User:B.Sirota/sandbox/Cons

FOR 'CONSCIOUSNESS' ARTICLE... 7 May/24 3 Dec. 23 Incon:

Velmans2009 Thomas67.

My-caston02? caston02

Lycan96 "JJ3" =>> JJ76

"JJ90".

Sutherland. Antony2001.

NEW:

Landesman67.

LLWhyte67. Alston67. "MWhite55". Levine10. Gardner87.

EPhil-Psyc.

NagelBat. NagelBat1.

Kuijsten16.

Prob of Def...
<<< at end of etymology? .... >>>In medical terminology, during the 1800's 'consciousness' came to mean normal wakefulness to contrast with the normal 'unconsciousness' of sleep or extreme states like coma, shock and drug-induced stupor. The idea of variable "levels of consciousness" based on behavioral variation or measurements of brain waves became medically useful in the 20th century.

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Julian Jaynes rejected popular but "superficial views of consciousness" especially those which equate it with "that vaguest of terms, experience". In 1976 he insisted that if not for introspection, which for decades had been ignored or taken for granted rather than explained, there could be no "conception of what consciousness is" and in 1990, he reaffirmed the traditional sense of the term 'consciousness', writing that "its denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable". Jaynes saw consciousness as an important but small part of human mentality, and he asserted: "there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until ... what is introspectable [is] sharply distinguished" from the processes of cognition such as perception, reactive awareness and attention,  and automatic forms of learning, problem-solving and decision-making. This kind of distinction applies to the work of Daniel Kahneman and the idea of two systems of thinking, with consciousness operating in only one of them.< >

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Basic concepts and issues
Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for example, Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues. <!--  ===Traditional metaphors for 'mind' DONE===

During the early 1800's, geology was discovering buried layers of history in the earth's crust, inspiring a popular metaphor that the mind also had hidden "layers which recorded the past of the individual". By 1875 most psychologists believed that "consciousness was but a small part of mental life", and this idea underlay the goal of Freudian therapy, to expose the layer of the mind.

Other metaphors from various sciences inspired other analyses of the mind, for example: J. F. Herbart described 'ideas' as being 'attracted' and 'repulsed' like magnets; J. S. Mill developed the idea of "mental chemistry" and "mental compounds", and Edward B. Titchener sought the 'structure' of the mind by analyzing its "elements". The abstract idea of 'states' of consciousness mirrored physicists' concept of states of matter.

In 1892 William James noted that the "ambiguous word 'content' has been recently invented instead of 'object'" and that the metaphor of mind as a seemed to minimize the dualistic problem of how "states of consciousness can " things, or objects; by 1899 psychologists were busily studying the "contents of conscious experience by introspection and experiment." James introduced the phrase "the stream of consciousness" which became a popular metaphor for the apparent endless flow of conscious contents.

James discussed the difficulties of describing and studying psychological phenomena, recognizing that commonly-used terminology was a necessary and acceptable starting point towards more precise, scientifically justified language. Prime examples were phrases like 'inner experience' and 'personal consciousness':"The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that [...] But everyone knows what the terms mean [only] in a rough way; [...] When I say 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. [...] The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's." -->

'Mental substance'
European philosophy since the 17th century has been greatly influenced by Descartes, who did not differentiate between "consciousness" and "mind". For Descartes, the existence of his own mind was self-evident and impossible to deny, and 'the mind' was simply 'pure thought' independent of the "illusions of the senses". According to A. D. Lindsay, this was an idealistic view "based on the misconception that the mind knows itself more easily or more certainly than it knows [physical] objects."

In Descartes' time, mechanistic explanations of the physical world were gaining support in various sciences, and given the possibility that all physical creatures were purely mechanical, Descartes' system granted a special status to the human soul. He hypothesized that mind is made of an immaterial substance he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to material substance, the stuff of physical things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension). This two-substance dualism required an explanation of how they interacted, and Descartes hypothesized that the location of interaction was in the pineal gland a small brain structure which he mistakenly thought to exist only within humans.

Traditional theory
In the 19th century, the effort to establish an empirical science of the mind produced psychology, which came to be defined as "the science of consciousness". According to William James psychologists sought the "description and explanation of states of consciousness [which included] such things as sensations, desires, emotions, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, volitions, and the like." These states were (and are) by no means easy to identify or describe, much less to define or explain, and within the Cartesian framework they were deemed to be 'mental' states or processes, but some (e.g. sensations and emotions) seemed also very physical, while volition (personal control over one's thoughts and actions) was associated with the complex problems of free will.

Introspection and 'inner sense'
Among European thinkers up to the early 20th century, a critical issue in the analysis of consciousness was the distinction between external perception—"the discovery, by means of the senses, of the existence and properties of the external world" —and some kind of 'inner sense'. Some ancient thinkers distinguished between lower-order perceptual abilities and higher-order rational abilities. Augustine held that living creatures perceive the world by way of separated physical senses plus an "inner sense" (closely related to Aristotle's ideas of "common sense" and "soul") by which perceptions are unified and the creatures 'perceive that they perceive', while humans alone have also the "rational faculties [that are] capable of genuine 'reflection' upon themselves." In medieval philosophy a variety of inner senses were discussed, while as of the 19th century one, namely 'introspection', has sufficed. Introspection was understood to be 'one's own Cartesian mind', or a part of it, observing itself, and the observed 'contents' of the mind were deemed to be 'mental things': "[The] traditional view [...] defines consciousness as the direct awareness or immediate experience of the contents and processes of mind. The method of observing consciousness, so defined, is introspection..."

By the 20th century, introspection upon the mind, as compared to sensory perception of the physical world, was the primary method of both psychological and philosophical phenomenology, and in general terms, the data of introspective study included not only "thoughts and feelings" but also the "knowledge [they provided] of other things [such as] material objects and events, or other states of mind." For Bertrand Russell it was reasonable to think that the mind "might be partly constituted by data which are given to "inner sense"—that is, things which are the objects of awareness, such as images and feelings— ".

Consciousness may be "at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives": familiar because 'one's own mind' is supposedly known through introspection, but mysterious and difficult to study because by introspection alone, one is somewhat aware of certain mental activities only, not all.

Problems
Early studies of the brain had discovered enough to support "a conceivable chance that all mental function could be related in one way or another to brain physiology" but if so, the dualistic problem to be solved was either how immaterial consciousness uses the brain or whether "the mind [is] merely an extension of the body" somehow produced, perhaps deterministically, by mechanical or chemical processes.

Early attempts at a purely materialist explanation of the Cartesian mind were based on a mechanical philosophy. After Darwin, however, a more biological explanation was sought, and in connection with evolutionary theory the problem of the  of consciousness arose: perhaps some earlier, primitive stages in the evolution of life had primitive forms of consciousness, but no theory of mind could clearly define what such 'stages' could be, or could exclude the idea that consciousness was a fundamental property of all living things.

Whether from a spiritualist or materialist position, the act of introspection is problematic: if it is the 'mind observing itself', the act is "analagous to perception", but happens without "an organ of perception"; how and why does the mind that seems to be non-physical have or produce "quasi-sensory experiences"? Peter Hacker criticized the traditional intuitive idea of "an inner sense, which we then dub 'apperception', or 'introspection'": "...There is indeed such a thing as introspection—but it is not a form of perception and involves no 'looking into' one's mind. ... it involves reflecting on one's actions and character traits ... It is a route to self-knowledge, but also a highroad to self-deception. It is not exercised when one says that one has a headache ..." For Hacker, "reflecting on one's actions" is no kind of awareness but the use of reason, and "Consciousness, conceived as an inner sense with operations of the mind as its objects, is not a mark of the mental, but of thoroughgoing confusion."

Skeptics argue that naive intuitions about the existence and nature of consciousness are false, either because the concept is intrinsically incoherent, or because the intuitions are based in illusions. William James in 1892 expressed doubts. Analytic philosophy in the early 20th century generated critical analyses of 'mysteries' like "cartesianism ... what Gilbert Ryle called the doctrine of the ghost in the machine, a purely spiritual soul joined mysteriously with a purely material body." Ryle argued that the 'mystery' was only a mistaken way of speaking about a unified behavioral reality. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world.

Behavior only
Based on similar doubts, behaviorism abandoned the method of introspection, aiming instead to study only an organism's physical activity and responsiveness to the world. Instead of speaking with poorly defined 'mentalist' terms like 'mind', 'self' and 'volition', theorists tried to explain all behavior as caused exclusively by environmental stimuli, and they assumed that the brain was generally inactive except when responding to a stimulus. Some researchers, however, did interpret behavior as indicating "various degrees or levels of consciousness" ranging from alert awareness to coma. This methodology, acknowledging 'awareness' while ignoring whether a mind even existed, could be applied equally to humans and non-speaking organisms. Mature humans however might also have "awareness of awareness" that can be associated with behavior only because it is reportable, thanks to language.

Perception
In 1921 Bertrand Russell "set out to construct the conscious mind out of sensations and images." He conceived of consciousness as perception in general. Attributed to Russell is the idea that "We are conscious of anything we perceive". This was quite different from "a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception." Russell's notion was based on his reportedly "notorious view that what one perceives is always [the physical activity of one's] own brain. ... [and paradoxically] that whenever one is conscious he is aware of his own brain." Thus, there was no essential difference between sensory phenomena and introspected 'contents' of the mind: all are mental, all objects of perception and all somehow in the brain.

The brain
By the 1960's, physiological 'levels of consciousness' were being correlated not only to overt behavior but to measurements of brain activity as well. Few psychologists cared about introspection and its problems. Neuroscience was developing and neural mechanisms were being explored. The term 'perception', still commonly used only in relation to objects of the 'external' world, could "be contrasted with imagery, bodily sensations, or having dreams" which are private phenomena but still normal, while the compound term 'perceptual consciousness' covered both actual perceptions and external illusions and hallucinations.

Unconscious processes
By the 1960's experimental psychology had provided evidence of cognitive processes that are inherently  yet underlie and influence thoughts, perception and behavior. Two major examples are visual image formation and language processing. These occur in the brain independently of introspection or voluntary control, but only their 'products' can be 'contents' of consciousness. The experimental evidence suggested a controversial claim that of "perceptual consciousness" (i.e. externally directed) is a "product of many unconscious processes". If unconscious processes are treated as 'mental events' that precede conscious states of mind, new questions arise: mid 20th-century scientific knowledge was not sufficient to describe "the unity and continuity of conscious thought, unconscious cerebral processes, physiological changes, and the processes of growth." No theoretical consensus existed to explain, in particular, how verbalized conscious thoughts and other contents of "phenomenal consciousness" interacted with unconscious processes; as of 2009, this was still a major issue.

On the other hand, there always seems to be 'something' in the 'contents' of consciousness; thus "consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not". Most behavior is habitual, happening unconsciously, and the learning of such habits in the first place is largely unconscious, and can even be disrupted by conscious efforts to learn. Also, the popular "stream of consciousness" metaphor suggests that experience is "a continuing flow that only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams", but this "flow" may be an illusion because the products of unconscious processes are selective and fragmentary even when we are awake, and we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.

"But even if the traditional theory is wrong, something like introspection often takes place" and consciousness must be more than simply a "spectator" aware of things, and 'must have something' to do with the complex experience of 'inner life', selfhood and self-control even though what actually happens in the brain and body is completely different from the way introspection 'sees' it.

Cognitive systems
New discoveries, concepts, and techniques began to emerge during the 1940's to further challenge mentalistic conventions, and cognitive sciences eventually developed as an extension of classical epistemology and as an inter-disciplinary bridge between biology and neuroscience. Many cognitivists combined experimental psychology, linguistics and anthropology with cybernetics, information processing and computer sciences in an effort to understand "cognitive systems" in general, whether in brains or in computers.

In this view, many kinds of physical system can process information using 'representational' or 'computational' functions, combining hardware and software, modular components, etc. Popular descriptions of the computer as a 'thinking machine' expressed an essentially new metaphor that likened 'the mind' to the information processing of the brain, and without distinguishing between different kinds of information.

An important goal early on, attributed to the influential Ross Ashby, was to avoid any concept of consciousness or purposeful behavior yet "account for human mental activity in a mechanistic manner [by designing] a machine capable of adaptive behavior or learning". Subsequent efforts over recent decades, considering that programs capable of 'learning' are widely deemed to be 'intelligent', have pursued more complex artificial intelligence systems. The possibility of artificial consciousness generates a great deal of technical and philosophical discussion: whether machines can become conscious remains largely a dispute about definitions and theories of consciousness, for example whether a machine can 'model itself', or be said to 'have subjective experience' as defined by notions of qualia.

'Inner life' and selfhood
In contrast to the definition of consciousness as external awareness ("Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world." ) for most people consciousness is intimately if naively connected to the feeling of being 'a self' which is a complex problem for philosophy and psychology. While the is casually said to be aware, or to have awareness, or to "perform" the act of awareness, Bertrand Russell found no reason to believe that such a self was more than a way of speaking about awareness. If consciousness is external awareness, or perception, as many assert, then what is the status of one's 'inner life' and self-awareness: is introspection simply the traditional awareness of an 'inner world', or is it fundamentally different from 'awareness', i.e., perception of the external world? For many philosophers and scientists today, a concept called "phenomenal consciousness" makes little or no distinction between 'inner' and 'outer' experience: all 'mental phenomena' are treated as information processing in the brain, with both simple forms in cognition or more complex forms in metacognition.

However, contrary to any modern assumption that inner experience has always been important, "Historically, [the modern] emphasis on private experience presupposed the development of individualism as a social movement." Owen Barfield observed that "a whole crop of words hyphenated with " entered the English language only after the 16th century, and he argued that the complexities of private, inner experience, especially self-consciousness or self-awareness that seem so fundamental to human nature, may in fact be a very modern development:

"The consciousness of 'myself' and the distinction between 'my–self' and all other selves, the antithesis between 'myself', the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our [English] words that this form of experience, far from being eternal, is quite a recent achievement of the human spirit [. . .] that seems to have first dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation[.]"

Barfield's view challenges an unstated, probably common assumption that the 'inner life' aspect of consciousness (as distinct from sensory awareness) is something that humans (at least) are born with, i.e. that it is 'human nature', or from a modern viewpoint, that it is built into the brain by evolution (e.g. John Searle's idea of "biological naturalism"). A more explicit argument that radically contradicts the natural assumption is made by Julian Jaynes who, in emphasizing that the fundamental problem of consciousness is about the 'inner world' of introspection (not perception), recognizes its importance but also its limited connection to most behavior, and hypothesizes that inner experience is not innate but a ability based on language and culture rather than biological evolution.

Julian Jaynes accepted that American behaviorists had profitably ignored the 'mentalism' of traditional theory, but had thereby avoided the fundamental problem of consciousness, the very idea of a private 'inner world' or 'inner life' where the self seems to exist, where self-awareness, self-control, personal agency and other 'mental events' seem to take place. In Jaynes's view, most people do equate consciousness with an 'inwardness' of their being that is "more myself than anything I can find in a mirror". For Jaynes, "interiority" is what consciousness is all about: it is the 'space' where the 'mind's eye' can 'see' the course of one's life, and where one tries to understand life's meaning and purpose by reflecting, recalling or reminiscing from accumulated experience and knowledge, both conscious and unconscious. It is in consciousness that humans engage in detailed planning, creative imagining or fantasizing and fictionalizing about unexperienced possiblities; or have volitional thoughts that can guide one's concentration and action, or seemingly random thoughts that disrupt, or afterthoughts that follow attention-grabbing events.

Esoteric, intuitive and altered mentality
... effects of meditation and drugs  ...

... intellectual vs. intuitive modalities ...

'What it's like' and 'qualia'
In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel used 'consciousness', 'conscious experience', 'subjective experience' and the 'subjective character of experience' as synonyms for something that "occurs at many levels of animal life ... [although] it is difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it." The term 'subjective experience' is amibiguous, as philosophers seem to differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about its meaning. Nagel's terminology also included what has been described as "the standard 'what it's like' locution" in reference to the impenetrable subjectivity of any organism's experience which Nagel referred to as "inner life" without implying any kind of introspection.

Peter Hacker commented: "Consciousness, thus conceived, is extended to the whole domain of 'experience'—of 'Life' ." He regarded this as a "novel analysis of consciousness" later used by many researchers "among the self-styled 'consciousness studies community'" for whom every particular phenomenal experience or 'percept' supposedly has a "distinctive qualitative character" that is called 'conscious' just because it is also a distinct mental state, i.e. there is 'something that it's like' for an organism to have it. In this view all "sensations, feelings, perceptions and ... thoughts and desires as well" are distinct mental states that differ only in their "experiential properties", called "qualia".

With this approach, specific brain states are presumed to underly the specific qualia of experience, and neuroscientists seek to correlate reported distinct experiences with a measurable state of the brain, and the 'hard' problem of consciousness involves explaining how the brain creates the distinct qualia of experience. The subjects of such research are said to be in the mental state of 'introspection' when "accessing" the brain's information about the "raw feel" or "distinctive " of "each conscious experience", e.g. 'what it's like' to see red, have a headache, imagine a pink elephant, remember one's last birthday, etc.

P-con and A-con
Ned Block argued that discussions on consciousness often failed to properly distinguish phenomenal (P-consciousness) from access (A-consciousness), though these terms had been used before Block. P-consciousness, according to Block, is raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.

There is debate over whether or not A-consciousness and P-consciousness always coexist or if they can exist separately. Although P-consciousness without A-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block, for instance, suggests the case of a "zombie" that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I don't know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility."

More types
In the 1990's William Lycan argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms. This abundance of consciousness terms might indicate real differences or, perhaps erroneously, an ambiguity of meanings.

Criticism
Against the philosophical trend, Julian Jaynes rejected popular but "superficial views of consciousness" especially those which equate it with "that vaguest of terms, experience". In 1976 he insisted that if not for introspection there could be no "conception of what consciousness is" and in 1990, he reaffirmed the traditional sense of the term 'consciousness', writing that "its denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable". Jaynes asserted: "there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until ... what is introspectable [is] sharply distinguished" from the processes of cognition such as perception, reactive awareness and attention,  and automatic forms of learning, problem-solving and decision-making.

Peter Hacker has been particularly critical of Nagel's terminology and its philosophical consequences. In 2002 he attacked Nagel's 'what it's like' phrase as "malconstructed" and meaningless English—it sounds as if it asks for an analogy, but does not—and he called Nagel's approach logically "misconceived" as a definition of consciousness. In 2012 Hacker went further and asserted that Nagel had "laid the groundwork for ... forty years of fresh confusion about consciousness" and that "the contemporary philosophical conception of consciousness that is embraced by the 'consciousness studies community' is incoherent".

Jaynesian approach
In Jaynes's view, the phenomenon of consciousness is not an organism's perception or "subjective experience" of the world, but neither is it a state or process of the brain. As in traditional theory, consciousness is the inner life, or inner world, of an adult human: it seems to be introspectable, is usually said to be 'inside' the head where no space exists, and is said to 'be' or 'contain'"... a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware." Contrary to traditional theory, Jaynes recognizes that consciousness is "limited in its overall contribution to human behavior";  yet while explaining consciousness as based on certain aspects of language and culture rather than physiology, Jaynes allows it an important role in shaping the human cognitive system differently from all other organisms. Jaynes also claims that being based on language, consciousness is a learned behavior. His approach has been described as "social constructivist" and has influenced the work of Daniel Dennett.

Metaphoric 'contents' of consciousness
According to Julian Jaynes, introspection involves processes of reflecting on experience and behavior, of recalling and reminiscing, or imagining past and future possibilities. All these, however, are "a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of [...]!" Introspection reveals nothing of the neurological or cognitive processes. Unlike in traditional theory, introspection only to be an act of awareness or observation like actual sensory process.

, but on the 'inside' instead of the 'outside'. It is this idea of

Jaynes argued that introspection is an 'inner sense', and that the 'inner space' of the mind and its 'contents', what people intuitively understand as their 'inner world', "must be a metaphor of real space." The same applies to all so-called 'mental entities' or 'mental events' identified by introspection and reported by speech: they are all metaphors and analogs of what is called the real world. In general, "there is no operation in consciousness that did not occur in behavior first." Jaynes detailed several operational "features" or "procedures", all based on metaphors or analogs of behavioral processes, that comprise the relatively stable 'structure of the mind': spatialization, narratization, excerption, the analog 'I', the metaphor 'me', and conciliation. Three of these, "an analog 'I' narratizing in a functional mind-space", constituted Jaynes's "basic connotative definition of consciousness" — its 'parts' metaphorically speaking. The list is not meant to be exhaustive or universal, and could vary from culture to culture.

Metaphoric 'creation' of consciousness
... Jaynes's theory of metaphors...

Cultural nature of consciousness
Jaynes's complex conclusion is, in brief: that "subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world"; it develops "through metaphorical language", and introspection is one of its metaphorical 'acts'; it helps an individual and a community to "shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions"; it does so not as a specific neurological process, but through metaphors and analogies both linguistic and non-linguistic; children can learn to do it, at a late stage of language acquisition, only through socialization; since it is "learned and not innate", it is created by culture rather than evolution. Jaynes's view was influential with later theorists such as Daniel Dennett.

...next...
Introspection is neither a constant nor necessary condition for most behavior, nevertheless it to provide all the 'inner' knowledge of one's 'self' and one's own 'mind'. It was this idea of — of the mind as a 'space' filled with 'mental entities' or 'mental events' — that

With new techniques for studying the brain more directly, its cognitive and neurological processes were being explored. During the 20th century solutions were sought in brain research: as one psychologist later put it, "Just what is it that makes a brain seemingly "introspectable?""