fixed but depend on variable response criteria; there is no undisputed mea-
sure for deciding whether or not a stimulus has been consciously perceived,
or an action consciously carried out, or a skill consciously learned, or a deci-
sion consciously made; there are many examples where the answer – con-
scious or unconscious – depends on the way you ask the question. All this
threatens the idea which seems so intuitively obvious: that a given stimulus
is unequivocally either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, or that a given physical
or cognitive act is unequivocally performed consciously or not. Indeed, it is
not clear that there is any coherent way to argue for a theory of conscious
causation.
Instead, this third way suggests that sensory information is processed in multiple
ways, with different consequences for different behaviours, and that the type of
behaviour involved may affect how the processing happens from the very begin-
ning (Marcel, 1983). Some of these behaviours are usually taken as indications of
consciousness, such as verbal reports or choices between clearly perceptible stim-
uli, while others are usually considered to be unconscious, such as fast reflexes, or
guesses. In between lie many behaviours which are sometimes taken to indicate
consciousness and sometimes not. But there is no right answer.
We have considered a wide range of evidence in this chapter, from the
ability to distinguish between near-identical weights by judging with one’s
finger the pressure they create on a weighing scale (Peirce and Jastrow,
1885) to the capacity to hold a conversation using one’s forearm while
under anaesthetic (Alkire, Hudetz, and Tononi, 2008), to the lightning-quick
appraisals by which, in every social encounter, we distinguish friend from
foe. The range of experimental measures includes every imaginable com-
bination of button-pressing, rating scales, and verbal reports – so many
that maybe the field needs to develop better ways of comparing results
(Rothkirch and Hesselmann, 2017). What do any of these correlations tell
us about whether or not the perception, the action, or the person was
‘really conscious’? Who gets to decide that a movement of the finger means
unconscious, whereas movements of the lips mean conscious (unless you
insist you’re just guessing)?
On this third way of thinking, nothing is ever ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, and
phrases such as ‘reaching consciousness’ or ‘available to consciousness’ are either
meaningless or are a short-hand for ‘leading to verbal report’ or ‘available to influ-
ence behaviours taken to indicate consciousness’. Calling an action or a percep-
tion conscious is another example of the mereological fallacy. An event itself is
never either conscious or unconscious, but they can be more or less likely to lead
the person to say they were conscious of it.
The major problem here is what people say about their own experience. Many
people say that they know for sure what is in their consciousness and what
is not, even if they cannot always explain what they mean. One way out is to
take the intuitions seriously, but to accept that they are illusions and then try
to explain how the illusions comes about (Dennett, 1991; Blackmore, 2016;
Frankish, 2016b). But the gulf between the evidence and the intuition is a
familiar one, and just one more reason why the problem of consciousness is
so perplexing.
WAS THIS DECISION
CONSCIOUS?‘the limits on
unconscious processing
are set by the means by
which the stimuli are
rendered consciously
inaccessible’(Kihlstrom, 1996, p. 39)