Some topics in Consciousness studies

1. What’s in the mind that we may know it?cf Shakespeare’s “What’s in the brain that ink may character?” • First part of this course is on “What properties do conscious states have, what can we know about them as sentient beings and as scientists. • How can we avoid being mislead? • I will be focusing on the methodological issues and not the metaphysical or existential ones. In particular I will discuss empirical or potentially-empirical scientific issues surrounding the study of consciousness.

2. Some topics in Consciousness studies • Psychology as The Science of Mental Life (Miller). If we want to understand mental processes we may need to examine it directly: For example, how can we infer the methods used in solving a problem or the way people understand a film or a book without introspection? • Psychophysics has a better answer, coming up later. • Early arguments against introspection. e.g., Asking the whyquestion about judgments. Examples from readings below. • Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259 • Examples include data gathered while exploring Cog Dissonance Theory • These examples assume that when someone is able to answer a question, then the relevant information was available to consciousness. Is this true?

3. Some topics in Consciousness studies 1) Psychology as The Science of Mental Life (Miller). If we want to understand mental processes we may need to examine it directly: For example, how can we infer the methods used in solving a problem without introspection? 2) Questioning introspections. e.g., Asking the Why question about judgments: Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. • Consider mental arithmetic problems 4+6, 6+9, 25+31, 27+24. Introspection of the simple operations reveals nothing. Most are experienced as one-step mental operations while others may be experienced as complex but the introspection reveals little about the nature and sequence of basic operations. Often they reflect how the task is taught.Psychophysical measures show a rich and unexpected structure.

4. What’s in the mind that we may know it? Can we directly observe what is in the mind? • The saga of the Introspective Method and its modern incarnations. Why did it fail? Reliability? Validity? • Why do the reported objects/events have the properties they seem to have? • There is a large literature from the early (classical) period in Psychology (late 1800 to the mid 1900’s) where it was argued (and is still being argued) that introspection can be made objective and reliable (see for example, … • Titchener, E. B. (1912). The Schema of Introspection. American Journal of Psychology, 23, 485-508. • Hurlburt, R. T. (2011). Investigating pristine inner experience . New York: Cambridge University Press. • Hurlburt, R. T., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2007). Describing inner experience? Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. • What is being reported in introspective reports? What are they about? • The Inevitable Stimulus Error ⊳ Titchener’s discussion: The stimulus error is the main practical problem with Introspection ⊳ The same is true with contemporary experiments on mental imagery (e.g., * Kosslyn, S. M. (1981). "The Medium and the Message in Mental Imagery: A Theory." Psychological Review 88: 46-66. * Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981). "The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge." Psychological Review 88: 16-45. * Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2003). "Return of the Mental Image: Are there really pictures in the brain?" Trends in Cog Sci7(3): 113-118. We will return to this when we discuss mental imagery!!

5. What’s in the mind that we may know it? Why do we bother with reports of conscious contents? • Is being conscious constitutiveof the mental (is it what makes some brain states mental states)? One cannot decide in advance what will be the natural kinds! • Studying conscious states / patterns for their own sake ? The sufficiency condition. • Visual Perceptionrelies on reports of how things look(constancies & illusions present interesting theoretical challenges). Is “how something looks” a conscious state? • Study of problem solving(and other slow processes: t ≥1 sec per state)relies on reports of howwe did something(e.g., arithmetic, chess). Are the states that explain how we solve problems always conscious? • Newell & Simon. Human Problem Solving. “Thinking Out Loud”Protocols • Use of Problem Behavior Graphs & inferring unreported states. • According to this theory, a non-conscious state is one that, if it became conscious, would be just like our other conscious states (e.g. we would experience it as something we perceived). [Note: There is more to this assumption than meets the eye!]

6. What’s in the mind that we may know it? Why do we bother with reports of conscious contents? • Descriptions of what we see something as are essential in the development of a proper statement of the research question. • Intuitions and judgmentsare essential in the study of language (syntax, presuppositions, ...)What are intuitions? Are they a form of unconscious access? • Study of clinical cases (dissociations):memory, split-brains, emotions, pain, ... • Is consciousness unitary? Is this a conceptual requirement or an empirical claim? • We will review cases involving split brains (Sperry) and various damages (patient DF – Goodale) , Parfit (1987) • Savants (videos of Daniel Tammet, XXX)

7. Some pros and cons of using reports of conscious states: • Are there a priori reasons we why we should expect reports of conscious states/processes to be correct, or to be wrong? • Who could provide a more accurate report of ‘what’s in my mind’ than me? After all it is myexperience and my mind! (“a penny for your thoughts”) • Where does the information I report come from, if not from my examining my own beliefs or thoughts or imaginings –my own mental contents ? But … • Even if your perception was veridical, “there's many a slip twixt cup and lip!” …between the event and the report of it (cf Signal Detection Theory) • Reporting conscious experience is subject to cognitive influences, even more than reporting perception of things in the world. (SDT can’t be used for reports of mental events). Is there such a thing as an illusion of one’s experience, the way there are visual illusions?

8. Some pros and cons of using reports of conscious states: • Reports of Whyyou did something are very often wrong: See examples in the 1977 paper cited earlier by Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). • Even your belief about whether you willedsome action of yours may be wrong or illusory (Who willed Dr Strangelove’s hand to move? Called the Alien Hand Syndrome – see Wikipedia) • The many dissociated visual-motor system phenomena bring into question the widely held belief in the unity of consciousness • Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Wegner, D. M. (2003). The mind’s best trick: how we experience conscious will. Trends in Cog Sci, 7(2), 65-69. • Goodale, M., & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

9. What are we to make of detailed reports of conscious states? • What might we realistically expect to know about our own mental states from first-person observations and reports? • Do we always know how the object of our conscious experience in some sense appears to us –i.e., what it looks, sounds, or feels like? • What exactly does that mean? Does it entail implicit judgments of similarity. Are we always right in such judgments (of how things seem to us)? • In the case of a mental image, must we know what it is an image of ? • Is it possible for us not to recognize an object in our mental image? • Even if we do not recognize it, must we at least see it as having certain pictorial properties (e.g., size, shape, orientation, location, color…)? • Must we be able to recognize its format, as opposed to its content! (Representations have both form and content. More on this later!) • More importantly: Must our image embody a commitment (even a wrong or impossible one) to such properties as size, shape, orientation or color? Could it simply fail to have a value on one of these properties?

10. What if the answers to such questions defy our intuitions: What would that mean? • How committed are we as scientists to how things seem to us as human observers, and how we feel they must be, even if these folk notions are sometimes violated by data and logic? • One problem faced by social sciences is that consistency with broader concerns often forces us to accept a view that is counterintuitive and in conflict with our informal ‘folk’ view.* • On the other hand we shouldn’t discount a common sense folk view because it is inconsistent with a dominant scholarly Zeitgeist.For example we should not dismiss out of hand the idea that people behave as they do because of what they know, believe and want. • In what follows we will rehearse some ideas about what is in the mind, as viewed by science, philosophy and your (or Fodor’s) grandmother. * The same is, of course, also true of physical sciences; the difference there is that not everyone feels they are experts in the subject, whose intuitions should take priority over the empirical and logical constraints.

11. Some topics in Consciousness studies • Psychology as The Science of Mental Life(Wm James, George Miller). If we want to understand mental processes we may need to examine it directly: For example, how can we infer the methods used in solving a problem without introspection? • Questioning introspections. e.g., Asking the Why question about judgments. An influential paper showed how bad we were at it: Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. • Consider the mental arithmetic problems 4+6, 6+9, 25+31, 27+24. Introspection of the simple operations reveals nothing. Most are experienced as one-step mental operations while others may be experienced as complex but the introspection reveals little about the nature and sequence of basic operations. Psychophysical measures show a rich and unexpected structure.

12. Examples where introspection does not help • When we study how people do mental arithmetic problems such as 4+6, 6+9, 25+31, 27+24. Introspection reveals the simple ones as one-step mental operations while others may be experienced as complex but the introspection reveals little about the nature and sequence of basic operations. • Psychophysical measures show a rich and unexpected structure. Even more surprising are problems such as judging which of these pairs of numbers is larger (/smaller): 3-2, 2-5, 9-8, 1-9, … Careful reaction-time experiments reveal that larger differences result in faster times, but also that the size of the smaller digit matters (smaller = faster). • Memorize a set of letters (e.g. B, D, C, A, F). Then you are given a single probe letter (e.g., D or N). Indicate whether the probe is a member of the memorized set. How would you expect the reaction time to vary with the number of letters in the memory set? What about the case where the probe was nota member of the memory set?

13. Studying Mental Processes: without using introspection #2 Memorize a set of letters (e.g. B, D, C, A, F). Then you are given a single probeletter (e.g., D or N). Indicate (e.g., by pressing one of two buttons) whether the probe was a member of the memorized set or not. How would you expect the reaction time to vary with the number of letters in the memory set? Would you expect the pattern to be different when the probe was not a member of the memory set? What possible process might you infer from your introspection of doing the task.

14. Possible patterns of mental processes • Can Experimental Cognitive Science make use of introspection? • Might we do better by paying attention to what our mind is telling us? • Maybe not. This term we will consider the advantages and disadvantages of paying attention to our view of our mind from the inside. • Next we will examine an experiment which shows nicely how we can find out what’s happening in your mind without seeing it directly.

15. One possible pattern of reaction times

16. Another possible pattern of reaction times

17. Compare possible patterns of reaction times

18. Over the next few months we will see a large number of examples in which the tacit use of introspection failed to help us to understand how the cognitive system works and in fact it led us astray.

19. But first we will look at some clinical cases to see how cognitive capacities cluster and to see whether there are capacities that seem utterly beyond (useful) introspection • Daniel Tammet’s incredible arithmetic … and his introspective reports • Split Brain patients (Gazzaniga) • Balint patients • Blind patients • Parfit - Divided Minds: Divided Minds and Nature of Persons The long (Superset) reading list is at: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn/Consciousness_2014/