Cog sci Unit 6 - Consciousness

What are the two main definitions of consciousness? Which one is the main focus of the class?

1) the Levels of Consciousness approach (like a spectrum): awake, deep sleep, anesthetized, hypnotized, etc.

2) the Being aware of specific content or “having an experience of something”. The consciousness as awareness/ experience definition is what we focussed on in the lecture

What are the 4 main examples of things that consciousness is NOT?

1) subliminal priming
2) Unilateral spatial neglect

3) Cortical Blindness

4) The four types of processing that have evidence that they can be done without consciousness (semantic processing/ priming, scene perception, navigating space, and object identification)

What is subliminal priming? How is it different from just regular priming? — What are the 2 conditions for knowing if something is subliminal priming?

what is masking?

a) when a prime (or subtle temporary sensory influence) is presented to a respondent in a way where they are not aware of it. 1) if the participant isn’t aware of the prime, 2) if the prime affects the reaction time and or accuracy of the participant when performing a sensory test task

b) masking is presenting a stimulus and immediately replacing it with something else (used in subliminal priming because you wouldn’t have the conscious experience of seeing the first stimulus… but studies have shown that there is a subconscious processing of this sensory information at least from a categorization standpoint)

What is unilateral spatial neglect?

What experiments or examples demonstrate unilateral spatial neglect?What does this tell us about the degree to which masked stimuli are processed?

what 3 tasks are impacted by unilateral spatial neglect?

a) when people with brain damage to one hemisphere become unaware of one half of the world (usually the left side of the world). Most people who have this have no problems with their eyes themselves, but their brains have trouble processing the images

b) one famous example is that patients with this are shown drawings of a house the image of the house in the half of the world that they do pay attention to is fine, but the house in the visual field that they don’t pay attention to is partially on fire. When asked which house they would rather live in, they consistently pick the house that isn’t on fire every time, even though technically they don’t report seeing the “fire” when it is drawn on the side that they spatially neglect.

c) the tasks affected are 1) visual search, 2) line bisection, and 3) copying or drawing from memory

What is cortical blindness?

What are the two examples of cortical blindness that we were shown in class?

What does it mean to “see” without perceiving?

a) blindness resulting from damage to the brain, specifically the Primary Visual sensory area (V1)

b) two examples were 1) a patient with this can successfully avoid obstacles in a hallway despite the fear and the conscious experience of not being able to see anything, 2) a patient with this can successfully identify which animals are being presented to them despite not being able to see it — they feel like they are guessing even though they are mostly correct

c) to “see” is that their eyes can technically take in the information perfectly, like the sensory part works, but the actual experience of perceiving is not there ie the information is simply not processed by the brain into something consciously usable

What are 4 examples of or types of unconscious processing? IE processing that can be done without consciousness?

1) semantic processing (being able to categorize information because of priming)

2) scene perception (for example despite unilateral spatial neglect, they can percieve burning houses)

3) navigating space (for example despite cortical blindness, they can avoid obstacles)

4) object identification (for example despite cortical blindness, they can recognize animals)

What are the 2 definitions of consciousness and 5 types of theories of the mechanisms that explain consciousness that we covered?

The 2 definitions are:

1) Ned Block’s “Phenomenal Consciousness” vs “Access consciousness”

2) David Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” vs “Easy Problems”

The 5 types of Theories about the mechanisms that explain consciousness are:

1) Global Workspace Theory (GWT)

2) Attention-Schema Theory (AST)

3) High-Order Thought Theory (HOT Theories)

4) Integrated information theory (IIT)

5) Recurring Processing Theories (RPT)

What is Ned Block’s understanding of consciousness: What is Access consciousness?

What is phenomenal consciousness?

According to Block, how do you know if someone is conscious? What is the problem?

a) access consciousness is the kind of consciousness where you can report information to yourself or later on if someone asks you, it is the stuff that is available for high-level processing. Generally it is what consciousness “allows us to do” with information

b) phenomenal consciousness - is what happens when information overflows reportability - we can’t even report this information that we experienced to ourselves (its “raw experience” like you experience the content without its consequences)

c) the problem he points out is that the only way we would know someone is “conscious” is by asking them, so in our experiments were are probing access consciousness but we cannot know what someone’s phenomenal consciousness Is or is not processing because they don’t even know it themselves and they can’t tell us

What are the 2 problems with consciousness that David Chalmer’s thinks we are trying to solve?

For Chalmer there are 1) easy problems that can be solved within the frame of cognitive science, and 2) the hard problem of consciousness that still remains hard to solve.

No amount of progress on solving the easy problems of consciousness will help with the hard problem

What are David Chalmers’ easy problems?

1) explaining an organism’s ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli

2) How and why mental states are reportable/ how a cognitive system can access its own internal states

What is the “Hard Problem”?

What was the main argument used for why the hard problem of consciousness is hard?

What does this argument/ thought experiment demonstrate about the “hard" problem” of consciousness?

a) To David Chalmers the hard problem is understanding the nature of raw experience itself, without everything that is enabled by it or accompanied to it

b) the main argument is the Mary the color scientist thought experiment — Mary the color-scientist lives in a color-less world. She learns about color consciousness and knows everything there is to know about the processes involved in color perception etc., but until she leaves her colorless room and sees the color red she FINALLY now actually knows what it feels like to see a color.

c) sometimes external knowledge of a thing isn’t enough to understand it in its entirety like understanding color as a concept vs understanding color as a lived experience — and so it demonstrates why the hard problem is hard

What is the “optimistic” view of the “hard problem?/ What was the old hard problem?

how did we get to this point where the old hard problem is no longer that hard?

What conclusions about consciousness does Chalmers then draw based on this optimistic example?

a) The previous “hard problem” was answering the question “What is life?“ or “How do you explain life?”. It used to be explained with something called this mystical “life force” that exists in what is alive and in what is not alive, but we don’t need this concept today to explain life.

b) Chalmers then asked “how did we get to this point” where the old hard question isn’t so hard anymore — the answer was that we just understood more biologically (ie by knowing enough biology we can explain the mechanisms that we call life and we can see cases where some of those mechanisms are at play in varying degrees)
c) if we equate the modern problem of consciousness with the old problem of living / what is life, the real problem that Chalmers identifies is that we are using a colloquial term that we haven’t defined well enough up until this point, and actually our question “what is consciousness” is a flawed one (it would be like asking “what is life force”? back in the day).
the important conclusion: for Chalmers consciousness is not just something that we have or don’t have — its a combination of mechanisms, and there are theories about what those mechanisms should be

What are the 3 key parts of Global Workspace Theory?/ What is Global Workspace Theory?

This is one of the theories of consciousness that attempts to explain how the mechanisms of consciousness work

The three important parts of this mechanism for consciousness:

1) our brain is modular/ made up of modules (aka: independent units that process information). For example, we have a module for movement, hearing, etc. and each of those process information separately from each other. basically the 2 main defining features of modules are a) that they are domain specific ie one for seeing, one for math, etc. and b) that they encapsulate information and that information cannot be affected by other modules EXCEPT through the global workspace

2) There is a Global Workspace: the non modular parts of the brain that can get information from all of the modules and can send information to all of the different modules.
3) There is something called “Information Broadcasting”: which is that attention filters information from the modules, and selects what enters the global workspace (GW)

What does Global Workspace Theory attempt to explain?

It attempts to explain the 3 assumed functional benefits of consciousness:

1) volitional control: ie that you can control what sort of response you produce to a stimulus…kind of like free will but not exactly… the ability to inhibit some responses and enhance others… or stop yourself from doing something even if it is automatic)

2) Information maintenance: the idea that when information enters a global workspace it lasts longer

3) Mental flexibility: explained by when you have information traveling between modules and each does something differently, then you can do something in a more complex manner by moving information between them. Ie the module and GW system could be a plausible explanation for mental flexibility because of the way that information is stored and allegedly travels around the consciousness

How does attention operate in the context of global workspace theory?

Where is the global workspace in the brain?

a) attention is the gating mechanism which is super important. It filters and selects which information is to be broadcasted.

b) we don’t really know — there are a lot of assumptions that it could be in the frontal part of the brain, but there’s not much super committed backing for this to be anywhere near certain.

What is Attention Schema Theory (AST)?

its the idea that self-awareness is our brain’s model of its own attention. More specifically:
1) in order for the brain to control itself + the body, it needs a body schema (or MODEL of the body) — for example: without having to actually lick something, you can pretty much know or at least have a good sense of what licking any surface might feel like on your tongue, because you have an internal model of your tongue in your brain that has a pretty specific resolution/ degree of clarity

2) Like the body, our Attention is a very really thing in our mind/body/brain that we need to be able to control — so it follows then that we much have a model of our own attention — but models are imperfect

3) therefore whenever we think about our own consciousness or attention, we are only thinking about our internal model of our own attention/ consciousness

the big conclusion: our conscious experience is really just whatever is happening whenever our brain tries to model its own attention.

What are HOT theories? (Higher-Order Thought)

According to this theory of consciousness a mental state is conscious only if the person is deliberately thinking and reporting on it. There are orders of thoughts: first order thoughts are just the basic things that happen when a stimulus invokes something in your brain (for example the experience of seeing a red apple), higher order thoughts are thoughts that point to the first order thoughts, and only then would those first order thoughts become conscious (for example the recognition and reporting that I am seeing a red apple).

What would disprove HOT (Higher Order Thought) Theories of consciousness?

its the fact that unless you consciously process something it doesn’t count as consciousness.

For example: things that are unconsciously processed still affect things like your performance on cognitive tests. If things are consciously processed these also affect your test performance AND you can report it to yourself. But under HOT theories only the latter situation is considered to be part of consciousness

What does the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness do? / How does it work + what are the 5 axioms?

it starts with axioms on what a conscious experience is like and tries to make a unified agreed upon list. Then it tries to use mathematics to find traces of such experience in physical/ actual systems

The 5 postulates of conscious experiences:

1) it exists intrinsically: there IS such a thing as conscious experience even if it can’t be observed from the outsides

2) it has composition: ie consciousness is structured and made up from smaller experiences/ processes

3) information: consciousness is different from other experiences, because it is specific to the information that you individually have

4) it is integrated: conscious experience is unified and can’t just be broken down into parts. IE you cannot experience two things separately, your experience is always of one unified thing

5) it is exclusive: consciousness happens at a particular level of complexity and does not overlap with other complex systems

How are IITs different from other theories of consciousness?

What are some issues with IIT’s

a) they work opposite from most other theories that go for observable evidence first because instead with IITs we start from axioms about what consciousness is built from the ground up and then we back up those axioms with findings.

b) It doesn’t explain the hard problem — ie it does a good job explaining HOW consciousness exists but not why subjective experience exists

What do Recurrent Processing Theories of consciousness? (RPT) — NOTE I AM THE LEAST SURE OF WHAT THIS DEFINITION MEANS

it posits that 1) attention and consciousness are separate idea (just because you attend to something doesn’t mean its enough for that to count as consciousness), 2) “top-down” activation is crucial for conscious experience, and neural activation doesn’t just go from low level to high level, it can also go from high to low IE you are only conscious if you are attending to feedforward information and it is RECURRENTLY activating.

What counts as conscious vs not conscious under Recurrent Processing Theories (RPT)? 3 cases

1) if you are NOT attending something and there is only feedforward information like for example visual information arrives at V1 the Primary Visual Cortex, then you are NOT conscious of it

2) If you DO attend to feed forward information - this includes widespread feedforward information that goes across multiple parts of the brain, then you are STILL NOT conscious of it (attention to something alone is not sufficient for consciousness under this model)

3) If you do attend to feedforward information AND it is RECURRENTLY activating (ie because of predictive coding + the addition of other stuff you know etc.), then you are finally considered to be consciously aware of it

MAIN IDEA: the only way for something to become conscious is if there is a recurrent activation/ feedback loop

What are the neural correlates of consciousness?

why is necessity alone not enough? - (not too sure of my answer to this)

why is sufficiency alone not enough? (not too sure of my answer to this)

a) this is neuronal activity that is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a conscious experience

b) because the things that are necessary by themselves still do not give a full enough picture of the entire situation that is consciousness by themselves/ in a vacuum (for example having a beating heart is necessary… but it isn’t a correlate of the entire experience of consciousness because the beating of our heart cannot explain the difference between seeing blue and seeing red.)??

c) an neural activity might be sufficient to prove that a person has a conscious experience or is capable of it, but again it could also be proving any number of other things about the person besides consciousness????

When studying consciousness, how do you distill true neural correlates of consciousness? - Not the prerequisites of consciousness and not the outcomes of consciousness. (3 methods + one bad idea)

Use a constant stimulus, but with fluctuating awareness. For example bistable images are things like images where you can see both the side profile of a face and also a vase — or images where when your brain looks at it you see it as one way or another not because of the properties of the stimulus itself, but instead because it is truly just your attention changing

binocular rivalry is an alternative to bistable images where one eye sees face and one eye sees something else using special goggles with overlaid images— this issue with these studies is that if you want to know what changes in the brain when a participant sees one thing vs another thing you still rely on the participant to tell you what they are seeing, and that isn’t the most reliable testimony

no-report paradigms - are another most ideal way to conduct such studies because you use other measures of a person’s body to determine what they are doing other than reporting for example things like eye movements are good indicators of where attention is being directed

we don’t use image degradation for example presenting the same stimuli but with different kinds of noise. we don’t do this because by changing the characteristics or properties of the stimulus we could be confounding our results.