I always felt urge to deconstruct the notion of “consciousness”, as it mixes at least two things: sum of sensory experiences presented in form of qualia, and capability to verbally judge about something. It seems to me that in this post consciousness is interpreted in the second meaning, as verbal capability of “being aware”.
However, the continuity of consciousness (if it exists) is more about the stream of non-verbal subjective experiences. It is completely possible to have subjective experiences without thinking anything about them or remembering them. When a person asks “Am I consciousness?” and concludes that she was not consciousness until that question, it doesn’t mean she was a phylozombie the whole day. (This practice was invented by Gurjiev, btw, under the title of “self-remembering”).
The qualia interpretation was what I had in mind when writing this, though of course Dehaene’s work is based on conscious access in the sense of information being reportable to others.
It is completely possible to have subjective experiences without thinking anything about them or remembering them. When a person asks “Am I consciousness?” and concludes that she was not consciousness until that question, it doesn’t mean she was a phylozombie the whole day.
Agreed, and the post was intended (in part) as an explanation of why this is the case.
It is interesting, is a person able to report something “unconsiousnessly”? For example, Tourette syndrome, when people unexpectedly say bad words. Or automatic writing, when, in extreme cases, a person doesn’t know what his left hand is writing about.
I’ve seen some authors use ‘subjective experience’ for the former and reserve consciousness for the latter. Unfortunately consciousness is one of those words, like ‘intelligence’, that everyone wants a piece of, so maybe it would be useful to have a specific term for the latter too. ‘Reflective awareness’ sounds about right, but after some quick googling it looks like that term has already been claimed for something else.
I always felt urge to deconstruct the notion of “consciousness”, as it mixes at least two things: sum of sensory experiences presented in form of qualia, and capability to verbally judge about something. It seems to me that in this post consciousness is interpreted in the second meaning, as verbal capability of “being aware”.
However, the continuity of consciousness (if it exists) is more about the stream of non-verbal subjective experiences. It is completely possible to have subjective experiences without thinking anything about them or remembering them. When a person asks “Am I consciousness?” and concludes that she was not consciousness until that question, it doesn’t mean she was a phylozombie the whole day. (This practice was invented by Gurjiev, btw, under the title of “self-remembering”).
The qualia interpretation was what I had in mind when writing this, though of course Dehaene’s work is based on conscious access in the sense of information being reportable to others.
Agreed, and the post was intended (in part) as an explanation of why this is the case.
It is interesting, is a person able to report something “unconsiousnessly”? For example, Tourette syndrome, when people unexpectedly say bad words. Or automatic writing, when, in extreme cases, a person doesn’t know what his left hand is writing about.
I’ve seen some authors use ‘subjective experience’ for the former and reserve consciousness for the latter. Unfortunately consciousness is one of those words, like ‘intelligence’, that everyone wants a piece of, so maybe it would be useful to have a specific term for the latter too. ‘Reflective awareness’ sounds about right, but after some quick googling it looks like that term has already been claimed for something else.