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Notes on Current Topics: Consciousness: From Theory to the Clinic
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Aantekeningen lecture 1Topics that will be covered
• What is consciousness?
• Can we measure it in the brain?
• What is consciousness for?
• Mechanistic theories of consciousness?
• What happens when we lose consciousness (e.g. coma, vegetative state)?
• Who have consciousness (monkeys, babies, computers etc.)?
The guest lectures
• 2 speakers
• Each of them addresses a topic of consciousness of special interest:
o Dr. Heleen Slagter: Attention and meditation (EEG)
o Dr. Anouk van Loon: Ketamine and consciousness (fMRI)
The book
Stanislas Dehaene (January, 2014)
Not the usual textbook. This book can be hard to find in hard-copy and you have to check for
it at different providers when a hard-copy is preferred. E-books can easily be found on the
web. It is quite a popular book and quite different from the other psychology books.
He explains how the field of consciousness evolved, what kind of methods we can
use to study consciousness, what theories have been proposed to explain
consciousness.
Scientific articles
• 9 original research articles
• Posted on Canvas
• See syllabus for planning, when to read etc.
You should know after reading an article (for the exam):
• The question addressed by the research.
• The population and equipment used in the study.
• An overall picture of the (experimental) protocol used (e.g. what data was collected,
e.g. neuroimaging method, behavioral task etc.).
• The methods used for data analysis (univariate contrasts, multivariate decoding etc.).
• The main results (all experimental factors and dependent measures are important).
• The conclusions that can be drawn from this article.
• Limitations of the study (what could have been done better?)
• Why the study is relevant for the field of consciousness in general.
• The answers can be discussed on Canvas among students. If there are remaining
issues/questions these can be asked during the Q&A.
,Reminder: different kinds of variables
• Manipulation Outcomes measures
• From https://www.simplypsychology.org/variables.html
Final exam
• Date: Tuesday 29-10-2020, from 13.00-15.00
• Exam questions are based on the book material, scientific articles, lectures and
provided links/YouTube videos in the lectures.
What is consciousness?
• I am not going to give you the answer (which is actually impossible, there is much
disagreement)
• In this course: No golden truths, but a lot of data/theories/ideas/discussion
• Learn to appreciate the accumulating knowledge about a scientific topic
Perspective of this course
• Cognitive Neuroscience approach
• Combination of Psychology and Neuroscience (the biology of mind)
• I will introduce some philosophers, but mainly to appreciate the difficulty of the
questions we are trying to tackle
What is it like to be... (thought experiment)
• A bat...?
→ Is there something about being a bat? Does it have subjective feelings and thoughts
about the world?
• A coffee mug…?
→ All of a sudden not a hard question, because there is ‘nothing’ about being a mug
,Thomas Nagel (1974): “What is it like to be...”
If there is something it is like to be an animal, i.e. a bat (or a
computer or baby) then that “thing” is conscious. Otherwise it is
not.
So, it is about the subjective experience, because that allows us to
be conscious about something.
A difficult problem
• Consciousness questions have confused philosophers and scientists for millennia.
• For long the question of consciousness lay outside the boundaries of normal science.
• Fuzzy, ill-defined domain whose subjectivity put it forever beyond the reach of
objective experimentation.
• No serious researcher would touch the problem: speculating about consciousness
was a tolerated hobby for the aging scientist (with tenure, see TED talk Daniel
Dennett).
An official ban: quotes from the book
• “Consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues... Maybe we should ban
the word for a decade or two until we can develop more precise terms for the
several uses which ‘consciousness’ now obscures.”
- George Miller, textbook Psychology, the Science of Mental Life (1962), the
founding father of cognitive psychology
• Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings. The term is
impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what
consciousness means ... Nothing worth reading has been written about it.
- Stuart Sutherland, International Dictionary of Psychology (1996)
• Ohhh Noooo “the C-word”...
• We dare to talk about perception, attention, perceptual decision making etc. but
consciousness....
Then here we are...
• Can modern cognitive neuroscience turn this age-old philosophical problem into an
experimental question?
• Is the human mind smart enough to understand it own subjectivity?
• This is a serious question, e.g. philosophers such as Colin McGinn
o “We will never find out what consciousness is”
o Finding out “the basis of consciousness in the physical world (i.e., material
world, the brain) exceeds our cognitive limits”
Philosophers talking...
Prof. David Chalmers (NYU):
- 1996, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory,
- 1999, Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and
Debates
, David Chalmers
• “There is more to consciousness than a physical process in the brain”
→ He’s a clear dualist. Logical aspects of consciousness can be explained
through neuroscience (e.g. zombies), but the conscious aspects cannot be
explained through that alone.
• “I don’t think that the hard problem of consciousness can be solved purely
by Neuroscience”
Chalmers’ “easy” problems
Easy problems: Are about abilities and functions: we need only
mechanisms to explain those. These are problems that we have not
solved (perception, memory etc.) but in principle we know how to
solve (even if we have not done yet). We will know how to explain
those in the future.
Examples:
• The ability to discriminate, categorize, react to environmental
stimuli
• The integration of information by a cognitive system
• The reportability of mental states
• The focus of attention
• The deliberate control of behavior
• The difference between wakefulness and sleep
Easy = Still very difficult (maybe requiring decades of science) but we can sort of see the
solution lying ahead
The “hard” problem
The hard problem: Why and how do subjective experiences arise from objective brains
(neural processes)? “Explaining the function doesn’t explain the experience”.
• Why aren’t the ‘easy’ processes carried out ‘in the dark’, why do we have
experiences associated with them?
• The way things look, feel, sound etc.
• What it is like (to be a bat, to feel sad, etc)
• Phenomenal experience, P-consciousness
• The private and intrinsic phenomena of consciousness. For example, ‘yellow’ or
‘pain’: QUALIA (quality of experience)
Philosophers talking...
Prof. Daniel Dennett (Tufts University):
Consciousness Explained (1991) Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
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