Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
the mistake you can put it right because consciousness creates global access to
further unconscious resources. Yet it is not entirely clear whether consciousness
is supposed to be the cause, the same as, or the result of access to the GW (Rose,
2006).
Similar ideas appear in Dehaene’s neuronal global workspace theory, in which
consciousness has clear causal power. As he puts it, ‘consciousness has a precise
role to play in the computational economy of the brain – it selects, amplifies, and
propagates relevant thoughts’ (2014, p. 14). More specifically, for example, it pro-
vides a summary of the environment to help guide action (p. 100). For Dehaene,
anything that we are aware of, because it has reached the conscious workspace,
‘becomes available to drive our decisions and our intentional actions, giving rise
to the feeling that they are “under control” ’ (2014, p. 167). Again, there are two
ways of interpreting this: one is that the contents of the GW somehow ‘become
conscious’ and this gives them causal power; the other is that the contents have
effects simply because they are broadcast from the GW to many other brain areas.
One involves an unexplained transformation from unconscious to conscious and
the other does not. But either way, the answer to our question is that conscious
actions have access to the global workspace, while unconscious actions do not.
NON-CAUSAL THEORIES
At the other extreme are theories which reject the idea that consciousness can
cause events (see Chapter 1). One example is eliminative materialism, which
denies the existence of consciousness as anything distinct from its material basis.
Epiphenomenalism accepts the existence of consciousness but denies that it has
any effects. In its traditional form, this is a somewhat strange idea, implying a
causal chain of events leading from sensory input to behaviour, with conscious-
ness produced as a by-product that has no further effects at all. As we have seen,
one apparent stumbling block here is that if consciousness had no effects we
could not even talk about it, let alone write a book about it. Epiphenomenalism in
this form is highly counter-intuitive, and it cuts against some of our most dearly
cherished intuitions, ‘entailing that what we believe, feel, sense, remember, etc.,
does not make a causal difference to what we do’ (Pauen, Staudacher, and Walter,
2006).
In the philosophy of mind, there are two main representational theories:
‘ higher-order perception’ (HOP) theory and various types of ‘higher-order
thought’ (HOT) theory (Carruthers, 2007). Other higher-order theories include
HOGS (higher-order global states) and HOST (higher-order syntactic thought)
theories (Gennaro, 2004, 2017). According to HOP theory, being conscious of a
mental state means monitoring first-order mental states in a quasi-perceptual
way – with something analogous to an ‘inner eye’ or ‘inner sense’ (Lycan, 2004).
According to HOT theories, a mental state is conscious if the person has a high-
er-order thought to the effect that they are in that state (Rosenthal, 1995, 2008).
For example, my perception of a red flash is conscious only if accompanied by a
HOT that ‘I am seeing a red flash’.
Higher-order theories readily answer our questions. What is the difference between
actions performed consciously and those done unconsciously? Answer – there
are HOPs or HOTs about them. No special place or kind of neuron is required; only
that the brain must construct HOPs/HOTs. Although HOPs/HOTs have effects (i.e.
‘consciousness has a
precise role to play in
the computational
economy of the brain’(Dehaene, 2014, p. 14)