Abstract
In Section I, I clarify turning point issues in the Phillips and Block debate about whether there is unconscious perception. These include questions about whether uptake of certain visual information is an individual or person level accomplishment, as required for genuine unconscious perceiving. Section II takes up a recent reorientation proposed in Block (2017) towards the question of whether there is unconscious perceiving, where we are to look for the pervasive role of unconscious perceiving in, perhaps especially, the online control of everyday reaching and grasping. I point out that while this may well be a helpfully different approach to explore, it does not evade the central questions and challenges familiar from the prior debate between Phillips and Block. Section III reviews an approach summarized in Dehaene (2014), drawing from a range of measures of neural activity. Dehaene provides evidence of quite rich non-conscious perceptual system responses, some arguably individual or person level. But in a fairly thin or fragile way, absent taking up, in higher level assessment, the information encoded in initial visual response. Or that is the interpretation I argue for, in relating the Dehaene account to the Phillips and Block debate, in a way that illuminates the Phillips and Block discussions. An Appendix provides an overview of debates in the literature about the Goodale and Milner Two Visual Systems Hypothesis, that Block (2017) makes central appeal to.
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Notes
I will regularly shorten this to “perceptual experience”. As the “sensory” indicates, I assume that perceptual consciousness implies sensory or phenomenal consciousness. I think it will be clear that this summary framing fits the proposals made and debated by Block, Phillips, and Dehaene.
This use of “perceive”, and the discussion in Sect. 3 below of “perceptual consciousness” (which of course requires perceiving or perceptual representation), doesn’t map entirely straightforwardly onto discussions in the philosophical literature of “seeing” and “perceiving”. Neither Dretske’s “non-epistemic seeing” (1969) or his “object seeing” (2007) would qualify as clear cases of perceiving—in the sense at issue and on the view I favor—because of a lack of required engagement of workspace capacities. There is perhaps a better fit of the view of (at least clear) perceptual consciousness that I favor to “dual component” accounts of perceptual experience, where perceptual judgment figures in perceptual experience (see Smith 2002, for discussion). But there are differences. For example I allow (see Sect. 3) that workspace access might be triggered by phenomenally conscious and possibly constancy involving visual responses, that do not inherently involve a perceptual taking or judgment. In Sect. 3 I also sketch an account of workspace access which involves use of working memory capacities—which are not invoked in traditional “dual component” accounts of perceptual experience.
This accords with widespread discussion in philosophy of perception and mind focused on distinguishing and relating “sub personal” perceptual mechanisms and “person level” perceiving and doing—discussions not specifically addressed to the question of whether there is unconscious perception. But not everyone would agree with the assumption made here, on a natural reading of it. For example, according to Olson (1997) each of us is somehow most fundamentally a human organism or human “animal”. Where we are typically also for most of our lives persons—much as many of us pass through a period of being students (an example Olson uses in this setting). In favor of such an account Olson points to, for example, ready acceptance of familiar “there I am” exclamations in looking at pictures of a parent holding a one month old infant. If so inclined one could, I think, reframe talk of accomplishment “by the persons that we are” in keeping with such a view. Compare: as persons, we can still note “student level” accomplishments as the students some of us also are.
Block (2020) objects to the Chalmers (1995, 1996) argument that “that although phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are metaphysically distinct, they are nomologically correlated, i.e. correlated as a consequence of laws of nature” (this is Block’s summary). But the Chalmers argument aims to establish that functional organization is nomologically correlated with phenomenology. I’m just here observing that access consciousness—at least in the “actual access” sense—is good reason to think that a creature (at least or especially a human person) is in a phenomenally conscious state because of how their psychologies are ordinarily constituted, leaving aside whether this requires an apt kind of biological make up.
See Phillips (2018b), where the opening explanation of the “access hypothesis” for phenomenal consciousness is stated in terms of (“direct”) availability. But then there is subsequent discussion of particular views that conceive of access in terms of some form of actual access. And in the same article Phillips also says that “The access hypothesis corresponds to the claim that only mobilized information…is conscious”. That said, while some of the framing could mislead, the clear aim of the arguments given in Phillips (2018b) is to establish that it is an open question whether actual access is required for phenomenal consciousness.
The Phillips claim that unconscious perception remains an open possibility even without contact with “central coordinating agency” is briefly made, and raises questions. Elsewhere Phillips objects that certain proposed examples of unconscious perception fail to be person level achievements because they don’t involve needed contact with “central coordinating agency”/global workspace capacities (see later this section as well as Sect. 3 below). This suggests that if there is unconscious perception, contact must be made to workspace capacities. As discussed in the text, it is then a fairly short step to the conclusion that sensory consciousness is guaranteed, at least as a matter of causal fixing. Phillips may be best read here as rejecting the idea that requirements for perception are to be determined entirely by a priori reflection, as opposed to relying on careful study of the explanatory commitments of empirical research on perceiving and acting—with the central questions about perceiving thereby remaining open to the results of ongoing empirical inquiry. Difficult questions of methodology are raised here (part 1 of Phillips, 2018a, is a relevant discussion).
See Phillips (2018a) for brief explanation of “d-prime” and related signal detection terms and methods. The main line of the discussion in the text should be clear without any knowledge of basic signal detection theory and methods. Just, for example, think of the different tasks indicated. For a yes/no task, setting a “biased”, “conservative”, “high criterion” is to take a cautious attitude, only responding “yes (there is a stimulus present)” when more information has accumulated than is really necessary. There is sometimes independent evidence that subjects with neurological deficits do just this (see Phillips, 2018, 2020, 2021, for discussion; blindsight patients may also not exhibit perceptual constancy—see the summary by Phillips in P&B, 2016, p 166, and Phillips 2021, for longer discussion). By contrast, in a forced choice test—“was it an O or an X, pick one or the other”—a biased, conservative, high criterion strategy of the foregoing kind isn’t available. Subjects are forced to choose one answer or the other, even if they protest that they can’t see the stimuli (perhaps because of a cautious/conservative high criterion).
Confusion is possible here. We know by Fourier analysis that 2D images can be represented by sums of sine wave gratings. Such an analysis can be used to represent scene visual information. It might be, and has been, proposed that human perceivers perform such an analysis. Individual such gratings might, as well, prove useful, precisely controllable stimuli in certain research settings—for example in studying orientation discrimination and perceptual adaptation (as in the He and MacLeod study). But in viewing ordinary scenes, gratings of various frequencies are not physically present, separable, detectable elements in the stimulus image.
Block (2017, p 8) has “There is strong evidence that size constancy is registered in V1, independently of feedback from higher areas”. The Murray et al. (2006) fmri study provides support for the first part of this assertion; Burbeck (1987) and Bennett and Warren (2002) provide some additional indirect support (see also Bennett 2020). But it isn’t clear how these studies bear on whether any engagement of V1 in registering size constancy is independent of “feedback from higher areas”.
This is a prominent lab and project and so appropriately cited in this context. I am not endorsing the thesis that Gabor patches and the like are likely stereo matching primitives.
The stereo case is more complex than suggested here, as outside of the region in which images are fused double images are present under two-eye viewing and can carry useable information (Howard and Rogers 1995). The point in the text holds of regions of the viewed scene in which the left and right eye images are fused.
Bennett and Foo (2010) contains a crisp summary of the Goodale and Milner Two Visual Systems Hypothesis; Milner and Goodale (2008) and Goodale (2013) helpfully explain the view and its basis; Franz and Gergenfurtner (2008) and Briscoe and Schwenkler (2015), summarize and press empirically backed worries. The Appendix below discusses some key results, observations, and areas of ongoing inquiry in debates in the literature about the Goodale and Milner Two Visual Systems Hypothesis.
The wording in Deheane et al. (2017) suggests a similar ambivalence. Evidence for pervasive, function serving “unconscious computations” is reviewed. But it is only with “global availability of information” that there is held to be “conscious perception” (see the chart on page 46). However, this is compatible with the view that other responses qualify as “unconscious perception”. This is hinted at in the same paper in describing unconscious “perceptual computations”, that include “invariant face recognition”.
Dehaene thus requires actual access to high level cognizing for sensory-phenomenal consciousness. (Though in places he is not quite completely dismissive of the possibility of pre actual access phenomenal consciousness; cf., Dehaene, Lau, and Kouider, 2017, p 54.) He uses the term “preconscious” for states that are “potentially accessible yet not accessed” (Dehaene et al. 2006, p 204.) For our purposes, we can remain neutral on whether certain related specific proposals should be included as elements of an elaborated actual access account of sensory-phenomenal consciousness. For example, it might be held that attention of some kind to properties or scene elements is required—and so, with this, facilitation of high level processing of the visual coding of the scene elements attended to. Dehaene holds that attention is thus required, although not sufficient (Dehaene et al. 2006). Some, further, argue that a higher level representation of one’s visual responses or codings is required for phenomenal consciousness, whether in the form of a judgment or an ‘inner sense’ perception (see Block 2020, chapter 13, for a discussion of the different forms such higher order accounts of the first kind—involving higher order thought—can take). A view of this kind might also be fit to an actual access account. Such higher order requirements on sensory or phenomenal consciousness have been strongly criticized (cf., Dretske 1993, 1995; Block 2011,2020). In my view appropriately. But see Carruthers (2016) for a helpful overview discussion by someone sympathetic to a higher order thought account of visual or perceptual consciousness.
For helpful treatment of key ideas see Hill’s (2009, pp 15–18) discussion of the two conceptions of “access consciousness” in work by Block (Block 1995, 2002, 2020), as well as his own related notion of “experiential consciousness”. In speaking of “access consciousness” (explicitly or implicitly) in the text I mean to include the Hill “experiential consciousness”—which is a wider category than the Block “access consciousness” notions in not requiring the accessed or accessible states to have representational content, and in invoking a larger, more diverse range of higher level mental capacities. Hill would opt for “accessible” here, against Block’s more recent views. Block suggests that his move to a characterization in terms of actual access reflects a move from “characterizing a strand of ordinary thinking” towards “characterizing an information-processing image” of the ordinary role of phenomenally conscious states (Block 2019, p 538). See also Stoljar (2019), who stresses that on an early (“accessibility”) Block version of access consciousness the idea is framed in terms of representations “poised” for—somehow on the verge of—engaging higher level cognizing and action (Block, 1994, introduces appeal to ‘poise’); Block (2019) is a reply to Stoljar (2019).
Our question here is what sort of contact with higher level capacities is required for the person level achievement of perceiving--allowing, with Block, for pre actual access sensory-phenomenal consciousness. Dehaene frames his proposals as accounts of consciousness, and holds there is no pre actual access consciousness of any sort. For present purposes we can examine the Dehaene proposals as concerning the kind of contact with higher level capacities allowing the person level achievement of perceiving, though that’s not how Dehaene frames the proposals.
Some more detailed characterizations are more in line with the point here. For example, “On top of a deep hierarchy of specialized modules, a ‘global neuronal workspace’ (GNW) with limited capacity, evolved to select a piece of information, hold it over time, and share it across modules. We call ‘conscious’ whichever representation, at a given time, wins the competition for access to this mental arena and gets selected for global sharing and decision-making” (Dehaene, Lau, Kouider, 2017). However, this language is still misleading: actual “global sharing” and actual contribution to decisions made is not required in order to perceive the world, at least if this involves high level reasoning. In the presentation of the GNW framework in a recent detailed assessment of relevant research (Mashour et al. 2020) the commitment, as requirement, to a mix of actual access to working memory resources and resulting availability is clearer. It is indeed stressed that “the relationship between attention, working memory, and conscious awareness is complex and warrants careful consideration”(p 783)—where the subsequent discussion of relevant research indicates that our references in the text to “working memory” are importantly simplified.
Haffenden and Goodale (2000) and Haffenden et al. (2001) propose that the remaining effect on the MGA (action) measure, suggesting a role played by the illusory experience, is actually an artifact of aspects of the (Ebbinghaus) stimuli that result in obstacle avoidance shaping of the hand and fingers. However, Franz et al. (2003) present evidence against such a non-experiential, obstacle avoidance, explanation (further discussed in Franz and Gergenfurtner, 2008).
Franz (2003, p 476) suggests that the Goodale and Milner two visual systems proposal might be reconciled with this conclusion by maintaining that the Ebbinghaus illusion derives from visual system response preceding a split into the two, perception vs. action, streams. In a somewhat different context Franz and Gegenfurtner (2008, p 935) cite the Murray et al. (2006) fmri evidence implicating V1 in achieving size constancy. However, on this proposal it isn’t clear what would be left of a perception vs. action two visual systems scheme, since both perception and action would be informed by the same visual representation of (at least) size.
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Bennett, D.J. Does perceiving require perceptual experience?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 14, 763–790 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00620-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00620-6