Chapter 8 - Consciousness
Narcolepsy ; a long-term brain disorder that causes a person to suddenly fall asleep at inappropriate times
(affects 0.5% of the population)
● Side effect of the Pandemrix (swine flu) vaccine
● Symptoms : loss of strength in hands, sleep paralysis (awake but muscles asleep)
What is consciousness?
● Experience ; essential to what it means to be human. It’s private and no one has the same consciousness
→ that’s why it’s hard to study the mind!
How do we study consciousness? →
Cartesian Theatre = A mental screen or stage on which things appear to be presented for viewing by the
mind’s eye : place in your head where you are. You can’t share this with anyone. We try to measure
consciousness but we can’t really see anything.
Mysteries of consciousness
Hard problem of consciousness : The difficulty of explaining how subjective experience could ever arise.
Psychologists want to know what it’s like to be ‘something/someone’ →
Phenomenology : How things actually seem in a state of consciousness in terms of the quality experience
(know a person's understanding of mind and behaviour)
Who’s in control?
Homunculus problem : Difficulty of explaining the experience of consciousness by advocating another
internal self. (mini-me inside your head making decisions) But who is the mini-me? And so on…..
So who is in control? Some say you are ; it’s free will , others say free will is an illusion because it can be
shaped by reinforcement and punishment from the environment. Science undermines the reality of free will as
a force of personal choice.
So we don’t know if something was a personal choice, but it makes it easy for us to think that we did it. This is
because the unconscious processes that lead to these choices are too complicated to monitor, but we can keep
track of the outcome ; it makes us feel as if we have made the decision.
The problem of other minds
Problem of other minds = the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others.
They can say they’re conscious ; how good and bad it all is etc. These are mental states ; qualia =subjective
experiences we have as part of our mental life.
We don’t know if we all experience everything the same ; is blue blue or is blue red?
If the brain were dead, there would be no consciousness. Consciousness is in your brain.
Materialism = The philosophical position that mental states are a product of physical processes alone
Anthropomorphism = The tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things. (What is the mental life
of an infant or animal like?)
, How do people perceive other minds?
People judge minds according to the capacity for experience, such as the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger,
consciousness, anger or fear, and the capacity for agency, such as the ability for self-control, planning, memory
or thought.
The mind-body problem → the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
How does something like the mind, which has no physical property, emerge from or interact with the physical
structures of the body?
We think our consciousness is in control of the body but some studies suggest that the brain’s activities precede
the activities of the conscious mind. Although your personal intuition is that you think of an action and then do
it, these experiments suggest that your brain is getting started before either the thinking or the doing, preparing
the way for both thought and action.
Choice blindness = When people are unaware of their decision-making processes and justify a choice as if it
were already decided.
The nature of consciousness
Four basic properties :
1. Intentionality of consciousness (quality of being directed towards an object)
2. Unity (resistance to division) ; you can’t really d o two things at a time
3. Selectivity (capacity to include some objects and not others)
4. Transience (tendency to change → The Necker Cube)
Change blindness = unawareness of significant events changing in full view
→ without attention we miss much of what’s happening
Dichotic listening = a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear
→ Consciousness filters out some information including irrelevant messages.
Cocktail party phenomenon = people tune in to one message even while they filter out others nearby
→ especially your own name. You selectively listen to this, even when you’re asleep.
The basic properties of consciousness are reminiscent of the 'bouncing ball' that moves from word to word
when the lyrics of a sing-along tune are shown on a karaoke machine. The ball always bounces on something
(intentionality), there is only one ball (unity), the ball selects one target and not others (selectivity), and the ball
keeps bouncing all the time (transience).
Levels of consciousness
1. Minimal consciousness = a low level of awareness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and
may output behaviour (change position, itch somewhere)
2. Full consciousness = you know and are able to report your mental state ; Full consciousness involves
not only thinking about things but also thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things
Thinking about thinking allows you to realize that you weren't thinking about what you wanted to be thinking
about.
Narcolepsy ; a long-term brain disorder that causes a person to suddenly fall asleep at inappropriate times
(affects 0.5% of the population)
● Side effect of the Pandemrix (swine flu) vaccine
● Symptoms : loss of strength in hands, sleep paralysis (awake but muscles asleep)
What is consciousness?
● Experience ; essential to what it means to be human. It’s private and no one has the same consciousness
→ that’s why it’s hard to study the mind!
How do we study consciousness? →
Cartesian Theatre = A mental screen or stage on which things appear to be presented for viewing by the
mind’s eye : place in your head where you are. You can’t share this with anyone. We try to measure
consciousness but we can’t really see anything.
Mysteries of consciousness
Hard problem of consciousness : The difficulty of explaining how subjective experience could ever arise.
Psychologists want to know what it’s like to be ‘something/someone’ →
Phenomenology : How things actually seem in a state of consciousness in terms of the quality experience
(know a person's understanding of mind and behaviour)
Who’s in control?
Homunculus problem : Difficulty of explaining the experience of consciousness by advocating another
internal self. (mini-me inside your head making decisions) But who is the mini-me? And so on…..
So who is in control? Some say you are ; it’s free will , others say free will is an illusion because it can be
shaped by reinforcement and punishment from the environment. Science undermines the reality of free will as
a force of personal choice.
So we don’t know if something was a personal choice, but it makes it easy for us to think that we did it. This is
because the unconscious processes that lead to these choices are too complicated to monitor, but we can keep
track of the outcome ; it makes us feel as if we have made the decision.
The problem of other minds
Problem of other minds = the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others.
They can say they’re conscious ; how good and bad it all is etc. These are mental states ; qualia =subjective
experiences we have as part of our mental life.
We don’t know if we all experience everything the same ; is blue blue or is blue red?
If the brain were dead, there would be no consciousness. Consciousness is in your brain.
Materialism = The philosophical position that mental states are a product of physical processes alone
Anthropomorphism = The tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things. (What is the mental life
of an infant or animal like?)
, How do people perceive other minds?
People judge minds according to the capacity for experience, such as the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger,
consciousness, anger or fear, and the capacity for agency, such as the ability for self-control, planning, memory
or thought.
The mind-body problem → the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
How does something like the mind, which has no physical property, emerge from or interact with the physical
structures of the body?
We think our consciousness is in control of the body but some studies suggest that the brain’s activities precede
the activities of the conscious mind. Although your personal intuition is that you think of an action and then do
it, these experiments suggest that your brain is getting started before either the thinking or the doing, preparing
the way for both thought and action.
Choice blindness = When people are unaware of their decision-making processes and justify a choice as if it
were already decided.
The nature of consciousness
Four basic properties :
1. Intentionality of consciousness (quality of being directed towards an object)
2. Unity (resistance to division) ; you can’t really d o two things at a time
3. Selectivity (capacity to include some objects and not others)
4. Transience (tendency to change → The Necker Cube)
Change blindness = unawareness of significant events changing in full view
→ without attention we miss much of what’s happening
Dichotic listening = a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear
→ Consciousness filters out some information including irrelevant messages.
Cocktail party phenomenon = people tune in to one message even while they filter out others nearby
→ especially your own name. You selectively listen to this, even when you’re asleep.
The basic properties of consciousness are reminiscent of the 'bouncing ball' that moves from word to word
when the lyrics of a sing-along tune are shown on a karaoke machine. The ball always bounces on something
(intentionality), there is only one ball (unity), the ball selects one target and not others (selectivity), and the ball
keeps bouncing all the time (transience).
Levels of consciousness
1. Minimal consciousness = a low level of awareness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and
may output behaviour (change position, itch somewhere)
2. Full consciousness = you know and are able to report your mental state ; Full consciousness involves
not only thinking about things but also thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things
Thinking about thinking allows you to realize that you weren't thinking about what you wanted to be thinking
about.
