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Accounting for Consciousness: Epistemic and Operational Issues

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Abstract

Within the philosophy of mind, consciousness is currently understood as the expression of one or other cognitive modality, either intentionality (representation per se), transparency (immediacy of cognitive content consequent upon the unawareness of underlying representational processes), subjectivity (first-person perspective) or reflexivity (autonoetic awareness). However, neither intentionality, subjectivity nor transparency adequately distinguishes conscious from nonconscious cognition. Consequently, the only genuine index or defining characteristic of consciousness is reflexivity, the capacity for autonoetic or self-referring, self-monitoring awareness. But the identification of reflexivity as the principal index of consciousness raises a major challenge in relation to the cognitive mechanism responsible for operationalizing such a reflexive state. Current reliance by higher-order and intrinsic self-representational theories on self-representing data structures to achieve reflexive self-awareness is highly problematic, suggesting a solution in terms of a self-referential processing regime.

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Notes

  1. Reflexivity is used here to connote cognitively operating upon or referring to itself in the same sense that a sentence is reflexive if it has the same subject and object, as in “The man washed himself”. Here the subject operates upon himself. Just so, cognitive reflexivity involves a cognitive process operating most immediately upon itself, thereby knowing itself or recognizing itself most immediately.

  2. Curiously, transparency has been deemed both the engine of consciousness, as Metzinger proposes, as well as the basis of the claim that consciousness itself is invisible or diaphanous, such that we see through our conscious awareness to the objects or representational content we are aware of (on which see Hume 1739–1740; Moore 1903; Tye 1995; Dretske 2003; Crane 2003).

  3. Smithies and Stoljar (2012: 20–21 N12) read Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory of consciousness as claiming that “a mental state is phenomenally conscious if and only if one knows by introspection that one is in that mental state.” But this is incorrect. Rosenthal actually distinguishes consciousness from introspection, where the latter, he insists “involves more than a mental state’s being a conscious state. Introspecting a mental state is deliberately and attentively focusing on that state. Nonintrospective consciousness, by contrast, requires no special act of attention. Every introspected state is therefor a conscious state, but not conversely” (1997: 745). For Rosenthal, the two are not equivalent (cf Van Gulick 2001). Nonetheless, inasmuch as higher order theories in general invoke some additional cognitive act (thought about, belief about …) in relation to the primary cognition, they are closer to the understanding of consciousness reflexivity as consequent upon an act of introspection than to the understanding of consciousness as intrinsically relfexive without need of any such additional cognitive act.

  4. Janzen (2008: 106) also references similar positions outlined by Gurwitsch (1950: 6) and Smith (1989, Ch 2, Sect 3.2). Similarly, Zahavi notes (1999: 17) that refutation of the introspective model (the “reflection model”) of consciousness can be found in the Heidelberg School of German philosophers, including Heinrich, Frank, Pathast and Cramer. Kriegel (2009a, b: 179) cites argument for cosc as prereflective in continental Phenomenologists Husserl, Saarte, Merleau-Ponty and Gurwitsch.

  5. Where first order accounts of consciousness discount or ignore reflexivity altogether, or reduce it to either subjectivity or transparency (as discussed above), higher-order representational theories are explicitly focused on explaining consciousness as reflexivity, casting the consciousness-yielding representational process in terms of a higher-order data structure directed towards first-order content. Several cognitive data structures have been proposed to cognitively activate or operationalize the crucial awareness-of capacity, including higher-order perception (Armstrong 1981; Lycan 1996), higher-order belief (Dennett 2003), and higher-order-thought (Rosenthal 1997; Weisberg 1999).

  6. Where higher-order theories rely on a two-state representational structure to achieve reflexive self-awareness (consciousness),”intrinsic” theories posit a single self-representational state. Aristotle has been read as advocating this understanding (Caston 2002), while Brentano is usually credited with initiating this approach in the modern era (Thomasson 2000; Kriegel 2003, 2005; Zahavi 1999), and has been followed most recently by Natsoulas (1996), Kriegel (2003), Van Gulick (2004), Smith (2004) and Janzen (2008).

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Peters, F. Accounting for Consciousness: Epistemic and Operational Issues. Axiomathes 24, 441–461 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9232-0

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