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Consciousness: Thoughts
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Consciousness has been thought to open a realm of possibilities, a sphere of options within which the conscious self might choose or act freely. At a minimum, consciousness might seem a necessary precondition for any such freedom or self-determination (Hasker 1999). How could one engage in the requisite sort of free choice, while remaining solely within the unconscious domain? How can one determine one's own will without being conscious of it and of the options one has to shape it.
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In reaction, surprisingly much can be said in favour of ‘eliminativism’ about phenomenal consciousness, the denial of any realm of phenomenal objects and properties of experience (ยง5). Most (but not all) philosophers deny that there are phenomenal objects - mental images with color and shape, pain-objects that throb or burn, inner speech with pitch and rhythm, etc. Instead, experiences may simply seem to involve such objects. The central disagreement concerns whether these experiences have phenomenal properties - ‘qualia’, particular aspects of what experiences are like for their bearers. Some philosophers deny that there are phenomenal properties - especially if these are thought to be intrinsic, completely and immediately introspectible, ineffable, subjective, or otherwise potentially difficult to explain on physicalist theories. More commonly, philosophers acknowledge qualia of experiences, either articulating less bold conceptions of qualia, or defending dualism about boldly conceived qualia.
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If you accept this idea, that there is more to human cognition than the brain function, then there is already a model of consciousness, intelligence, mind, and brain in the Vedantic texts that closely follows these requirements. This Vedantic model describes mind as a level of matter subtler than the brain. According to this model, thought is to mind what motionis to objects, or beavior is to the body. That is, thoughts have no intrinsic semantic content. An example of this is when a driver drives a car. The idea of the journey is not intrinsic to the car's motion, but a superimposition on the part of the driver.
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The framework of consciousness is thought. Its shuttle is random selection and its warp and woof are memories and emotions. Human consciousness, unlike awareness, includes a series of choices. American psychologist E.L. Thorndyke called this the method of trial, error, and accidental success. Modern AI (artificial intelligence) calls it 'generate and test'.
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For Edelman, primary consciousness requires perceptual organization, the ability to carve up the world of signals into categories useful for a given species. (cf frame problem) It requires concepts -- the ability to combine different perceptual categorizations and to abstract some common features -- as well as memory and value (to develop categorical responses that are adaptive.) Following William James, who described the "specious present" in which perceptual and memory systems interact, Edelman calls the ability to construct a consious scene "the remembered present." For Edelman, the emergence of primary consciousness gives a significant selective advantage -- the ability of an animal to evade complex dangers by selecting its responses to a complex environment through the construction of a complex scene based on its own unique history of value-dependent responses. " (p.109) For Edelman, Identity, memory, and space compose primary consciousness. From this primary consciousness, a higher-order consciousness evolves in man, with the powers of language, conception, and thought.
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One theory of consciousness that combines naturally with theory-ladenness is Rosenthal’s (1990) ‘higher-order thought’ theory. (A thought or belief is ‘higher-order’ in virtue of being about mental entities rather than nonmental entities.) According to his view, a mental state is conscious just in case one forms, in a suitably direct way, a thought that one has the state. The state may generate its higher-order thought through inference so long as these inferences are not themselves conscious. This condition is intended to rule out cases in which one comes to think about a state through very indirect inference - say, solely through believing the testimony of a psychologist. On this view, even if introspective access to phenomenally conscious experiences is somehow inferential, it would seem noninferential simply because one lacks higher-order thoughts about the inferences.
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