AbstractHow do we come to understand the nature of the thoughts that we and others have? And how do we come to have the conceptual resources needed to formulate such understanding? Many would say we understand the nature of thoughts simply by being subjectively aware of our own conscious thoughts. But it is unclear how consciousness could, on its own, provide the conceptual resources required...
Quality spaces promise to represent mental qualities objectively. That objectivity is compromised, however, if quality spaces are constructed by subjective introspective access, which is impressionistic. But mental qualities also have a robust and objective connection to perceptual discrimination. So quality spaces can be constructed in a fully objective way by appeal to their role in...
Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach...
Graziano et al. (in press) sketch some suggestive ways in which Graziano’s attention-schema theory (AST) of consciousness (Graziano, 2013, 2019; Webb & Graziano, 2015) connects with three other the...
It is natural to see conscious perceptions as typically bringing with them a degree of confidence about what is perceived. So one might also expect such confidence not to occur if a perception is not conscious. This has resulted in the use of confidence as a test or measure of consciousness, one that may be more reliable and fine-grained than the traditional appeal to subjective report as a...
ScienceApril 12, 2019R. N. Moda-Sava, Mitchell H. Murdock, Puja K Parekh et al.
Why is ketamine an antidepressant? A better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the action of antidepressants is urgently needed. Moda-Sava et al. explored a possible mode of action for the drug ketamine, which has recently been shown to help patients recover from depression (see the Perspective by Beyeler). Ketamine rescued behavior in mice that was associated with depression-like...
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent mismatch has led some to posit that rich phenomenological content overflows cognitive access, whereas others hold that phenomenology is in fact sparse and constrained by cognitive access. Here, we review the Rich vs. Sparse debate as it relates to a...
Abstract I begin by discussing an objection often lodged against higher-order theories of consciousness. The objection is that those theories do not preclude consciousness from misrepresenting the mental properties of our conscious states. I argue that there are several reasons why this objection cannot succeed. Sam Coleman (2018) agrees that the objection fails, but sees it as pointing to a...
A recent fMRI study by Webb et al. (Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independent of visual attention, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2016;113:13923-28) proposes a new method for finding the neural correlates of awareness by matching attention across awareness conditions. The experimental design, however, seems at odds with known features of attention. We highlight logical and...
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman once remarked that engaging the public about economic theories is hard, partly because everybody feels they are entitled to opine about the economy even if they have no formal training in economics (see: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/virus.html). Perhaps because we are all conscious, the same sometimes happens in the field of consciousness research. Like Krugman, we...
Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether...
Conscious mental states are states we are in some way aware of. I compare higher-order theories of consciousness, which explain consciousness by appeal to such higher-order awareness (HOA), and first-order theories, which do not, and I argue that higher-order theories have substantial explanatory advantages. The higher-order nature of our awareness of our conscious states suggests an analogy...
The report of my death is an exaggeration. (Mark Twain, New York Journal, 2 June 1897) A state’s being conscious is a matter of mental appearance – of how one’s mental life appears to one. If somebody is in a mental state but doesn’t seem subjectively to be in that state, the state is not conscious. This straightforward test for the consciousness of mental states is deeply entrenched in common...
One thing a theory of consciousness must do is capture the way conscious states differ from mental states that are not conscious. If an individual is in some mental state but wholly unaware of being in that state, that state is not a conscious state. By contraposition, a necessary condition for a state’s being conscious is that one is in some way aware of it. We can describe being conscious or...
It is plain that an individual's being conscious and an individual's being conscious of various things are both crucial for successful functioning. But it is far less clear how, if at all, it is also useful for a person's psychological states to occur consciously, as against those states occurring but without being conscious. Restricting attention to cognitive and desiderative states, a number...
AbstractThe higher‐order‐thought hypothesis is a proposed explanation of what it is for a mental state to be a conscious state and hence of how conscious mental states differ from mental states that are not conscious.
Abstract Any acceptable theory of consciousness must plainly satisfy two main constraints. It must, first of all, do reasonable justice to our commonsense, folk-psychological intuitions about consciousness and mentality. Some of these intuitions will be helpful in identifying just what phenomena the theory seeks to explain. Others the theory will predict, using its explanatory machinery. Still...
Ned Block's influential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has become a staple of current discussions of consciousness. It is not often noted, however, that his distinction tacitly embodies unargued theoretical assumptions that favor some theoretical treatments at the expense of others. This is equally so for his less widely discussed distinction between phenomenal...
Abstract Metacognition has attracted considerable attention in recent psychological research. There has been extensive investigation, for example, of our metacognitive sense that information is present in memory even when that information is not consciously available, as well as investigation of the degrees of confidence people have about recall responses and about how well something has been...
One strategy for explaining consciousness is to locate it relative to its causes and effects. Common sense seems to tell us what the causes and effects of consciousness are; so perhaps we can identify consciousness as being whatever it is that occurs in between the two. Though superficially tempting, this idea heightens the air of mystery surrounding consciousness. As far as we can tell, the...
Theories of what it is for a mental state to be conscious must answer two questions. We must say how we're conscious of our conscious mental states. And we must explain why we seem to be conscious of them in a way that's immediate. Thomas Natsoulas (1993) distinguishes three strategies for explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. I show that the differences among those...