Unity of consciousness and the self

Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society

Volumn 103, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 325-352

  Rosenthal, David M ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 14944374861     PISSN: 00667374     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00075.x     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. So there is no reason to suppose mental states, of whatever type, cannot occur without being conscious. Ned Block's notion of phenomenal consciousness tacitly embodies the contrary assumption for qualitative states, since he holds that every qualitative state is phenomenally conscious. See 'On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness', The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 2 (June 1995): 227-247,
2. and 'Paradox and Cross Purposes in Recent Work on Consciousness,' Cognition, 79, 1-2 (April 2001): 197-219.
3. Locke uses the related 'internal Sense' (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited from the fourth [1700] edition by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, II, i, 4, 105.
4. For prominent modern exponents of the inner-sense model, see D. M. Armstrong, 'What is Consciousness?', in Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1980, 55-67;
5. and William G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1996, Ch. 2, 13-43,
6. and 'The Superiority of HOP to HOT,' in Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness, ed. Rocco W. Gennaro, John Benjamins Publishers, forthcoming;
7. and David M. Rosenthal, 'Varieties of Higher-Order Theory', also in Gennaro.
8. For more on the HOT model, see David M. Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming 2004.
9. I am grateful to Sydney Shoemaker for pressing this question, in 'Consciousness and Co-consciousness,' presented at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, Brussels, July 2000, and forthcoming in The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation, Axel Cleeremans, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press.
10. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, I, IV, ii, 207. Cf. Appendix, 634.
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, B133.
12. For problems about the way we are conscious of qualitative states as spatially unified within sensory fields, see David M. Rosenthal, 'Color, Mental Location, and the Visual Field,' Consciousness and Cognition, 9, 4 (December 2000): 85-93, Section 4.
13. Pace Hans Reichenbach, 'Token-Reflexive Words', Elements of Symbolic Logic, New York: Macmillan, 1947, Section 50.
14. David Kaplan, 'Demonstratives,' in Themes From Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, with the assistance of Ingrid Deiwiks and Edward N. Zalta, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 481-563, 505-507. Kaplan posit a character of 'I', which is a function whose value, for each context, is the speaker or agent of that context.
15. In 'Two Concepts of Consciousness', I wrongly suggested that we could so construe the content of HOTs (Philosophical Studies 49, 3 [May 1986]: 329-359, 346),
16. and Thomas Natsoulas subsequently drew attention to the apparent consequence that all HOTs would be conscious ('What is Wrong with the Appendage Theory of Consciousness', Philosophical Psychology VI, 2 [1993]: 137-154, 23,
17. and 'An Examination of Four Objections to Self-Intimating States of Consciousness', The Journal of Mind and Behaviour X, 1 [Winter 1989]: 63-116, 70-72). But a HOT need not explicitly be about itself to represent its target as belonging to the individual we can independently pick out as thinking that HOT.
18. It is also arguable that even if HOTs had the content that whoever has this thought is in the target state, HOTs still wouldn't refer to themselves in the way required to make one conscious of them. See David M. Rosenthal, 'Higher-Order Thoughts and the Appendage Theory of Consciousness', Philosophical Psychology, VI, 2 (1993): 155-167.
19. For more on introspective consciousness, see 'Introspection and Self-Interpretation', Philosophical Topics 28, 2 (Winter 2000): 201-233.
20. Similarly, various contemporary theorists seem to assume that introspective access to our mental states must be perceptual. See, e.g., Fred Dretske, 'Introspection', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CXV (1994/5): 263-278,
21. and Naturalizing the Mind, Ch. 2;
22. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992, 96-7 and 144;
23. Gilbert Harman, 'Explaining Objective Color in terms of Subjective Reactions', Philosophical Issues: Perception, 1 (1996): 1-17, 8;
24. reprinted in Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, Volume 1: The Philosophy of Color, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT/Bradford, 1997, 247-261;
25. and Sydney Shoemaker, 'Introspection and Phenomenal Character', Philosophical Topics, 28, 2 (Fall, 2000): 247-273.
26. See, e.g., my 'Thinking that One Thinks', in Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays, ed. Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphreys, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993, 197-223,
27. and 'Consciousness and Higher-Order Thought', Macmillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, forthcoming.
28. For Carruthers's view, see Peter Carruthers, Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
29. For difficulties in Carruthers's defence of that view, See David M. Rosenthal, 'Explaining Consciousness', in Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary and Classical Readings, ed. David J. Chalmers, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 406-421, 410-11.
30. Perhaps as in cases of so-called Multiple Personality or Dissociative Identity Disorder.
31. 'The First Person', in Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures 1974, ed. Samuel Guttenplan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 45-65.
32. On the idea that self-identification is a precondition for identifying anything else, see, e.g., Sydney Shoemaker, 'Self-Reference and Self-Awareness,' The Journal of Philosophy LXV, 19 (October 3, 1968): 555-567,
33. reprinted with slight revisions in Shoemaker, Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 6-18 (references below are to the reprinted version);
34. David Lewis, 'Attitudes De Dicto and De Se', Philosophical Review LXXXVIII, 4 (October 1979): 513-543,
35. reprinted in Lewis, Philosophical Papers, vol. I, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, 133-59;
36. and Roderick M. Chisholm, Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1976, Ch. 1, Section 5,
37. and The First Person, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, Ch. 3, esp. 29-32.
38. John Perry, 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical,' Noûs XIII, 1 (March 1979): 3-21.
39. See also P. T. Geach, 'On Beliefs about Oneself', in Geach, Logic Matters, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972, 128-129;
40. G. E. M. Anscombe, 'The First Person', in Mind and Language, ed. Samuel Guttenplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, 45-65;
41. Steven E. Boër and William G. Lycan, 'Who, Me?', Philosophical Review LXXXIX, 3 (July 1980): 427-66;
42. Hector-Neri Castaneda, 'On the Logic of Attributions of Self-Knowledge to Others', Journal of Philosophy, LXV, 15 (August 8, 1968): 439-56;
43. Roderick M. Chisholm, The First Person, Chs. 3 and 4;
44. and David Lewis, 'Attitudes De Dicto and De Se'.
45. For an argument that this type of self-reference conflicts with the HOT model, see Dan Zahavi and Josef Parnas, 'Phenomenal Consciousness and Self-Awareness: A Phenomenological Critique of Representational Theory', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5, 5-6 (1998): 687-705, Section iii.
46. Affective states, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and the like, also have intentional contents cast in such evaluative terms. See David M. Rosenthal, 'Consciousness and its Expression', Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXII (1998): 294-309, Section IV.
47. 'Postscripts to "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se"', Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, 156-159, 156.
48. See, e.g., David M. Rosenthal, 'Explaining Consciousness', Section 5; 'Consciousness and Metacognition', in Metarepresentation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Proceedings of the Tenth Vancouver Cognitive Science Conference, ed. Daniel Sperber, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 265-295, Section 5;
49. 'Consciousness, Content, and Metacognitive Judgments', Consciousness and Cognition, 9, 2, Part 1 (June 2000): 203-214, Section 5;
50. and 'Metacognition and Higher-Order Thoughts', Consciousness and Cognition, 9, 2, Part 1 (June 2000): 231-242, Section 4.
51. Sydney Shoemaker, 'Self-Reference and Self-Awareness', 8. Shoemaker thinks such immunity applies even when I think I'm performing some action.
52. See also Gareth Evans, 'Demonstrative Identification', in Evans, Varieties of Reference, ed. John McDowell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, 142-266,
53. and James Pryor, 'Immunity to Error through Misidentification', Philosophical Topics 26, 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 1999): 271-304.
54. 'Self-Knowledge and "Inner Sense"', The Royce Lectures, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LIV, 2 (June 1994): 249-314;
55. reprinted in Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 201-268, 211.
56. 'Self-Reference and Self-Awareness', 7.
57. As always, it is crucial to distinguish the mental state one is conscious of from our being conscious of it, in this case, the event of desiring or deciding from our consciousness of that event. Indeed, robust experimental findings support this distinction, by establishing that our subjective awareness of decisions to perform basic actions occurs measurably later than the events of deciding of which we are conscious. See Benjamin Libet, Curtis A. Gleason, Elwood W. Wright, and Dennis K. Pearl, 'Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness Potential)', Brain 106 Part III (September 1983): 623-642;
58. and Benjamin Libet, 'Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action', The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, 4 (December 1985): 529-539.
59. This work has been replicated and extended by Patrick Haggard, Chris Newman, and Edna Magno (1999).
60. 'On the Perceived Time of Voluntary Actions', British Journal of Psychology, 90, Part 2 (May 1999): 291-303;
61. Patrick Haggard, 'Perceived Timing of Self-initiated Actions', in Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events, ed. Gisa Aschersleben, Talis Bachmann, and Jochen Müsseier, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1999, 215-231;
62. and Patrick Haggard and Martin Eimer, 'On the Relation between Brain Potentials and Awareness of Voluntary Movements', Experimental Brain Research, 126, 1 (1999): 128-133.
63. For more on the connection between this research and intuitions about free will, see David M. Rosenthal, 'The Timing of Conscious States', Consciousness and Cognition 11, 2 (June 2002): 215-220.
64. Related considerations have been advanced by Daniel Wegner, who presents experimental evidence that the experience of conscious will results from our interpreting our intentions as the causes of our actions. Wegner argues that such an interpretation arises when we are conscious of the intention as prior to and consistent with the action and we are conscious of no other cause of the action. See Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press/A Bradford Book, 2002,
65. and Daniel Wegner and and Thalia Wheatley, 'Apparent Mental Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will', American Psychologist 54, 7 (July 1999): 480-492.
66. 'On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness', 231; emphasis Block's.