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Consciousness has long been a subject of interest in philosophy and religion but only relatively recently has it become subject to scientific investigation. Research, once limited to separate inquiries in discrete disciplines, is converging, but there is no recognized entry point to the field, no comprehensive summary. The Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 2-Volume Set is that reference.
Coverage encompasses a summary of major research and scientific thought regarding the nature of consciousness; the neural circuitry involved; how the brain, body, and world interact; and our understanding of subjective states. The work includes contributions covering neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence to provide a comprehensive backdrop to recent and ongoing investigations into the nature of conscious experience from philosophical, psychological, and biological perspectives.
March 2009 • Hardback, 1,400 pp.
ISBN: 9780123738646
Introductory List Price: $400.00 / €340.00 / £240.00
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The study of consciousness, like psychology, has a long past and a short history, but the history part is shorter and the past much longer than psychology’s. Topics now included in the study of consciousness have been matters of fundamental existential human concern since prehistoric times. The earliest ceremonial burial sites, which suggest a belief in a sentient essence independent of the body, may be 70,000 years old. Only very recently has the approach to these issues been substantially different from those of the previous millennia. The difference between now and then is an empirical approach to consciousness and mental activity. This difference comes from the change in worldview that led to what we now call science and was a long time coming to the study of the mind.
The application of an empirical criterion for evidence brought consciousness into the domain of "normal science." Everything from the older approach doesn’t get into normal science, however, only the few parts that follow the rules. The rules include no supernatural explanations and no untestable ones, of which the supernatural is a subset. The anti-supernatural rule constrains us to physical explanations, which are for the most part biological. The result is that some questions unthinkable in the prescientific tradition, such as neural correlates of consciousness, become important. Another previously unthinkable idea is that thought is a product of neural activity. (Imagine that! Reason founded on neurons?) Still another unthinkable idea is that some means is needed to maintain the coherence and continuity of experience. If the self is a spiritual, supernatural entity, continuity is in its nature. If it is a product of brain activity we need a neurophysiological explanation of how continuity and unity can come from the massively parallel operation of the brain. Articles by Schmidt, Vallacher, Bermudez, Olson, and Gallagher cover theories of the self. These are just a few of the previously unthinkable explanations needed in a science of consciousness.
One of the developments that put the study of consciousness on a solid empirical footing is the array of neural imaging tools that let us see relations between awareness and brain activity. The images themselves are exciting because they give a glimpse of what the brain is doing when we are consciously seeing, remembering, thinking our own thoughts and so on. We can see changes in brain activity as the focus of attention switches from one image to another, for example. In addition to the scientific value of such findings, there is what could be called rhetorical value: the techniques drive home the point that what is going on in the mind is going on in the brain.
Articles by Haynes, Kouider, and Smythes, Goodale, and Sterzer and others in this collection report some of the scientific progress made through these tools. Several generalizations can be drawn from these contributions. One is that perception, and presumably other conscious processes, has a division of labor among many special-purpose analyzers. Some of these operate on sensory input and others on very high-level analysis such as face recognition. Their results are not by themselves conscious but if coordinated with other special-purpose analyzers can result in a conscious perception. The evidence that sophisticated representations can be created unconsciously would support theories that postulate an active unconscious.
Control and coordination is one of the many processes subsumed under the rubric of attention. Change blindness and inattentional blindness illustrate the central importance of attention to consciousness. Change blindness is found when a scene or part of a scene is changed while the observer is not attending. The changes in the scene can literally be not seen at all if not attended. Rensink notes that such a gap in perception would have been classed as a momentary aberration before it had theoretical significance. Change blindness indicates that at a phenomenal level our impression of seeing the whole scene before us is not correct. The entirety of the scene may be available, but only what is attended will be perceived. Inattentional blindness is similar to change blindness, but it is not noticing something that is present but unattended in the visual field. These "blindnesses" both suggest that attention is a gateway to awareness.
Unattended objects may be analyzed to some depth outside of attention, as when emotionally laden words are seen in intentional blindness experiments. These words had to have been processed to the level of meaning without attention, or else they would not have been recognized. This finding is one of many that show analysis progressing quite far without attention or awareness. Breitmeyer discusses in depth the relations between conscious and unconscious processes in perception. Snodgrass analyzes effects of stimuli that cannot be consciously represented, and covers many of the methodological problems in this area.
Processing of unattended material brings us to the larger question of what kind of processing can take place unconsciously. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of mental activity, the rest being unconscious, but the nature of the unconscious activity is a question. Some theorists assume that unconscious thinking is essentially like conscious thinking, just not conscious. Others, like Freud, theorized that unconscious mental activity goes on but it has different characteristics than conscious thinking has. It’s an associative "primary process" rather than the rational thought of the conscious, waking mind. The articles by Kihlstrom and Macmillan discuss the active unconscious. Still others do not require an active unconscious but only action patterns or habits that can be automatically called into action. Approaches like this are covered in several articles, including those by Aarts and Dijksterhuis. Schneider contrasts automatic processing, which is unconscious, fast, and virtually effortless with controlled processing, which has properties that might classify it as conscious. Any or all of these versions of unconscious activity may take place in some situations.
Implicit cognition does much of our daily mental work, just as automatic processing spares us the effort of controlling skilled actions. Cleeremans describes a wide range of studies that show how implicit memory can develop and influence performance, usually for the better, without conscious recall of the learning event or events. Bar-Anan and Nosek describe the Implicit Attitude Test (IAT) for measuring implicit attitudes that can influence opinions and social behavior but may be in contrast to admitted, explicit attitudes. Vallacher describes how the IAT is used to assess implicit self-esteem. Self-esteem measured by overt techniques such as questionnaires may differ from implicit measures. The result can be dysfunctional uncertainty about self-concept and conflicting and erratic behavior in different situations.
As Steve Pinker discusses in his forward, scientific models of functions that have a conscious consequence run into what the philosopher David Chalmers termed the "hard" problem. For example, a complete model of color vision may predict such things as the outcome of color mixtures very well, but where in the explanation is the experience of the resulting color? We would like to have it explain not only the result, that a paper reflecting a certain spectral distribution is called "red," but also why it has the qualitative look it has, the "redness" of red. There is a disjoint here. Scientific models have not explained subjective experience, and there seems no way to do it with the concepts they employ. Seager and Rowlands refer to the problem of explaining experience with a scientific model as intractable. We seem to be attempting to connect two things, the wavelength distribution, which is a physical quantity, and the experience, which is known only to the observer. The models don’t have a meaning for the expression, "It looks red to me." It is though we have returned to the dualistic universe of material and spiritual (supernatural) substances. One can’t hook a neuron to a feeling. They are different kinds of things.
The scientific enterprise goes about its business of explaining psychological phenomena without a worry about the intractability of the connection between explanation and experience. It is a problem seemingly at the center of the discipline that stands like an elephant in the room, yet science goes on as if it were not an issue. Perhaps it is enough to work only on the "easy" problems and ignore that old hard one. However, there are reasons to ask for some account of the experiential side of the process. The first is mentioned by Rowlands. It is unsatisfactory to leave this account out of the story. The perception of red is not explained to our satisfaction until the perception itself is explained — wasn’t that the point, after all?
Another reason to have an answer about subjective states comes from the other hard problem, volition. How does the decision to act result in action? Again we seem to have two different things: the decision to act, which is an idea, and the action, some sort of motion of a group of muscles. How can an idea move a muscle? Here we do not have a passive sensation of red, we have an idea that seems actually to do something. It is as though the action is an effect of the idea and clear evidence that a connection is made between the idea and the material world. Articles by Pockett, Hommel, Goodale, Jeannerod, and Custers constitute together a reference volume on volition and action. These accounts show that action is much more complex than the simple formula "idea causes action." It is possible that our clear impression of a causal relation comes from an overly simplistic description.
Pinker leans toward one resolution of the hard problem in his forward. This is that there is a resolution, but our simian minds, evolved for other things, are simply not capable of finding it, or of understanding it if it were presented to us. I would strive for the negative capability that the poet John Keats admired. That is the ability to resist the urge to choose one option or another and remain in uncertainty. I should add that I have a suspicion that the problem may be formulated wrongly. The history of science shows many cases in which when a problem has gone unsolved for many years, and a number of very skilled problem-solvers have failed with it over decades or centuries, the problem has been improperly formulated, often because a wrong theory, implicit or explicit, has been applied.
Our language betrays an implicit dualism in many locutions: a thought becomes "available" to consciousness (as if consciousness were outside the system); a certain neural process "reports" to consciousness; attention brings something "into" consciousness. These metaphors can constrain in subtle ways. In the dictionary "mental" and "physical" are given as antonyms, and they lurk in my personal lexicon as such. Again, language tips us off to the implicit metaphor. I don’t think I’m alone in having this problem. Francis Crick called the idea that consciousness is a product of brain events "the astonishing hypothesis." It is astonishing because we accept it as a scientific matter but some small part of us still finds it an affront to common sense. Clearly, the old way of thinking is very deep and still may haunt us, so to speak. Perhaps a generation that grows up with results of the sort reported in this handbook will have an informed intuition that will not find the hypothesis astounding. Perhaps a member of that generation will come up with a formulation that will lead to a scientific answer.
As a final note, consciousness research has developed subdisciplines remarkably quickly for such a young field. These include analysis of attention, memory, the self, unconscious cognition, emotion, social perception, volition, psychopathology, and more. Just scan the table of contents of this handbook to see the richness and variety of this work. It is as though researchers in many areas suddenly discovered that awareness was an important aspect of the topic they studied. There is more than just growth of interest in consciousness here. Awareness has become a central question in many areas. In order to understand perception, emotion, memory, volition, and many other human functions we need to consider the role of awareness. The result is a transformation that ranks with the Copernican revolutions that have come at critical times in the history of science.
This encyclopedia depended on the good work of a number of people. I thank Nikki Levy, the Publisher, for conceiving of this project and getting it through the inevitable rough spots gracefully and effectively. Maria Turnock, Development Editor, for Major Reference Works, and Edward Taylor, as Project Manager, deserve thanks for the daily operation of this project and dealing with hundreds of academics. The Editorial Assistants that have tirelessly worked as support on this project are Victoria Sayce, Caroline Phipps and Milo Perkins. Finally, the editors, Bernard Baars, Bruce Bridgeman, Shaun Gallagher, Geraint Rees, Jonathan Schooler, and Daniel Wegner, are responsible for assembling a stellar group of authors and obtaining the superb set of articles you see here.
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