Philosophers have noted for many centuries that we are conscious of the perceptual world in ways that differ from our awareness of concepts. Perception has qualities like color, taste, and texture. Concepts like "democracy" or "mathematics" do not. And yet, ordinary language is full of expressions like "I am conscious of his dilemma," "I consciously decided to commit murder" and the like. Abstract beliefs, knowledge, intentions, decisions, and the like, are said to be conscious at times. And certainly our operational definition would allow this: If someone claims to be conscious of a belief in mathematics, and we can verify the accuracy of this claim somehow, it would indeed fit the definition of an "accurate report of being conscious of something." But can we really say that people are conscious of a belief that has no experienced qualities like size, shape, color, or location in time and space?

      We will suppose that it is meaningful to be conscious of some abstract concept. We can point to a number of contrastive facts about our consciousness of abstract concepts. For example, the reader is probably not conscious right now of the existence of democracy, but if we were to ask whether democracy exists, this abstract fact will probably become consciously available. That is, we can contrast occasions when a concept is in memory but not "conscious" to the times when it is available "consciously." Further, there are  reasons to believe that conscious access to concepts becomes less conscious with practice and predictability, just as images become less conscious with practice. Thus consciousness of abstract concepts seems to behave much like the conscious experience of percepts and images. We will speak of conscious experience of percepts and images, and conscious access to abstract concepts, intentions, beliefs, and the like.

The logic of contrastive analysis is much like the experimental method, and some of the same arguments can be raised against it. In an experiment, if A seems to be a necessary condition for B, we can always question whether A does not disguise some other factor C. This question can be raised about all of the contrasts: What if the contrasts are not minimal: what if something else is involved? What if automatic skills are unconscious because they are coded in a different, procedural format, which cannot be read consciously?  What if subliminal stimulation is unconscious not because the stimulus has low energy, but because the duration of the resulting neural activity is too short? These are all possibilities. In the best of all possible worlds we would run experiments to test all the alternative hypotheses. For the time being, we will rely mainly on the extensive evidence that is already known, and try to account for it with the smallest set of principles that work. But any explanation is open to revision. 

... but is it really consciousness?
 

      A skeptical reader may well agree with much of what we have said so far, but still wonder whether we are truly describing conscious experience, or whether, instead, we can only deal with incidental phenomena associated with it. Of course, in a scientific framework one cannot expect to produce some ultimate, incorrigible understanding of "the thing itself." Rather, one can aim for an incremental advance in knowledge. No matter how much we learn about conscious experience, there may always be some irreducible core of "residual subjectivity". In this connection it is worth reminding ourselves that physicists are still working toward a deeper understanding of gravity, a centerpiece of physical science for almost four hundred years. Yet early developments in the theory of gravity were fundamental, and provided the first necessary steps on the road to current theory. We can work toward a reasonable theory, but not an ultimate one. These considerations temper the quest for better understanding. And yet, scientific theories in general claim to approach the "thing itself," at least more so than competing theories. Physics does claim to understand and explain the planetary system, and biology really does seem to be gaining a genuine understanding of the mechanism of inheritance. These topics, too, were considered shocking and controversial in their time. Generally in science, if it looks like a rabbit, acts like a rabbit, and tastes like a rabbit, we are invited to presume that it is indeed a rabbit. Similarly, if something fits all the empirical constraints one can find on conscious experience, it is likely to be as close to it as we can get at this time. Of course, any claim that the current theory deals with conscious experience as such depends on the reliability, validity, and completeness of the evidence.

      It is customary in cognitive psychology to avoid this debate through the use of scientific euphemism like "attention," "perception," "exposure to the stimulus," "verbal report,"  "strategic control" and the like. These terms have their uses, but they also tend to disguise the real questions. "Strategic control" is a good way to refer to the loss of voluntary control over automatic skills. But using this term skirts the question of the connecting between conscious experience and voluntary, "conscious" control. Once we label things in terms of conscious experience, this question can no longer be evaded.

Conscious event as shape of unconscious contexts. 

 We treat a context as a relatively enduring system that shapes conscious experience, access, and control, without itself becoming conscious. The range of such contextual influences is simply enormous. 

        In knowing the visual world, we routinely assume that light shines from above. As a result, when we encounter an ambiguous scene, such as a photograph of moon craters, we tend to interpret them as bumps rather than hollows, when the sun's rays come from the bottom of the photo. The assumed direction of the light is unconscious of course, but it profoundly influences our conscious visual experience. There are many cases like this in language perception and production, in thinking, memory access, action control, and the like. The contrasts between unconscious systems that influence conscious events and the conscious experiences themselves, provide demanding constraints on any theory of conscious experience. 

         Theoretically, we will treat contexts as coalitions of unconscious specialized processors that are already committed to a certain way of processing their information, and which have ready access to the Global Workspace. Thus they can compete against, or cooperate with incoming global messages. There is no arbitrariness to the ready global access which contexts are presumed to have. Privileged access to the Global Workspace simply results from a history of cooperation and competition with other contexts, culminating in a hierarchy of contexts that dominates normal access to the Global Workspace.  

         We may sometimes want to treat "context" not as a thing but as a relationship. We may want to say that the assumption that light comes from above "is contextual with respect to" the perception of concavity in photographs of the moon's craters or that a certain implicit moral framework "is contextual with respect to" one's feelings of self-esteem. In some models context is a process or a relational event --- part of the functioning of a network that may never be stated explicitly. In our approach we want to have contexts "stand out", so that we can talk about them, and symbolize them in conceptual diagrams. There is no need to become fixated on whether context is a thing or a relationship.  In either case contextual information is something unconscious that profoundly shapes whatever becomes conscious.  Conscious percepts and images are qualitative events, while consciously accessible intentions, expectations, and concepts are non-qualitative contents. People report qualitative conscious experiences of percepts, mental images, feelings, and the like. In general, we can call these perceptual or imaginal. Qualitative events have experienced qualia like warmth, color, taste, size, discrete temporal beginnings and endings, and location in space. There is a class of representations that is not experienced like percepts or images, but which we will consider to be "conscious" when they can be accurately reported. Currently available beliefs, expectations, and intentions --- in general, conceptual knowledge --- provide no consistent qualitative experience. Yet qualitative and non-qualitative conscious events have much in common, so that it is useful to talk about both as "conscious". But how do we explain the difference? Concepts, as opposed to percepts and images, allow us to get away from the limits of the perceptual here-and-now, and even From the imaginable here-and-now, into abstract domains  representation. Conceptual processes commonly make use of imagined events, but they are not the same as the images and inner speech that they may produce. Images are concrete, but concepts, being abstract, can represent the general case of some set of events. However, abstraction does not tell the whole story, because we can have expectations and "set" effects even with respect to concrete stimuli. Yet these expectations are not experienced as mental images. The opposition between qualitative and non-qualitative "conscious" events will provide a theme that will weave throughout the following chapters. 

         Both qualitative perceptual imaginal events and non- qualitative "conceptual" events will be treated as conscious in this book. The important thing is to respect both similarities and differences as we go along, and ultimately to explain these as best we can.         

Is there a lingua franca, a trade language of the mind? 

        If different processors have their own codes, is there a common code understood by all?  Does any particular code have privileged status? Fodor has suggested that there must be a lingua mentis, as it was called in medieval philosophy, a language of the mind. Further, at least one mental language must be a lingua franca, a trade language like Swahili, or English in many parts of the world. Processors with specialized local codes face a translation trade-off that is not unlike the one we find in international affairs. The United Nations delegate from the Fiji Islands can listen in the General Assemply to Chinese, Russian, French or English versions of a speech; but none of these may be his or her speaking language. Translation is a chore, and a burden on other processes. Yet a failure to take on this chore presents the risk of failing to understand and communicate accurately to other specialized domains. This metaphor may not be far-fetched. Any system with local codes and global concerns faces such a trade-off. 

         We suggest later in this book that the special role of "qualitative" conscious contents --- perception and imagination --- may have something to do with this matter.. This is one criterion for a lingua franca. Further, some conscious events are known to penetrate to otherwise inaccessible neural functions. For example, it was long believed that autonomic functions were quite independent from conscious control. One simply could not change heart-rate, peristalsis, perspiration, and sexual arousal at will. But in the last decade two ways to gain conscious access to autonomic functions have been discovered. First, autonomic functions can be controlled by biofeedback training, at least temporarily. Biofeedback always involves conscious perceptual feedback from the autonomic event. Second and even more interesting, these functions can be controlled by emotionally evocative mental images --- visual, auditory, and somatic --- which are, of course, also qualitative conscious events. We can increase heart-rate simply by vividly imagining a fearful, sexually arousing, anger-inducing, or effortful event, and decrease it by imagining something peaceful, soothing, and supportive. The vividness of the mental image --- its conscious, qualitative availability --- seems to be a factor in gaining access to otherwise isolated parts of the nervous system.  

         Both of these phenomena provide support for the notion that conscious qualitative percepts and images are involved in a mental lingua franca. We suggest later in this book that all percepts and images convey spatio-temporal information, which is known to be processed by many different brain structures. Perceived and imagined events always reside in some mental place and time, so that the corresponding neural event must encode spatial and temporal information. A spatio-temporal code may provide one lingua franca for the nervous system. Finally, we will suggest that even abstract concepts may evoke fleeting mental images    

Are there fleeting "conscious" events that are difficult to report, but which have observable effects?  

       William James waged a vigorous war against the psychological unconscious, in part because he believed that there are rapid "conscious" events which we simply do not remember, and which in retrospect we believe to be unconscious. There is indeed good evidence that we retrospectively underestimate our awareness of most events. We know from the Sperling phenomenon that people can have fleeting access to many details in visual memory which they cannot retrieve a fraction of a second later.  Further, there are important theoretical reasons to suppose that people may indeed have rapid, hard-to-recall conscious "flashes," which have indirect observable effects. But making this notion testable is a problem.  

         There are other sources of support for the idea of fleeting conscious events. In the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon people often report a fleeting conscious image of the missing word, "going by too quickly to grasp." Often we feel sure that the momentary image îwasï the missing word, and indeed, if people in such a state are presented with the correct word, they can recognize it very quickly and distinguish it from incorrect words, suggesting that the fleeting conscious "flash" was indeed accurate. Any expert who is asked a novel question can briefly review a great deal of information that is not entirely conscious, but that can be made conscious at will, to answer the question. Thus a chess master can give a quick, fairly accurate answer to the question, "Did you ever see this configuration of chess pieces before?" Some of this quick review process may involve semi-conscious images. And in the process of understanding an imageable sentence, we sometimes experience a fleeting mental image, flashing rapidly across the Mind's Eye like a darting swallow silhouetted against the early morning sky --- just to illustrate the point. 

         One anecdotal source of information about conscious "flashes" comes from highly creative people who have taken the trouble to pay attention to their own fleeting mental processes. Albert Einstein was much interested in this topic, and discussed it often with his friend Max Wertheimer, the Gestalt psychologist. In reply to an inquiry Einstein reported:  

         "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. ... this vague ... combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought. ... (These elements) are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the  ... associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. (But the initial stage is purely) visual and motor...

         About the turn of the century many psychologists tried to investigate the fleeting images that seem to accompany abstract thought. As Woodworth and Schlossberg recall:  

        "When O's (Observers) were asked what mental images they had (while solving a simple problem) their reports showed much disagreement, as we should expect from the great individual differences found in the study of imagery ... Some reported visual images, some auditory, some kinesthetic, some verbal. Some reported vivid images, some mostly vague and scrappy ones. Some insisted that at the moment of a clear flash of thought they had no true images at all but only an awareness of some relationship or other "object" in (a) broad sense. Many psychologists would not accept testimony of this kind, which they said must be dueto imperfect introspection. So arose the imageless - thought' controversy which raged for some years and ended in a stalemate." The possibility of fleeting conscious flashes raises difficult but important questions. Such events, if they exist, may not strictly meet our operational criterion of accurate, verifiable  reports of experienced events. We may be able to test their existence indirectly with dual-task  measures, to record momentary loading of  limited capacity. And we may be able to show clear conscious flashes appearing and disappearing under well-defined circumstances. Pani's work shows that with practice, mental images tend to become unconscious, even though the information in those images continues to be used to perform a matching task. Further, the images again become conscious and reportable when the task is made more difficult. Perhaps there is an intermediate stage where the images are more and more fleeting, but still momentarily conscious. People who are trained to notice such fleeting events may be able to report their existence more easily than those who ignore them --- but how can we test the accuracy of their reports? The evidence for fleeting glimpses of inner speech is weaker than the evidence for automatic images. Some clinical techniques which  are based on the recovery of automatic thoughts are quite effective in treating clinical depression and anxiety. It is hard to prove however that the thoughts that patients seem to recover to explain sudden irrational sadness or anxiety, are in fact the true, underlying automatic thoughts. Perhaps patients make them up to rationalize their experience, to make it seem  more understandable and controllable. In principle, however, it is possible to run an experiment much like  Pani's to test the existence of automatic, fleetingly conscious thoughts. 

         In the remainder of this book we work to build a solid theoretical structure that strongly implies the existence of such fleeting "conscious" events. We consequently predict their existence, pending the development of better tools for assessing them.  

         Should we call such quick flashes, if they exist, "conscious"? Some would argue that this is totally improper,  and perhaps it is (B. Libet, personal communication). A better term might be "rapid, potentially conscious, limited-capacity-loading events." Ultimately, of course, the label matters less than the idea itself and its measurable consequences. This issue seems to complicate life at first, but it will appear later in this book to solve several interesting puzzles. 

We have sketched an approach to the problem of understanding conscious experience. The basic method is to gather firmly established contrasts between comparable conscious and unconscious processes, and to use them to constrain theory. As we do this we shall find that the basic metaphors used traditionally to describe the various aspects of conscious experience --- the Activation Metaphor, the Tip-of-the-Iceberg Metaphor, the Novelty Hypothesis, and the Theater Metaphor --- are still very useful. All of the traditional metaphors contain some truth. The whole truth may include all of them, and more.  

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