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Consciousness: Theories
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Introspective consciousness has seemed less puzzling than phenomenal consciousness. Most thinkers agree that introspection is far from complete about the mind (§7) and far from infallible (§8). Perhaps the most familiar account of introspection is that, in addition to ‘outwardly perceiving’ nonmental entities in one’s environment and body, one ‘inwardly perceives’ one’s mental entities, as when one seems to see visual images with one’s ‘mind’s eye’. This view faces several serious objections (§9). Rival views of introspective consciousness fall into three categories, according to whether they treat introspective access (1) as epistemically looser or less direct than inner perception, (2) as tighter or more direct, or (3) as fundamentally nonepistemic or nonrepresentational (§10). Theories in category (1) explain introspection as always retrospective, or as typically based on self-directed theoretical inferences.
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One way to get beyond the weaknesses in the similarity arguments is to try to articulate a theoretical basis for connecting the observable characteristics of animals (behavioral or neurological) to consciousness. As mentioned above, one approach to bringing consciousness into the scientific fold is to try identify behaviors for which it seems that an explanation in terms of mechanisms involving consciousness might be justified over unconscious mechanisms by a strategy of inference to the best explanation. This form of inference would be strengthened by a good understanding of the biological function or functions of consciousness. If one knew what phenomenal conscious is for then one could exploit that knowledge to infer its presence in cases where that function is fulfilled, so long as other kinds of explanations can be shown less satisfactory.
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Neuroscientists believe that examining neurons and the interactions between them could yield the necessary empirical, unambiguous knowledge for the construction of scientific models of consciousness. But it is not clear whether the kind of "electrophysiological" theory called for by Francis Crick would suffice to explain consciousness. Crick and Christof Koch argue in The Astonishing Hypothesis that consciousness is the combination of attention and short-term memory.
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The three questions focus respectively on describing the features of consciousness, explaining its underlying basis or cause, and explicating its role or value. The divisions among the three are of course somewhat artificial, and in practice the answers one gives to each will depend in part on what one says about the others. One can not, for example, adequately answer the what question and describe the main features of consciousness without addressing the why issue of its functional role within systems whose operations it affects. Nor could one explain how the relevant sort of consciousness might arise from nonconscious processes unless one had a clear account of just what features had to be caused or realized to count as producing it. Those caveats notwithstanding, the three-way division of questions provides a useful structure for articulating the overall explanatory project and for assessing the adequacy of particular theories or models of consciousness.
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Invited plenary speakers and symposia addressed empirical and theoretical issues in the study of consciousness, focusing on the theme of models and mechanisms of consciousness. The conference explored the many connections between models of consciousness and their psychological and neurobiological mechanisms, from the perspectives of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science, cognitive ethology, and artificial intelligence. Plenary symposia included:
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Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world.
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