Cornell Cognitive Studies Winter Symposium - Consciousness

When:	Friday, Jan. 25th
Where:	Room 701, Clark Hall

please register (it's free!)

Schedule:

The task of a science of consciousness is to connect third-person data about behavior and brain processes to first-person data about conscious experience. On my view, a science of consciousness will not reduce either sort of data to the other, but will build a systematic framework that integrates the two. I will talk about the general shape that such a science might take, and will look at how various current projects in neuroscience and psychology fit into this structure. I will also discuss the distinctive problems posed by the investigation and representation of first-person data.

The concept of consciousness arises from a half-hearted introjective error. As a result, it is impossible to answer nearly any interesting question about the distribution of phenomenal consciousness. We should forget about consciousness, and do consciousness studies by explaining data about actual acts of introspection. I sketch a proposal along these lines.

Thomas Nagel's 1974 article on "WILTBAB?" has served as a engaging and instructive "tool" for probing the meaning of conscious mental states, especially within the disciplines of philosophy, and cognitive science, and consciousness studies. A variant on WILTBAB is Frank Jackson's Mary, the omniscient but color-blind neuroscientist. Under the "radar" of philosophy and cognitive science, neuroethologists have been investigating the way that real, as opposed to gedanken, bats sense their world, especially in their use of biosonar, the use of ultrasonic signals by which they navigate in the dark. Whether these findings illuminate the philosophical discussions or not, there is work emerging within neuroethology that have biologists wondering about "animal consciousness," and I will take up some of these.

Through a range of real-time experimental methods, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have shown that cognition is a temporally extended process in which transitions from one identifiable/reportable "mental state" to the next are usually gradual and continuous. In fact, the evidence suggests that we may spend more time IN BETWEEN these "mental states" than actually IN them. These findings cast doubt on the scientific viability of introspective reports of conscious mental states.

Most academic psychologists and cognitive scientists do not yet accept the existence of psi, anomalous processes of information or energy transfer (such as telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception) that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. I will review results from one particular experimental method-the ganzfeld procedure-that appears to produce replicable evidence for psi. I will also discuss scientific skepticism and the oft-quoted maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A currently popular account of the phenomenal character of color experiences is what is here called standard representationalism - the view that a color experience's having a certain phenomenal character is just a matter of its representing the instantiation of certain colors. This paper argues that standard representationalism is mistaken, and proposes an alternative version of representationalism that allows the phenomenal character of color experiences to vary independently of what colors they represent.