Miguel Ángel Sebastián

Dreams: an empirical way to settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science.

Not a HOT Dream

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness maintain that the kind of awareness necessary for phenomenal consciousness depends on the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting.

Cognitive access and cognitive phenomenology: conceptual and empirical issues

The well-known distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one, and the debate now is focused on whether the neural mechanisms of cognitive access are constitutive of the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I want to analyze the consequences that a negative reply to this question has for the cognitive phenomenology thesis – roughly the claim that there is a “proprietary” phenomenology of thoughts. If the mechanisms responsible for cognitive access can be disentangled from the mechanisms that give rise to phenomenology in the case of perception and emotion, then the same disentanglement is to be expected in the case of thoughts. This, in turn, presents, as I argue, a challenge to the cognitive phenomenology thesis: either there are thoughts with cognitive phenomenology we lack cognitive access to or there are good reasons to doubt that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology. I discuss and explore the conceptual and empirical problems for assessing this disjunction, and conclude that defenders of the cognitive phenomenology thesis have nothing to fear from this distinction. I finish by speculating on how it might, in turn, speak in favor of the cognitive phenomenology thesis.

A Consciousness-Based Quantum Objective Collapse Model

Ever since the early days of quantum mechanics it has been suggested that consciousness could be linked to the collapse of the wave function. However, no detailed account of such an interplay is usually provided. In this paper we present an objective collapse model (a variation of the Continuous Spontaneous Location model) where the collapse operator depends on integrated information, which has been argued to measure consciousness. By doing so, we construct an empirically adequate scheme in which superpositions of conscious states are dynamically suppressed. Unlike other proposals in which “consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function,” our model is fully consistent with a materialistic view of the world and does not require the postulation of entities suspicious of laying outside of the quantum realm.

Embodied appearance properties and subjectivity

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols following certain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computational system—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its commands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body in which the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. From a representationalist framework regarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognition constitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will argue that in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum, representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience is de se. I show that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective character of the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodily activity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied.