Implications For Theories Of Consciousness Research Articles

Towards a multi-modal model of mental imagery (and implications for theories of consciousness) Comment on ``Visual mental imagery: Evidence for a heterarchical neural architecture'' by A. Spagna et al.

Towards a multi-modal model of mental imagery (and implications for theories of consciousness) Comment on ``Visual mental imagery: Evidence for a heterarchical neural architecture'' by A. Spagna et al.

The 'No-Supervenience' Theorem and its Implications for Theories of Consciousness

The 'no-supervenience' theorem (Reason, 2019; Reason and Shah, 2021) is a proof that no fully self-aware system can entirely supervene on any objectively observable system. I here present a simple, non-technical summary of the proof and demonstrate its implications for four separate theories of consciousness: the 'property dualism' theory of David Chalmers; the 'reflexive monism' of Max Velmans; Galen Strawson's 'realistic monism'; and the 'illusionism' of Keith Frankish. It is shown that all are ruled out in their current form by the no-supervenience theorem, except for Chalmers' theory, which I show requires humans to behave irrationally.

Behavioural and Neural Evidence for Conscious Sensation in Animals : An Inescapable Avenue towards Biopsychism?

Evidence for all sorts of cognition in animals is mounting. But is this accompanied by conscious sensation or phenomenology? To answer that question, it is noted that consciousness to us presents itself as a contrast: we are asleep or awake, we either see something or we don't, each state or condition accompanied by distinct neural correlates. The contrast implicitly holds there is conscious sensation; you cannot lose what you didn't have to begin with. So if there is similar behavioural and neural evidence for a conscious–unconscious contrast in any animal, there should be some sort of difference in the 'what it is likes' between the two extremes — for the animal in question. Findings from sleep, anaesthesia, blindsight, masking, and rivalry present unequivocal evidence for such a dichotomy in monkeys and — surprisingly — possibly insects. For other animals (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish) the situation is less clear, although mostly due to a lack of evidence rather than evidence to the contrary. Implications for theories of consciousness, and the role of neural versus behavioural findings, are discussed.

Confabulation or experience? Implications of out-of-body experiences for theories of consciousness

Difficulties in distinguishing veridical reports of experience from confabulations have implications for theories of consciousness. I develop some of these implications through a consideration of out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Do these variations indicate individual variation in experience or are they post-hoc confabulations, stories told by subjects to themselves in an attempt to make sense of the core phenomenology? I argue that no existent or possible evidence would be sufficient to favour one hypothesis over the other. How such evidence is interpreted depends on prior commitments to one or other of these hypotheses or to a theory of consciousness that is not neutral as to these hypotheses. One of these types of theory, namely vehicle theories, has difficulty accommodating the existence of confabulations and so allows for only the elaborate phenomenology hypothesis. Because we cannot know that reports are not confabulations, vehicle theories are insufficient to explain OBEs.

Relative blindsight arises from a criterion confound in metacontrast masking: Implications for theories of consciousness

Relative blindsight is said to occur when different levels of subjective awareness are obtained at equality of objective performance. Using metacontrast masking, Lau and Passingham (2006) reported relative blindsight in normal observers at the shorter of two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) between target and mask. Experiment 1 replicated the critical asymmetry in subjective awareness at equality of objective performance. We argue that this asymmetry cannot be regarded as evidence for relative blindsight because the observers' responses were based on different attributes of the stimuli (criterion contents) at the two SOAs. With an invariant criterion content (Experiment 2), there was no asymmetry in subjective awareness across the two SOAs even though objective performance was the same. Experiment 3 examined the effect of criterion level on estimates of relative blindsight. Collectively, the present results question whether metacontrast masking is a suitable paradigm for establishing relative blindsight. Implications for theories of consciousness are discussed.

Motor awareness without perceptual awareness

The control of action has traditionally been described as “automatic”. In particular, movement control may occur without conscious awareness, in contrast to normal visual perception. Studies on rapid visuomotor adjustment of reaching movements following a target shift have played a large part in introducing such distinctions. We suggest that previous studies of the relation between motor performance and perceptual awareness have confounded two separate dissociations. These are: (a) the distinction between motoric and perceptual representations, and (b) an orthogonal distinction between conscious and unconscious processes. To articulate these differences more clearly, we propose a new measure of motor awareness, based on subjects’ ability to reproduce the spatial details of reaching movements they have just made. Here we focus on the dissociation between motor awareness and perceptual awareness that may occur when subjects make rapid visuomotor adjustments to reaching movements following a target shift. In experiment 1, motor awareness was dissociated from perceptual awareness of a target shift during reaching movement. Participants’ reproduction of movement endpoints following visuomotor adjustment was independent of whether they saw the target shift or not. Experiment 2 replicated this result, and further showed that neither motor awareness nor motor performance were disrupted by TMS over the parietal cortex. The neural mechanisms underlying motor awareness, and the implications for theories of consciousness, are discussed.