Bernard W. Kobes

Access and what it is like

Blocks cases of superblindsight, the pneumatic drill, and the Sperling experiments do not show that P-consciousness and Aconsciousness can come apart. On certain tendentious but not implausible construals of the concepts of P- and A-consciousness, they refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

Unity of Consciousness and Bi-Level Externalism*

In a conference hotel recently I accompanied a philosophical friend on a shopping expedition for some bold red and green wrapping papers, to be displayed as props in his upcoming talk on sensory qualia. Most examples used in philosophical discussions of consciousness have this static, snapshot character. The vehicle for a conscious perception of red wrapping paper may be a pattern of activation in a region of the brain devoted to visual input. But while walking, a person can turn her head, notice the wrapping paper, reach out, and grasp it. Our survival often depends on our ability to negotiate a changing environment by simultaneous streams of perception and action. What do vehicles of conscious content look like when there is realistically complex interaction with the world? A dynamic view requires, according to Susan Hurley, a ‘twisted rope’, the strands of which are continuous multi-modal streams of inputs and outputs looping into the environment and back into the central nervous system. The twist in the rope is analogous to the unity of consciousness. The contents of conscious perceptions depend directly— non-instrumentally— on relations among inputs and outputs; similarly for conscious intentions. We are evidently a long way from static red and green sensory qualia. Hurley’s book is a work of formidable ambition and multi-disciplinary erudition. She marshals wide-ranging literatures in the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory. Her Kant and Wittgenstein scholarship is also impressive. Each chapter stands on

Metacognition and consciousness: A review essay of Janet Metcalfe & Arthur P. Shimamura (Eds) metacognition: Knowing about knowing

Abstract The field of metacognition, richly sampled in the book under review, is recognized as an important and growing branch of psychology. However, the field stands in need of a general theory that (1) provides a unified framework for understanding the variety of metacognitive processes, (2) articulates the relation between metacognition and consciousness, and (3) tells us something about the form of meta‐level representations and their relations to object‐level representations. It is argued that the higher‐order thought theory of consciousness supplies us with the rudiments of a theory that meets these desiderata and integrates the principal findings reported in this collection.