Abstract
AbstractAn invited workshop on ‘Theories of Consciousness’ was organized in the format of a Nature Network closed group during the second semester of 2009. There were presentations by each of 15 authors active in the field, followed by debate with other presenters and invitees. A week was allocated to each of the theories proposed; general discussion threads were also opened from time to time, as seemed appropriate. We (who had been participants in the workshop) offer here an account of the principal outcomes. It can be regarded as a contemporary, ‘state of the art’ snapshot of thinking in this field.
Highlights
It should be said straight away that there was little general agreement in the workshop about what constituted the main problems, or how to address them
Despite a range of differences over philosophical issues, most workshop participants appeared to agree that a reflexive form of Dual-Aspect Monism provides a reasonably satisfactory basis on which to proceed, taking conscious experiences and their physical counterparts to be complementary and mutually irreducible aspects of a single underlying dynamic
Monism is usually contrasted with Substance Dualism, the view found for example in the writings of Plato and Descartes that, fundamentally, the universe is composed of two kinds of stuff, physical stuff and the stuff of soul, mind or consciousness
Summary
Despite a range of differences over philosophical issues, most workshop participants appeared to agree that a reflexive form of Dual-Aspect Monism provides a reasonably satisfactory basis on which to proceed, taking conscious experiences and their physical (neural) counterparts to be complementary and mutually irreducible aspects of a single underlying dynamic. Each of these features appears to originate in the activities of specific brain mechanisms or ‘modules’, they all contribute content to what may be a common mechanism (the caveat here being that consciousness could be less unitary than is often assumed, from either ontogenetic or phylogenetic points of view). One can distinguish high level information processing functions that are conscious, from the same functions in the brain that are non-conscious, e.g. the activation of semantic networks by consciously perceived linguistic stimuli contrasted with unconscious ‘semantic priming’ in masking experiments.
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