<? include 'common.php'; ?>
<blockquote>
"What is meant by consciousness we need not discuss; it is beyond all doubt."<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- Freud <i>Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis</i> 
</blockquote>

<h2>Reading</h2>
<ul>
<li>[Required] Block (2002) "Some Concepts of Consciousness" in <i>Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings</i>,  David Chalmers (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2002.
From Ned Block's web site : http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/
<li>See also http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/ecs.pdf
</ul>

<h2>Grammar</h2>

<ul>
<li>Creature consciousness : X is conscious, where X is a person or some creature.
<li>State consciousness : X is a conscious mental state, where X is a mental state such as belief / pain, etc.
<li>Presumably creature consciousness can be explained in terms of state consciousness.
<li>X is conscious of Y : Peter is consious of his headache. Peter is conscious of the chair in front on him.
</ul>
What about awareness / attention?
<h2>Three families of concepts</h2>

<h3>Reflexive consciousness</h3>

<ul>
<li><a href="mconsciousness.php">Monitoring consciousness</a> : having a state that is monitoring some other states of a system. 
<li>Higher-order thought consciousness : Rosenthal - a state S is conscious iff there is a higher-order state that is about S.
Your pain is not conscious until you think about it. A more sophisticated phenomenal conceptual
reportoire allows you to make finer phenomenal discrimination.
<li>Self-consciousness - having a concept of the self and using the concept
to think about oneself.
<li>Body-consciousness - having a <a href="./media/sensorymap.gif">sensory map</a> of the body.
Insects, reptiles or robots can have such maps without having self-consciousness. 
</ul>

<h3>Access consciousness</h3>

<ul>
<li>Applies only to a state with some informational content.
<li>A state S is A-conscious = the information in S is <i>poised</i> or <i>directly available</i> for global control.
<li>"Direct availability" is meant to rule out beliefs or memory as A-conscious - In the latter cases, some 
processing is needed to retrieve the information.
<li>Information directly available can participate in (inferentially promiscuous) reasoning and control of action, such as verbal report.
<li>"Inferentially promiscuous" is Steven Stich's terminology.
</ul>

<h3>Phenomenal consciousness</h3>
<ul>
<li>A mental state S is P-conscious = there is something it is like to have S.
<li>What it is like to have a state S = qualia of S (qualitative properties of S)
<li>Most puzzling for the mind-body problem : why having a physical state P is like
the way it is and not some different way.
</ul>

<h2>The explanatory gap</h2>

<ul>
<li>Reflexive and access consciousness seem a lot easier of explain than 
phenomenal consciousness. Our concepts of the first two forms of consciousness are functional - defined by their functional role.
<li>But our conception of phenomenal consciousness is subjective - in terms of there being something it is like.
<li>It is not clear how phenomenal consciousness can emerge from a physical state. Given an
identity statement physical state P = conscious state C, one can always ask, why is it that P should
feel the way C does and not like some other conscious state D ?   
</ul>

<h2>Some interesting cases for class discussion</h2>

<ul>

<li>Blindsight - Blindsight patients have blind fields where they claim they cannot see anything. So
if there is a glass of water located in the blind field, they will not reach for it even
though they might be thirsty. However, if certain stimuli are shown to the blindfield (e.g. lines) and
subjects are forced to guess whether the lines are horizontal or vertical, they perform
above chance (more than 50% guesses correct), even though they would still say that they
have no idea and cannot see a thing. Discuss whether this is a case of information being A-conscious
but not P-conscious.

<li>Ned Block's example of the drill - Block gives the example of a busy person who suddenly realizes
that there is a loud drilling noise. Furthermore, the subject realizes that the noise has been there all morning. 
But he was preoccupied with other things and were not aware of it. It is suggested that the experience of the noise is P-conscious but not A-conscious.

<li>Sperling test http://www.willamette.edu/~mstewart/nwacc/modules/sperling.htm - Three rows of four letters each
are flashed briefly to a subject, followed by a tone (high, medium, low). The pitch of the
tone identifies the row of letters that the subject has to report. Subjects typically
report being able to see all the letters distinctly, but are unable to report on the letters
of more than one row. It is suggested that the information regarding the 12 letters 
are P-conscious but not A-conscious.

<li>Aerodontalgia - The term refers to toothache brought on by sudden changes in atmospheric pressure, for example, in high-altitude flying. 
According to some reports, some dental patients reported experiencing aerodontalgia years after
their dental operations. These patients all underwent global but not local anesthesia. The locations of
the pain reported correspond to the sites where dental operations were carried out. It is
suggested that perhaps these patients actually experienced pain (their pains were P-conscious) during
the operation, but they were not A-conscious because of anesthesia.       

<li>Sleep-walking

</ul>


<? pagefooter(); ?>