Encyclopedia of the Mind

Harold Pashler

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781412950572
• eBook ISBN: 9781506319384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

It?s hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how the mind works and how it affects our lives and our behavior. Studies of the mind and brain have crossed many exciting thresholds in recent years, and the study of mind now represents a thoroughly cross-disciplinary effort. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines seek answers to such questionsas: What is mind? How does it operate? What is consciousness?

This encyclopedia brings together scholars from the entire range of mind-related academic disciplines from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and computer science and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.

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ACCESS CONSCIOUSNESS

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Consciousness, according to the American philosopher Ned Block, is a “mongrel” concept—a conglomeration that picks out a number of very different mental properties that are nevertheless treated as undivided and denoted by a univocal concept. Access consciousness is one of these kinds of consciousness.

This entry will (a) discuss the notion of access consciousness—as distinguished from phenomenal consciousness—in the work of Block; (b) consider the introspective, experimental, and conceptual support for this distinction; (c) briefly consider Block’s contention that much current work on consciousness conflates these two kinds of consciousness; and (d) conclude with a consideration of some criticism that may be directed at Block’s approach.

To see what Block means by access consciousness (A-consciousness), consider the example of driving and being in the cognitive state of perceiving a stationary car on the road ahead of you. This is an A-conscious state inasmuch as its content (that there is a stationary car ahead) is freely available to your cognitive and action-regulating resources—which you may, in this instance, decide to employ in pressing the brake pedal of your own car, planning what to do next, and so on. Characteristically, A-conscious content is linguistically reportable (e.g., “I see that the car ahead of me isn’t moving”), but is also attributable to the lower animals by virtue of their ability to use perceptual content to guide action.

To put it simply, an organism is in an A-conscious state if that state is poised for free use in controlling thought and action for that organism. More formally, A-consciousness consists in the broadcasting of representations for free use in reasoning and for direct rational control of action of the agent (with rational understood in a broad enough sense to include poor reasoning).

The notion of A-consciousness belongs to the family of information processing or functional theories of consciousness—but according to Block’s distinctive account, this is only part of the story. The other main part is phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) — the experiential dimension of conscious experience itself, that is, what it is like to experience pain, to see a building, to hear a bell, to smell a flower, and so forth. According to Block, it is not A-consciousness, but P-consciousness that seems to be a scientific mystery. In the vast majority of cases, A-consciousness and P-consciousness are coextensive—such as in the example of seeing the car ahead on the road, where one has both the content available to A-conscious control of thought and action and the P-conscious experience of seeing a large, stationary object ahead. In certain instances, however, a breakup, or disassociation, is thought to appear between the two types of consciousness. We shall consider such cases in more detail later.

In general, Block’s theory of A-consciousness should be viewed as an integral part of a compromise position designed to accommodate both an information processing and a phenomenal view of consciousness. The main thrust of Block’s work has thus been to emphasize the distinction between A-consciousness and P-consciousness and to argue that some current work in psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience is subject to fallacious inferences deriving from the failure to distinguish all the relevant meanings of consciousness.

Introspective, Experimental, and Conceptual Support

The first type of data that Block enlists in support of his account is introspective data, in the sense of “our impressions of how things seem to us.” An example of this is the experience of suddenly noticing a sound (of, say, an electrical appliance or a distant jackhammer) and realizing that this has been going on for a while without one attending to it. Once the sound has been noticed, one is A-conscious of it, but it seems that there was a period before that point where one was in a state of P-consciousness with no additional A-consciousness of the sound. If this is the right way to interpret what happens, it seems that we have a simple disassociation between A-consciousness and P-consciousness.

A second type of data derives from experimental studies and clinical cases, including those of the attentional blink, binocular rivalry, blindsight, the Capgras delusion, Cotard’s syndrome, prosopagnosia, and visual neglect. Prosopagnosia (also known as “face blindness” or facial agnosia) is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. Yet, under certain experimental conditions, it appears that prosopagnosics have some information about the faces they are seeing, even though this information is A-unconscious. According to Block, it is thus the lack of A-consciousness of the information, rather than the P-conscious lack of the familiarity of the face, that defines the disorder—and attention thus needs to be paid to both dimensions of the condition. Now consider the much-discussed phenomenon of blindsight, a clinical condition associated with brain damage to the visual cortex in which the subject responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. Specifically, if a stimulus is flashed in a patient’s “blind” area, he will be able to “guess” (with much higher than chance outcome) certain simple features of the stimulus, given highly limited forced choice conditions. Clearly, the patient is unable to use the visual information from the blind area in the access sense of consciousness because he has no ability to deploy the information in reasoning or the rational control of action. Neither, however, does the patient appear to be conscious of the stimulus in the phenomenal sense of consciousness; if we take his word for it, he has no experience of the stimulus. Like the prosopagnosic patient, the blindsight patient thus lacks both the relevant A- and P-consciousness of the stimulus. To get a complete disassociation between the two types of consciousness, Block therefore introduces a conceptual maneuver that will be discussed shortly.

The third type of data employed by Block is entirely imaginary in nature (in a strict sense) and derives from philosophical thought experiments that are assumed to provide conceptually possible cases. One thought experiment is that of superblind-sight. Here we imagine a blindsight patient with the counterfactual ability to prompt himself at will to guess reliably what is in his blind field. As a result of this remarkable auto-prompting, visual information from the blind field simply pops into his thoughts without any corresponding visual experience of the stimuli. In such a case, the patient would have A-consciousness without the P-conscious visual experience—and we thus have a clear disassociation between the two types of consciousness.

Conceptual Conflation of A-Consciousness and P-Consciousness

Relying on the distinction between A-consciousness and P-consciousness, Block has criticized contemporary work on consciousness—including that of Francis Crick and Christof Koch, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and others—for fallaciously conflating the two notions. One conflation is to analyze P-consciousness in terms of information processing (i.e., A-consciousness); the directly opposite conflation is to analyze A-consciousness in terms of experience (i.e., P-consciousness). Finally, an even more basic confusion occurs if one is operating with an unanalyzed notion of consciousness to which neither A- nor P-consciousness properly applies.

Consider Block’s criticism of Dennett’s hypothesis that human consciousness is largely a product of cultural evolution that is working on our basic biological hardware, a product that becomes imparted to human brains in early developmental training. P-consciousness, Block first points out, cannot be a cultural construction in the way that Dennett suggests. After all, human P-consciousness pertains to the way that things look, sound, and smell to human beings—and this clearly is a basic biological feature of beings like us, not a cultural construction that children have to learn as they grow up. Culture may have an impact on P-consciousness, but it does not create it. Analogously, culture has an impact on feet (e.g., by making it fashionable to wear constricting shoes), but culture does not create feet. Consider, now, A-consciousness. It, similarly, cannot be a cultural construction because, according to Block, it is a basic biological feature of human beings that we are capable of having states that are poised for free use in controlling thought and action. Culture may influence the kind of content that characteristically becomes A-conscious among a group of people, but it does not create the basic biological ability to make cognitive content available for the control of thought and action. In Block’s analysis, then, Dennett’s claim about the cultural construction of consciousness is shown to be untenable—and this is because Dennett has confused himself by applying an unanalyzed notion of consciousness rather than the specific concepts of A-consciousness and P-consciousness.

Criticism of the Two Concepts Approach

Block’s theory of A-consciousness—and, more broadly, his two-concept distinction—has been subjected to a wide range of criticism from thinkers such as Bernard Baars, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, David Rosenthal, and many others.

One line of criticism advanced by Dennett is that Block mistakenly inflates a mere difference in degree between A-consciousness and (what Block calls) P-consciousness into a difference in kind. According to Dennett, Block’s distinction can be wholly accommodated in terms of richness of content and degrees of influence—that is, in purely quantitative, A-consciousness terms. Everyday instances of conscious awareness have an immense richness of information, whereas unusual cases, such as the blind field perception of blindsight patients, have a paucity of information. This is simply a difference of quantity, however, not of quality, and it explains the highly delimited but still statistically significant success of blindsight patient “guesses.” According to Dennett, if a blindsight patient achieves the super-blindsight ability to prompt himself at will to guess reliably what is in his blind field, this amounts to the full restoration of that patient’s visual consciousness, and that, in turn, impugns Block’s strongest case of an A- and P-consciousness split. Rosenthal similarly rejects Block’s distinction and proposes to account for the data in terms of higher order thoughts rather than in terms of quantitative differences in degree.

Another line of criticism pertains to the ultimate status of Block’s distinction. The problem is that A- and P-consciousness, as Block presents it, never actually come cleanly apart. In prosopagnosia, after all, the subject lacks both the experience of knowing a face and the relevant information about the person. The same is true of blindsight. The blind field information is elicited under forced choice conditions, and the subject has no access to the information in the sense of having it available for free use in controlling thought and action. In neither case do A-consciousness and P-consciousness actually disunite. The jackhammer example is nebulous; attention in some sense is involved here, but it is not at all clear that this phenomenon is best captured by Block’s notion of A-consciousness. Indeed, Block grants that there may be no actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness. This still leaves the purely conceptual scenarios with A and P disassociation, but here one needs to be very wary. As with the superblind patient case, one can certainly imagine, say, that it really is the gravitational pull of the moon, not the action of the heart, that drives the circulation of the blood—and this might lead one to make the conceptual distinction between (a) the rhythmic contractions of the heart and (b) the circulatory pumping of the blood. However, this clearly is neither an evidentially warranted nor a clinically fruitful distinction for scientific medicine to adopt.

Finally, as a compromise position, Block’s account is open both to general criticism of information processing accounts of consciousness and to general criticism of phenomenal accounts of consciousness.

Christian Beenfeldt

See also Attention and Consciousness; Blindsight; Consciousness and the Unconscious; Mind-Body Problem; Neural Correlates of Consciousness; Perceptual Consciousness and Attention

Further Readings

Block, N. J. (2007). Concepts of consciousness. Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected papers (Vol. 1, pp. 275–296). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Block, N. J. (2007). How many concepts of consciousness? Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected papers (Vol. 1, pp. 215–248). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Block, N. J. (2007). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected papers (Vol. 1, pp. 159–214). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Block, N. J. (2007). What is Dennett’s theory a theory of? Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected papers (Vol. 1, pp. 141–158). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1995). The path not taken. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18 (2), 252–253.

Rosenthal, D. M. (2002). How many kinds of consciousness? Consciousness and Cognition, 11 (4), 653–665.

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ACTION AND BODILY MOVEMENT

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Human beings are agents: We have the capacity to act, which involves the capacity to cause and to prevent events. Indeed, to perform an action of a particular kind is to cause (or prevent) an event of a particular kind: To kill someone is to cause their death, and to save their life is to prevent it. Actions are attributed to us as agents on the grounds of the events we cause (or prevent); so an action of killing requires that the agent cause a death, an action of breaking a window requires that the agent cause an event of a window’s breaking, and so on.

It may be thought that the capacity to act goes beyond the capacity to cause or prevent events, for acting is sometimes causing or preventing processes or states of affairs or bringing objects into existence; for example, bringing it about that a top is spinning or that a door is closed, or bringing a painting into existence. Even in such cases, however, the initiation of the process, the coming about of the state of affairs, and the object’s coming into existence are events that one causes (or prevents). Therefore, we can broadly characterize our capacity to act as the capacity we have to cause or prevent ev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Entries
• Reader’s Guide
• About the Editor-in-Chief
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Entries
• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Entries
• Index