Notes: Lecture 1
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Lecture 1: Problems of Consciousness: Introspection
In the first part of this course will be concerned primarily with the content of conscious states, although
in a few cases I will touch on the question of the qualitative nature of this state. Although I may say
something about whether consciousness is, or must be, unitary. I will also briefly raise the question whether
the state or the process one reports when the qualitative character resembles vision is the same as the state
one reports on when it involves some other modality. In other words what role does the qualitative character
(whether it feels like seeing or hearing or …) play in cognition. Also I will mention, but not discuss to any
depth, the question whether our report on the content of conscious episodes can be wrong – i.e. can we be
mistaken about what we are conscious of? Those are very big questions so I will only discuss them if I find
an enticing reading to follow.
The view of consciousness held by philosophers and by Cognitive Scientists are, with a few exceptions,
quite different. I will begin with the Cognitive Scientists’ views which, ever the last century have tended to
focus on methodological issues, in particular; how we can study consciousness even when we don’t know in
any detail what a theory in this area would need to explain. We scarcely have any idea what consciousness is,
except, possibly, when it occurs in the mind of the investigator – and even that assumes that it, whatever it is,
is something that has a location, at least in the sense entailed by saying it is “in the mind”. In speaking about
conscious states we generally begin with first-person descriptions – of what it’s like to be conscious of
something. This is already a serious problem as Thomas Nagel has shown (Nagel, 1947). But as a science
we want quickly to go beyond describing what it’s like to be in a particular sort of state. The fervent hope is
that the description we start off with will capture a natural kind that will eventually connect with other parts
of cognitive science and neuroscience. So even when we give first-person accounts we expect there to be
core properties that generalize across instances and across individuals and that will eventually ground out in
some way in causal properties.
In the first part of the course we will begin with a view from psychology. For at least the first half of the
20th century, psychology was focused on describing states of consciousness as such. The method associated
with this movement was called introspection and many proponents of this method argued that with proper
understanding of this term and with proper training, the method could be an objective way of observing
consciousness – its structure and its content (what phenomenal properties it embodies, such as color, shape,
movement, and so on). A great deal of time was spent on making introspection reliable (repeatable) and
valid (related to the object of the experience in a consistent way). There was also concern with what
Titchener called the Stimulus Error, in which observers reported properties of what their conscious states
were about – what things in the actual or possible world1 they depicted – rather than the experience itself (we
will have a lot more to say about that when we discuss mental images). We will read parts of papers that
argue for the Introspective Method, as well as papers that argue that introspection was doomed as a scientific
method because the object of study was essentially private and could not be publically shared. These
arguments were conducted with considerable passion and, as far as I can see, did not affect the science of the
time. What did affect the science was the obvious historical fact that theories based on introspection seemed
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The very idea of a logically possible but nonexistent (imaginary) world that we can experience consciously is problematic. For
example, could we imagine invisible physical objects or objects that cannot be examined from different perspectives (e.g., that
have no backs or sides)? Or worlds in which there are 4-dimentional objects (as assumed by some Inca mythologies or by
special relativity)? Or even higher-order spacetime manifolds, such as the 26 spatial dimensions hypothesized by one version of
String Theory?
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to go nowhere and eventually this was seen (correctly) as lack of progress of a science based on introspection
(if it was a science).
In this course we will encounter many instances of arguments against introspection as a way of accessing
mental states so as to help us understand mental processes. We present a number of arguments against the
assumption that introspection gives us direct access to mental states (and therefor mental processes) that are
not available by any other means. While the examples illustrate how accepting introspection as a uniquely
privileged source of evidence about mental states carries the risk of leading us astray, they fail to do what
early stages of science typically do; provide ways to narrow or circumscribe or idealize the relevant sources
of evidence and the relevant phenomena. In the case of consciousness as a natural domain one might have to
confine the study to empirically derived domains within which some empirical regularities could be found
and to which the grand arguments did not apply (e.g., that did not subsume what some have called the “hard
problem” of consciousness) 2. But this is Fodor’s territory.
Suppose we accept that there are conscious phenomena that form the core of patterns of cognition that
can be explained in naturalistic terms. There still remains the problem of specifying what conscious
observations (introspections) tell us about mental processes. What they don’t tell us is the most obvious
interpretation of our first-person observations. For example, they do not tell us why we believe one thing
rather than another, nor do they tell us the form and content of our thoughts. Take the question; what are you
thinking? People used to say, when they saw you staring into the middle distance, “a penny for your
thoughts.” A penny doesn’t buy much these days but you should still take the dare because neither they nor
you can say with any confidence whether your report of your thoughts of the moment are veridical. The
evidence suggests that what you are doing in answering the question is pretty much the same as what some
bystander would do in answering the same question about your thoughts, given that he knows the same
relevant details as you do. In other words what both you and the third person would do is compute (or
reason, or infer) what must have been going through your mind. There is even evidence (discussed by
Gopnik, 1993), that children’s first-person reports are also the result of inferences. These assumptions will
become clearer and more directly relevant later when we speak of reports of particular sorts of conscious
contents, namely those we call mental imagery.
Do we need to appeal to conscious contents in cognitive science?
The shadow of Behaviorism no longer haunts cognitive science. When the human observer that we are
studying (the “subject”) utters something, we do not merely record it as a response, we consider what the
subject was trying to tell us (e.g., I didn’t hear what you said. Or, Did you have garlic for lunch?). As with
many seemingly radical changes, this rediscovery of mentalistic or folk-psychology initially produced a
science as radically confused as the one it displaced. In this brave new world we typically take a subject’s
statement as a literal report of what he or she was thinking (even putting aside self-promotion or
acquiescence). In studying such cognitive processes as those involved in problem solving we often appeal to
subjective states of consciousness and we are equally often lead astray when we do so, since reports of the
content of conscious mental states are inevitably reconstructions that depend what we believe might have
been involved in the mental processes, or on tacit theories we hold about the role of mental states. And we
will see that such tacit theories, often based on folk psychology, are likely more often than not to be false.
An excellent summary of some of the arguments can be found in Fodor’s notes for this class, as well as in Wikipedia
(http://tinyurl.com/nmpm64e).
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Yet there are contexts where we appeal to properties of conscious states because there is no other way to
obtain evidence of mental processes and because the states that we advert to are our very own mental states,
and shy would we mislead ourselves (we will see some reasons why later in this chapter). True, in some of
these cases the consciously accessible states might provide initial hypotheses that must subsequently be
validated. On the other hand so would the day’s news, the weather, or any other fact you have in mind.
That’s what makes prediction difficult – once you get past the early-vision stage the mind is so holistic!
Let’s look at some examples of the sorts of theories one might come up with if one takes the content of
your conscious experience as primary (and privileged). The description of your experience might be a
complex one and might be an accurate characterization of your conscious experience, but not of the way you
solve the problem. Consider, for example, this description of how we solve the “visual analogies” problems
like those shown in Figure 1 below). The art critic and writer Rudolf Arnheim (1969) criticized
contemporary views (based on information-processing ideas) of how visual analogy problems might be
solved. Arnheim rejects the idea (which cognitivist theories typically assume) that the mind has to engage in
what might be viewed as great deal of ratiocination, which are represented in such models as symbol
manipulation, involving pattern-matching, comparison, and inference. Not so, claims Arnheim. When
people solve such problems they go through a quite different sequence of mental states; for example, ones
that involve a “rich and dazzling experience” of “instability,” of “fleeting, elusive resemblances,” and of
being “suddenly struck by” certain perceptual relationships. Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus (1979) accuses
cognitive scientists of not taking seriously such distinctions as between “focal” and “fringe” consciousness
and of ignoring a “sense of oddness” about the information processing story. We are guilty as charged. But
then we take the theoretical task to be one of building a rational reconstruction of processes that are sufficient
to carry out the task. Explaining how it feels is certainly not a primary goal – and in fact many of us think
it’s a distraction that more often takes us away from the goal of explaining how we think, rather than
illuminating it.
Consider how one goes about applying the evidence of introspection to the task discussed by Rudolph
Arnheim: solving visual analogies problems of the sort commonly found in IQ tests. In the examples below
1a is an easy case while 1b is harder because it is ambiguous. In either case try to produce a simple
introspective report of what went on in your mind as you examined the figures trying to find a solution to
problem 1a of completing; “A is to B as 1 is to what figure?” and then repeat this exercise for panel b which
continues the analogy of Panel 1a but presents two different possible solutions; do you prefer the solution
labeled 1 or that labeled 2? How is this reflected in your introspective report? Try solving the puzzles and
see whether it produces the flourish of pyrotechnics described by Arnheim – not because we doubt his
description, but to see how confident you are in the description but, more important, whether it enhances
your understanding of how you solve problems of this kind.
Figure 1a Easy geometrical analogies
Figure 1b ambiguous analogies
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To illustrate the inability of introspection to provide an understanding of a task carried out in perception,
including in short-term memory that receives the sensory information, consider what goes on in a rapid
search task where the target item may or may not be in the STM store. Sternberg (1966) showed that
rapid search through recently memorized sets of items obeys surprising regularities. Take the case
where a person is asked to memorized a list of some 3 to 7 letters or digits or other individual objects
such as words. In the experiment the observer is asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether a
“probe” item presented from the same class as the memorized list (e.g., a letter or digit) was in the
memorized list. People can do this very rapidly and accurately. But asked how they did it they are
either at a loss or they confabulate some superficially plausible story. But standard psychophysical
methods can disentangle the plausible intuitive or introspection-based options. The standard way of
doing this is by using a reaction time measure. There is independent evidence that the time taken to
carry out a task is generally a good indicator of how many steps or subtasks had to be taken to
complete the problem. So, using reaction-time methodology, Sternberg and others, showed that the
reaction time to respond “yes” or “no” to the question“ was a token of that probe in the memory set
provided a good measure of how the search was conducted, even though it may not have been
observed consciously. The critical variables were (1) the number of items in the memory set, (2)
whether a token of the probe was identical to one of the items in the memory set, (3) the ordinal
position of the matching memory item in the presentation of the memory set, (4) the reaction time to
respond in each case. Considering just the set-size, the present-vs-absent status of the probe item and
(in some studies) the ordinal position of the critical target item in the memory set as it was presented
to the observer. Considering only the set size, the present-vs-absent status of the probe item and
reaction time, we can expect the results to tit one of the following three patterns, shown in the Figures
2a, 2b or 2c. Of those, the possible pattern of increasing reaction time when the number of items
increases from 2 to 5 is shown in Figure 2. The question we can now ask is, which of these is more
consonant with one’s introspection in doing the task?
Figure 2. Several of the possible functions relating reaction time to number of search items and presence or absence of
a matching probe item in the memory set (based on Sternberg, 1966). Thus the case that matches one’s experience in
doing the task is either (a) or (c), whereas the actual experimentally observed case is the least plausible case (b).
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Subjects debriefed after the experiment rarely opt for (b) or (c) – the impression is that the task is extremely
fast and not obviously sensitive to either the number of potential matches (number of items in the search set)
although the absence of a matching item in the memory set, a pattern partially fulfilled by case (a), is selected by
subjects, particularly ones who correctly anticipate that absence, even if it makes the heart grow fonder, is a
condition that generally requires a second look (an effect observed in many experiments). But figure (b) is
more puzzling. It shows that the time taken increases linearly as the cardinality of the search set increases.
Figure (b) shows merely that it takes longer to report the non-occurrence of a match, which is a widely observed
phenomenon. In Figure (c), the difference in slope between the case where the probe item matches some
memory item is also understandable insofar as observers are in a position to announce a match as soon as they
encounter an item in their search. As long as the probe item is selected at random from among the possible
memory items the observer can announce a hit as soon as a match is encountered, which on the average will be
in half as many comparisons for matching targets as for non-matching targets since that cannot be decided until
all search items have been examined. And the possibility of establishing the match-nonmatch status of the
matching probe in half the number of comparisons would lead us to expect the slope of the match cases to be
approximately half of that for the non-match cases – i.e., we would expect figure (c) to apply. What is observed,
however, is a pattern resembling figure (b), which has been referred to as “exhaustive search”.
Problems with Introspection
I will review studies that implicitly assume the validity of reports of conscious mental states/processes,
and I will ask whether there are other ways to discover how the mind works that are not subject to the same
tendency to succumb to introspection and folk psychology:
 Study of perception (What do you see now?). Bistable precepts and competition between two percepts
in cortical switching. Apparent motion and solutions to the correspondence problem.
 Study of language competence (“knowledge of language” or tacit knowledge of the grammar of your
language)
 Study of memory, problem solving and other cognitive processes (esp Newell & Simon’s Problem
Behavior Graph based on thinking-out-loud protocols).
 Use of mental imagery in solving problems and recall.
 Study of pain (factors affecting perceived location and subjective intensity; cognitive penetrability)
 Study of clinical deviations of consciousness, including apparent deficits and dissociations, such as in
“split brain” patients, chronic pain, memory of subjective states, relation between emotional states and
other functional states.
On the other side of the ledger, there are many examples where accepting reports of subjective
experiences leads one into untenable assumptions about the mind. My main culprit is mental imagery but
there are some other examples too, such as the assumption that we think in English.
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Consciousness Notes: Some topics to be covered
Introspection and its problems
 The early goal of pure introspection (Wundt, Titchener,…)
 Examples of hybrid descriptions (DES)3 (Russell T. Hurlburt vs Eric Schwitzgebel)
 Recordings of Melanie and what they tell us about the nature of mind and mental processes.
 The experience of thinking or of our thoughts?
 Do we think in our natural language? (The Linguistic Code?)
 Do we think in Mental Images? (The Visual-Image Code)
 Do we think in terms of other sensory experiences? (Or other sensory codes & schemas).
 Are the sensory objects epiphenomenal? (and what does that mean?)
 Is the experience of hearing speech or seeing an image from memory an illusion?
 The experience of memory (recall)
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Is the sequence of recall governed by the architecture of the cognitive/memory system, or by how
the world is.
 The most common new theory (announced frequently) fits the template, “Consciousness is having an X
in your brain” where at various times X has been “working memory,” synchronous activation (or 30 Hz
standing wave patterns) in the brain, an anticipatory motor plan for acting upon the object of one’s
conscious experience. None of these proposals face the “explanatory gap” bridging the qualitative feel
(or the qualia) that is needed to answer the question; Why does being stimulated this way or in this
location, with this pattern, result in the experience of (say) red or of ice-cold, as opposed to green, or to
loud or high pitched or a low base note or sweet, or tired, or
References cited
(Dunlap, 1912; James, 1982 / 1890 Chapter 7 ; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Titchener, 1912; Washburn, 1922)
Dunlap, K. (1912). The case against introspection. Psychological Review, 19, 404-413.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(1), 1-14.
James, W. (1982 / 1890). Text Book of Psychology (Chapter 7: The Methods and Snares of Psychology).
London: MacMillan.
Nagel, T. (1947). What it is like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.
Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.
Sternberg, S. (1966). High-Speed Scanning in Human Memory. Science, 153, 652-654.
Titchener, E. B. (1912). The Schema of Introspection. American Journal of Psychology, 23, 485-508.
Washburn, M. F. (1922). Introspection as an objective method. Psychological Review, 29, 89-112.
See also: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn/Consciousness_2014/Dissociation/Parfit1987_dividedmind.pdf
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Description Experience Sampling (Hurlburt)
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