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Summary Chapter 5 - The theatre of the mind (detailed)
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This is a very detailed summary on Chapter 5 - The theatre of the mind of the Consciousness book (S.Blackmore) Third Edition
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1. INSIDE THE MENTAL THEATRECartesian Theatre: we seem to imagine that there is some place inside my
mind or brain where I am. This place has something like a mental cinema screen
on which images are presented for viewing by my mind’s eyes. In this place,
everything that we are conscious of in a given moment is present together and
consciousness happens.
- If you believe in CT you believe in some kind of literal or metaphorical
space or place or stage within which conscious experiences happen and
into which the contents of consciousness come and go Dennett:
Cartesian Theatre and Materialism The cartesian theatre and the
audience of one inside doesn’t exist
- Rejects Cartesian Dualism
- Argues that many who claim to be materialists still implicitly believe in
something like a ‘centered locus in the brain’ where consciousness
happens and someone to whom it happens.
Cartesian Materialism (CM): “the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes”
dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central but material Theatre where it
all comes together
- If you believe that consciousness isn’t separate from the brain and so
there must be some brain basis for this theatre of the mind where “it all
comes together” and “consciousness happens”.
Spatiotemporal pinealism: Descartes ideas that regions of the brain mediates
between conscious and unconscious
2. THE PLACE WHERE CONSCIOUSNESS HAPPENS
Reading - Activity in visual cortex and language areas (Wernicke’s Area)
Oculomotor complex of nuclei: responsible for moving eyes (reading)
Motor cortex: preparing and executing the skilled action of touching thumb to
nose
Frontal areas: planning and making the decision whether to bother or not
Sensory cortex: a ctivation of maps and connection to ongoing activity
maintaining the body schema (your sense of where your body is in space)
Where does consciousness happen)
Metaphors:
1) Conscious is the center into which experiences come and from which
commands go out
2) Hierarchy of processing with a top where consciousness reigns
But!
1) No place in the brain to fit either intuition
2) No single stream of neural activity coming into a middle and sending a
new stream out - There’s parallel processing
a) Feedback loops: cell assemblies forming and dissolving
3) No special time at which consciousness happens
3. THE MENTAL SCREEN
Shepard and Metzler - participants responded more quickly if the object had
been rotated only a few degrees compared with a 180* rotation
, - pictorialists correctly observe the similarities between imagery and vision,
but incorrectly take this to mean that there are pictures in the brain,
painted on a mental canvas.
When we mentally scan a visual image, similar areas of the visual cortex are
activated as when we look at a similar object
Both pictorialism and propositionalism (language-like) theories: both accept
learning is more about the similarities between seeing and imagining & rely on
the idea that we see and imagine by means of mental representations of the
things being seen or imagines but draw different conclusions
3rd way of thinking about mental imagery: rather than having either picture-like
images (discrete entities somewhere in the head), in enactivist and sensorimotor
theories, we engage in acts of imagining.
- Show how fundamental action is to both seeing and imagining
- Actions and interaction play role attributed to representation
Enactivist theories: in case of imagining, the sensory exploration is performed
without any interaction with the environment
Sensorimotor: even potential f ort such exploration is enough
Findings about the timing and the behaviours of imagining and their connections
to seeing DO show that there’s something measurable happening when people
have private imaginings - imagery isn’t something mysterious and unamenable
to scientific study
- The DO NOT show either that consciousness is needed to do the imagining
ir that there must be a mental screen on which the images are projected
1) Mental rotations and other manipulations can happen unconsciously
a) Crick and Koch: no infinite regress if the front parts of the brain are
looking at the sensory systems at the back. The 2 areas involve:
i) Competing coalitions of neurons that interact but not entirely
reciprocally and so give rise to the “illusion of a homunculus
in the head looking at the sensory activities of the brain”
2) Mental rotation - distributed processing in various areas of the cortex
somehow gives rise to the solutions of rotation problems and either gives
rise to or at least correlates with the experience of watching a mental
rotation and being able to describe it
How does the subjective experience arise out of all objective happening?
There is no single time and place where color happens. Colour information is
distributed through the visual system and used in multiple parallel versions by
different brain areas
4. THEATRES THAT ARE NOT CARTESIAN ?
What makes some events c onscious and others u
nconscious ?
Unconscious driving phenomenon
Theories:
1) Bernard Baars Global Workspace Theory (GWT)
Focal consciousness acts as a bright spot on the stage, direct to different actors
by the spotlight of attention possibly surrounded by a fringe of events that are
only vaguely or potentially conscious
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