Consciousness

• seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
  What leads us astray is perhaps the tendency to assume that vision is always maxi-
  mally clear (Stazicker, 2011) – and we saw in Chapter 3 that this is not the case, even
  in a basic sense like how much the resolution of the retina diminishes towards the
  periphery. It may also be quite plausible that the moment at which we gain access
  to more detail would go unnoticed – it might well not be something people would,
  or could, report. Paying attention might so naturally give us access to more detail
  that we would not even remark on the change. The findings from Carrasco and col-
  leagues which we mentioned earlier add weight to the idea that attention changes
  the specifically visual quality (something as specific as the spatial resolution) of
  visual consciousness: accessing something by paying attention changes the quality
  of the experience rather than just whether we experience something.

We can ask similar questions about Mack and Rock’s experiments used to demon-

strate inattentional blindness. Can we necessarily assume that people did not

report seeing the additional stimulus because they were unconscious of it? Along

similar lines to the discussion of Sperling’s experiments, failure to report seeing an

additional stimulus or to identify it

might reflect either (i) that the subjects were not visually conscious of the

stimulus, or (ii) that, though subjects were conscious of the stimulus, they

did not attend to it in the way required for this consciousness to form the

basis for a reliable decision. To assume that (i) is the correct interpretation

is to beg the question. On the other hand, there’s no obvious way to argue

for interpretation (ii) either, because without reports or fairly explicit

decisions we lack compelling evidence for the presence of consciousness.

(Stazicker, 2011, p. 164)

It is easy to assume that consciousness is all-or-nothing, on or off: we are

conscious of something or we are not. But this may be one of the errors that

prevents us from accurately assessing

its relationship to attention. So where

does this leave us? Searching for the

neural correlates of consciousness

might still sound like a nice idea: if

we could find out what neural activity

correlates with (say) visual conscious-

ness, we could determine whether

this activity ever occurs without those

processes which correlate with atten-

tion. But this takes us back to prob-

lems we encountered in Chapter  7:

how do we establish these correlates

without first knowing whether or not

one occurs without the other? Some

people, like the philosopher Hilary

Putnam, conclude that there is simply

no way of answering the question

of whether there is unreportable

consciousness.

FIGURE 7.5 • Meditating in Japan’s famous
rock garden at Ryoanji.