of awareness: SWS or REM sleep, whilst awake, under International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010) 65 68 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000321
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