Thor Grünbaum

Consciousness and modality: On the possible preserved visual consciousness in blindsight subjects

In a recent paper, Brogaard (2011) presents counter-arguments to the conclusions of an experiment with blindsight subject GR. She argues that contrary to the apparent findings that GRs preserved visual abilities relate to degraded visual experiences, she is in fact fully unconscious of the stimuli she correctly identifies. In this paper, we present arguments and evidence why Brogaards argument does not succeed in its purpose. We suggest that not only is relevant empirical evidence in opposition to Brogaards argument, her argument misconstrues necessary criteria to decide whether a conscious experience is visual or not visual.

Action and Agency

In this chapter, we will be asking how the notions of intentional action and agency are related and discuss different ways of thinking about agents’ experiences of agency. I will focus on agents’ experience of agency as they engage in and execute their intentional actions.1 A number of distinctions important to our theories about and experimenting with intentional agency will be presented, and arguments in favour of viewing the experience of agency as having a complex phenomenology will be given. Let us begin by asking how we should conceive of intentional action. It is no easy task to define what an intentional action is. A commonsensical conception would be to say that an intentional action is an action an agent is performing because she has some reason to do so. An intentional action would then, as Anscombe said, be the kind of behaviour to which the “Why-question” in a certain sense has application (Anscombe 2000: 11), namely, in the sense that requires a reason for acting as an answer.

A common representation of spatial features drives action and perception: grasping and judging object features within trials.

Spatial features of an object can be specified using two different response types: either by use of symbols or motorically by directly acting upon the object. Is this response dichotomy reflected in a dual representation of the visual world: one for perception and one for action? Previously, symbolic and motoric responses, specifying location, has been shown to rely on a common representation. What about more elaborate features such as length and orientation? Here we show that when motoric and symbolic responses are made within the same trial, the probability of making the same symbolic and motoric response is well above chance for both length and orientation. This suggests that motoric and symbolic responses to length and orientation are driven by a common representation. We also show that, for both response types, the spatial features of an object are processed independently. This finding of matching object-processing characteristics is also in agreement with the idea of a common representation driving both response types.

Cognitive and non-cognitive conceptions of consciousness.

In a recent article by Block [1], different interpretations of the classical Sperling experiment [2] were discussed. In this experiment, subjects were only able to report letters from one of three rows. However, with post-stimulus cueing, subjects could report whatever row they were asked. Block [1] interprets the experiment to show that conscious experience overflows the amount of information that is attended and available in working memory. The suggestion that ‘we experience seeing the entire display of letters, yet we report only a limited amount’ appears so intuitively true that it seems difficult to disagree.

The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique

A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.

Perception and non-inferential knowledge of action

I present an account of how agents can know what they are doing when they intentionally execute object-oriented actions. When an agent executes an object-oriented intentional action, she uses perception in such a way that it can fulfil a justificatory role for her knowledge of her own action and it can fulfil this justificatory role without being inferentially linked to the cognitive states that it justifies. I argue for this proposal by meeting two challenges: in an agents knowledge of her action perception can only play an enabling role (and no justificatory role) for the agents knowledge and if perception has a justificatory role, then the agents knowledge must be inferential.

Action between plot and discourse

Abstract In this article, I argue that the representation of simple, bodily action has the function of endowing the narrative sequence with a visualizing power. It makes the narrated scenes or situations ready for visualization by the reader or listener. By virtue of this visualizing power or disposition, these narrated actions disrupt the theoretical divisions, on the one hand, between the narrated story and the narrating discourse, and on the other hand, between plot-narratology and discourse-narratology. As narrated actions, they seem to belong to the domain of plot-narratology, but insofar as they serve an important visualizing function, these narrated actions have a communicative function and, as such, they can be said to belong to the domain of discourse-narratology. In the first part of the article, I argue that a certain type of plot-narratology, due to its retrospective epistemology and abstract definition of action, is unable to conceive of this visualizing function. In the second part, I argue that discourse-narratology fares no better since the visualizing function is independent of voice and focalization. In the final part, I sketch a possible account of the visualizing function of simple actions in narratives.

The body in action

This article is about how to describe an agent’s awareness of her bodily movements when she is aware of executing an action for a reason. Against current orthodoxy, I want to defend the claim that the agent’s experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agent’s awareness of her own intentional action. In “The problem,” I describe why this should be thought to be problematic. In “Motives for denying epistemic role,” I state some of the main motives for denying that bodily awareness has any epistemic role to play in the content of the agent’s awareness of her own action. In “Kinaesthetic awareness and control,” I sketch how I think the experience of moving and the bodily sense of agency or control are best described. On this background, I move on to present, in “Arguments for epistemic role,” three arguments in favour of the claim that normally the experience of moving is epistemically important to one’s awareness of acting intentionally. In the final “Concluding remarks,” I round off by raising some of the worries that motivated the denial of my claim in the first place.

Commonsense psychology, dual visual streams, and the individuation of action

Psychologists and philosophers are often tempted to make general claims about the importance of certain experimental results for our commonsense notions of intentional agency, moral responsibility, and free will. It is a strong intuition that if the agent does not intentionally control her own behavior, her behavior will not be an expression of agency, she will not be morally responsible for its consequences, and she will not be acting as a free agent. It therefore seems natural that the interest centers on the notion of intentional control. If it can be experimentally shown that agents do as a matter of fact not control their own actions, even though they think they do, it will have far reaching consequences for our moral psychology. In this paper I look at recent eliminative arguments allegedly demonstrating that our commonsense notion of intentional control is incompatible with experimental data in support of the dual visual stream theory.

Brain Imaging and Psychiatric Classification

Fielding and marwede attempt to lay down directions for an applied onto-psychiatry. According to their proposal, such an enterprise requires us to accept certain metaphysical and methodological claims about how brain and experience are related. To put it in one sentence, our critique is that we find their metaphysics questionable and their methodology clinically impracticable. A first fundamental problem for their project, as it is expressed in their paper, is that their overall aim is unclear. At least three different aims might be read as motivating their efforts, here listed according to their strength: