“What Is Consciousness?”

“What Is Consciousness?”

David Armstrong

Australian philosopher at the University of Sydney.

“Many people would say David Armstrong is Australia's greatest living philosopher, living or dead.” – Michael McDermott

Outline

Armstrong is going to outline and analyze several different things we might mean when we use the word “consciousness.”

MINIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The Mark of the Mental?

Some philosophers have thought that consciousness is the “mark of the mental”:

• Everything that is mental is conscious.• Mental states must be conscious, if they exist.

Unconscious

Armstrong points out that there is one sense of ‘conscious’ in which a sleeping person who is not dreaming is completely unconscious.

Unconscious

But we still think that sleeping people have beliefs, knowledge, memories, and mental abilities (for example, to multiply numbers mentally).

Computer Analogy

Armstrong likens a sleeping person to a computer that has been turned off partway through computation, and will proceed in that computation when turned back on.

The stored values in the computer’s registers are like our beliefs and desires when we sleep: they’re there, but they’re not in-use.

Unconscious

There are SOME mental claims that are never true of unconscious people:• Thinking• Deliberating• Feeling/ Sensing

States vs. Events

Armstrong thinks this is just the states vs. events/ processes.

Unconscious people can have mental states. But they can’t have mental processes (changes in their mental states). If they had activity in their minds, they’d be conscious!

Minimal Consciousness

Someone is minimally conscious if there is something happening in their mind.

More Senses of ‘Consciousness’

Why isn’t that the whole story? Armstrong points out that there’s a sense in which not all minimally conscious people are ‘conscious.’

I go to bed at night thinking about some difficult mathematical problem. I wake up and know the answer. There has been activity in my mind when I slept– but I was never conscious.

PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

New Strategy

Armstrong tries the following strategy: what could we add to a minimally conscious person to make them conscious in this other sense?

New Strategy

Obviously not problem solving activity. And Armstrong thinks even dreaming is not really being conscious, in this other sense.

Perceptual Consciousness

A person is perceptually conscious if she is aware of her environment and the things happening to her and around her.

Perceptual vs. Minimal

Since everyone who perceives their environment is undergoing mental activity, all perceptually conscious people are minimally conscious.

Only some minimally conscious people perceive their environment, so not all minimally conscious people are perceptually conscious.

INTROSPECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Unconscious Driving

Sometimes people driving for a long period of time, or driving really familiar roads can do it automatically or “unconsciously.”

They perceive their environment, follow the road, watch out for other cars. But when they “snap out of it” they describe themselves as not knowing what they were doing/ unable to remember what they did.

Animal Consciousness

Armstrong suggests that “many animals… are continually, or at least normally, in the state in [sic] which the long-distance truck driver is in temporarily.”

What’s the Difference?

The difference, Armstrong says, is self-awareness or introspective awareness.

This is a consciousness of consciousness. An awareness, knowledge, or inner perception of one’s own mental states and activities.

Freud & The Unconscious

Armstrong suggests that introspective consciousness was what Sigmund Freud called “consciousness” and that lack of introspective consciousness was his “unconscious.”

Proprioception

We know a lot about our bodies without using the “five senses”: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

I can tell when I’m off-balance, when I’m falling, where my limbs are in relation to the rest of my body, whether I need food or drink, and whether I’m hot or cold. I know this through proprioception (self sense).

Inner Sense

Armstrong thinks that in addition to “outer sense” (perception) and bodily sense (proprioception) we also have a sense that detects our inner mental lives, an “inner sense.”

You’re perceptually conscious when you exercise your outer sense, and you’re introspectionally conscious when you exercise your inner sense.

Subjectivity

To Armstrong, this way of looking at things “de-mystifies” the privacy or subjectivity of experience.I can sense the position of my limbs without looking/ hearing/ touching… but if you want to know where my limbs are, you have to look/ hear/ touch. This is because I have sensors hooked up to my limbs and you don’t.

Subjectivity

The same is true of my mental states. Only I am directly aware of my mental states. You have to infer them from my behavior.

But this is because my inner sense is connected to my mental states, and yours isn’t. It’s not that these are things beyond objectivity and science.

Against Epiphenomenalism

Armstrong argues that mental states have to have causal powers, because perception is a causal process and inner sense is just perception of one’s own mental states.

Armstrong, p. 725

“Introspective consciousness seems like a light switched on, which illuminates utter darkness. It has seemed to many that with consciousness in this sense, a wholly new thing enters the world.”

Self-Awareness

The unique thing about introspective awareness is that it gives us awareness of the self.

But why does perception of our mental states give us awareness of our selves? We don’t have an “inner sense” trained on ourselves.

And why do we need/ have self-awareness?

Theory-Laden Perception

When we see that something is a tomato this goes beyond what our immediate evidence tells us.

Theory-Laden Perception

To be a tomato requires that it have a back and not just a front. It requires that it have certain causes and effects. If my hand passes right through an object, it’s not a tomato.

Theory-Laden Perception

So seeing that something is a tomato is adding to the immediate evidence additional facts about how the unobserved portions of the object are and how it will behave.

Armstrong’s Idea

“Seeing” our mental states is like seeing different parts of the tomato = our self. We don’t see the thing directly, and we only see part of it at any time. But we use theories about the self to cobble together a coherent picture.

Why Introspective Consciousness?

Armstrong then asks why we have introspective consciousness (from an evolutionary point of view).

Why Introspective Consciousness?

His idea is that it plays a role in controlling and regulating our mental processes: it’s “much easier to achieve integration of the states and activities, to get them working together in the complex and sophisticated ways necessary to achieve complex and sophisticated ends.

Plasma Equipment Module

Self-Awareness

“If introspective consciousness is the instrument of mental integration, then it is natural that what is perceived by that consciousness should be assumed to be something unitary.” p. 727

Rubber Hand Illusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk

Body Integrity Identity Disorder

BIID sufferers feel that certain limbs that they have are “not theirs” and desire to have them amputated to “feel whole.”

Schizophrenia and Integrity

Many cognitive psychologists think something like this (but for inner sense, not proprioception) is going on in schizophrenia. Schizophrenics “hear voices” – they have thoughts that they don’t identify as their own.

Why Introspective Consciousness?

Armstrong notes that introspective consciousness is required for what he calls “event memory.” The introspectively unconscious driver does not remember how he drove here.

Memory and I.C.

“Unless mental activity is monitored by introspective consciousness, then it is not remembered to have occurred, or at least it is unlikely that it will be remembered.”

Further evidence: dreams are hard to remember; lots of psychologists think attention is the gateway to short-term memory.

Why Introspective Consciousness?

“Without introspective consciousness, we would not be aware that we existed– our self would not be self to itself. Nor would we be aware of what the particular history of that self had been, even its very recent history.” pp. 727-728