The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0521674123
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521674126
- Pub. Date:
- 05/14/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521674123
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521674126
- Pub. Date:
- 05/14/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521674126 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2007 |
| Series: | Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 998 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.01(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.77(d) |
About the Author
Morris Moscovitch is the Max and Gianna Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He is also the Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. His research focuses on the neuropsychology of memory in humans while also studying attention, face-recognition, and hemispheric specialization in young and older adults, and in people with brain damage.
Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception. He is also the co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. He is a former holder of a Canada Research Chair.
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-85743-7 - The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness - Edited by Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch and Evan Thompson
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Consciousness: An Introduction
Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness brings together leading scholars from around the world who address the topic of consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from philosophical to anthropological to neuroscientific. This handbook is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research during the latter part of the last century and it has remained so for more than 20 years. Indeed, there are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. By the mid-1990s, if not earlier, it was widely agreed that one could not get a full appreciation of psychological phenomena – for example, of perception or memory –without distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes. The antecedents of this agreement are many, and it would be beyond the scope of this Introduction to do more than highlight a few (for further discussion, see Umiltà & Moscovitch, 1994). One of the most obvious is the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology and the subsequent emergence of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary enterprise. Whereas previously psychologists sought to describe lawful relations between environmental stimuli and behavioral responses, in the mid-1950s or so they began to trace the flow of information through a cognitive system, viewing the mind as a kind of computer program. It eventually became clear, however, that by focusing on the processing of information – the kind of thing a computer can do – psychology left out most of what really matters to us as human beings; as conscious subjects, it left us cold. The cognitive revolution opened the door to the study of such topics as attention and memory, and some time later, consciousness came on through. The pre-1990s tendency to avoid discussions of consciousness, except in certain contexts (e.g., in phenomenological philosophy and psychoanalytic circles), may have been due, in part, to the belief that consciousness necessarily was a kind of ghost in the machine – one that inevitably courted the awful specter of dualism. Since then, however, our ontological suppositions have evolved, and this evolution may be a consequence of the growing trend toward interdisciplinary investigation – seen, for example, in the emergence of cognitive science and neuroscience as coherent fields. The transdisciplinary perspective afforded by new fields may have engendered an increased openness and willingness to explore problems that earlier were deemed too difficult to address. Certainly, it provided the means that made these problems seem soluble. Indeed, precisely because consciousness is such a difficult problem, progress in solving it probably depends on a convergence of ideas and methodologies: We are unlikely to arrive at an adequate understanding of consciousness in the absence of a transdiscipli-nary perspective. Clinical sciences, and in particular neuropsychology, also played a prominent role in helping usher in a new willingness to tackle the problem of consciousness. Various unusual syndromes came to light in the latter half of the 20th century, and these syndromes seemed to demand an explanation in terms of consciousness. Blindsight is a good example: In this syndrome, patients with lesions to the occipital lobe of the brain are phenomenologically blind, but can nonetheless perform normally on a number of visual tasks. Another example is amnesia, in which people who are phenomenologically amnesic as a result of damage to medial temporal lobes or the diencephalon can acquire, retain, and recover information without awareness. Similar examples emerged in other domains, and it soon became clear that processes under conscious control complement, or compete with, unconscious processes in the control of cognition and behavior. These issues are also beginning to play a major role in the rigorous, scientific analysis of psychopathology, the one field in which concerns with the role of conscious and unconscious processes have played a steady role since Freud. Moreover, some of these same atypical phenomena (e.g., blindsight) have also been demonstrated in non-human animals, raising the possibility that consciousness is not associated exclusively with human beings. A third prominent contribution to the current state of affairs is the development of new techniques that have made it possible to treat consciousness in a more rigorous and scientifically respectable fashion. Foremost among these is the development of neuroimaging techniques that allow us to correlate performance and subjective experience with brain function. These techniques include electrophysiological methods, such as magneto-encephalography (MEG), and various types of functional neuroimaging, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The analytic sophistication of these technologies is growing rapidly, as is the creation of new technologies that will expand our capabilities to look into the brain more closely and seek answers to questions that now seem impossible to address. There is currently considerable interest in exploring the neural correlates of consciousness. There is also a growing realization, however, that it will not be possible to make serious headway in understanding consciousness without confronting the issue of how to acquire more precise descriptive first-person reports about subjective experience (Jack & Roepstorff, 2003, 2004). Psychologists, especially clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, have grappled with this issue for a long time, but it has gained new prominence thanks to the use of neuroimaging techniques. Here one guiding idea is that it may be possible to recover information about the highly variable neural processes associated with consciousness by collecting more precise, trial-by-trial first-person reports from experimental participants. If ever it was possible to do so, certainly serious students of the mind can no longer ignore the topic of consciousness. This volume attempts to survey the major developments in a wide range of intellectual domains to give the reader an appreciation of the state of the field and where it is heading. Despite our efforts to provide a comprehensive overview of the field, however, there were several unavoidable omissions. Though we had hoped to include chapters on psychedelic drugs and on split-brain research, in the end we were unable to obtain these chapters in time. Readers interested in the latest scientific writing on drugs and consciousness may wish to see Benny Shanon’s (2002) book on ayahuasca. Michael Gazzaniga’s (1998) book, The Mind’s Past, provides an accessible overview of work on split-brain research and its implications for subjective experience. We note, too, that although we were able to cover philosophical approaches to consciousness from a variety of cultural perspectives, including Continental phenomenology and Asian philosophy (particularly Buddhism), there were inevitably others that we omitted. We apologize for these unfortunate gaps. The volume is organized mainly around a broad (sometimes untenable) distinction between cognitive scientific approaches and neuroscientific approaches. Although we are mindful of the truly transdisiplinary nature of contemporary work on consciousness, we believe this distinction may be useful for readers who wish to use this handbook as an advanced textbook. For example, readers who want a course in consciousness from a cognitive science perspective might concentrate on Chapters 2– 24. Readers approaching the topic from the perspective of neuroscience might emphasize Chapters 25– 31. A more sociocultural course could include Chapters 2–4, 13– 15, 19– 24, and 31. More focused topical treatments are also possible. For example, a course on memory might include Chapters 6– 8, 10, 18, and 29. The topic of consciousness is relevant to all intellectual inquiry – indeed, it is the foundation of this inquiry. As the chapters collected here show, individually and together, by ignoring consciousness, one places unnecessary constraints on our understanding of a wide range of phenomena – and risks grossly distorting them. Many mysteries remain (e.g., what are the neural substrates of consciousness? are there varieties or levels of consciousness within domains of functioning, across domains, across species, and/or across the lifespan?), but there has also been considerable progress. We hope this collection serves a useful function by helping readers see both how far we have come in understanding consciousness and how far we have to go. Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank Phil Laughlin, formerly of CUP, who encouraged us to prepare this volume, and Armi Macaballug and Mary Cadette, who helped us during the final production phases. Dana Liebermann provided valuable assistance as we planned the volume, and Helena Hong Gao helped us pull the many chapters together; we are very grateful to them both. We would also like to thank the contributors for their patience during the editorial process (the scope of this volume threatened, at times, to turn this process into an editorial nightmare...). Finally, we note with sadness the death of Joseph Bogen, one of the pioneers in research on consciousness. We regret that he was unable to see his chapter in print. References Gazzaniga, M. S.(1998). The mind’s past. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jack, A. & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.) (2003). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. Vol. 1.Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic. Jack, A. & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.) (2004). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. Vol. 2.Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic. Shanon, B.(2002). The antipodes of the mind: Charting the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Umiltà, C. & Moscovitch, M. (Eds.). (1994). Conscious and nonconscious information processing: Attention and Performance ⅩⅤ: Conscious and nonconscious processes in cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford Press. Part I THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS A. Philosophy CHAPTER 2 A Brief History of the Philosophical Problem of Consciousness William Seager Abstract The problem of consciousness, generally referred to as the mind-body problem although this characterization is unfortunately narrow, has been the subject of philosophical reflection for thousands of years. This chapter traces the development of this problem in Western philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks to the middle of the 20th century. The birth of science in the 17th century and its subsequent astounding success made the problem of mind particularly acute, and produced a host of philosophical positions in response. These include the infamous interactionist dualism of Descartes and a host of dualist alternatives forced by the intractable problem of mind-matter interaction; a variety of idealist positions which regard mind as ontologically fundamental; emergentist theories which posit entirely novel entities, events, and laws which ‘grow’ out of the material substrate; panpsychist, double aspect, and ‘neutral monist’ views in which both mind and matter are somehow reflections of some underlying, barely knowable ur-material; and increasingly sophisticated forms of materialism which, despite failing to resolve the problem of consciousness, seemed to fit best with the scientific view of the world and eventually came to dominate thinking about the mind in the 20th century. I. Forms of Consciousness The term ‘consciousness’ possesses a huge and diverse set of meanings. It is not even obvious that there is any one ‘thing’ that all uses of the term have in common which could stand as its core referent (see Wilkes 1988). When we think about consciousness we may have in mind highly complex mental activities, such as reflective self-consciousness or introspective consciousness, of which perhaps only human beings are capable. Or we may be thinking about something more purely phenomenal, perhaps something as apparently simple and unitary as a momentary stab of pain. Paradigmatic examples of consciousness are the perceptual states of seeing and hearing, but the nature of the consciousness involved is actually complex and far from clear. Are the conscious elements of perception made up only of raw sensations from which we construct objects of perception in a quasi-intellectual operation? Or is perceptual consciousness always of ‘completed’ objects with their worldly properties? The realm of consciousness is hardly exhausted by its reflective, introspective, or perceptual forms. There is distinctively emotional consciousness, which seems to necessarily involve both bodily feelings and some kind of cognitive assessment of them. Emotional states require a kind of evaluation of a situation. Does consciousness thus include distinctive evaluative states, so that, for example, consciousness of pain would involve both bodily sensations and a conscious sense of aversion? Linked closely with emotional states are familiar, but nonetheless rather peculiar, states of consciousness that are essentially other directed, notably empathy and sympathy. We visibly wince when others are hurt and almost seem to feel pain ourselves as we undergo this unique kind of experience. Philosophers argue about whether all thinking is accompanied by or perhaps even constituted out of sensory materials (images have been the traditional favorite candidate material), and some champion the idea of a pure thought-consciousness independent of sensory components. In any event, there is no doubt that thought is something that often happens consciously and is in some way different from perception, sensation, or other forms of consciousness. Another sort of conscious experience is closely associated with the idea of conscious thought but not identical to it: epistemological consciousness, or the sense of certainty or doubt we have when consciously entertaining a proposition (such as ‘2 + 3 = 5’ or ‘the word ‘eat’ consists of three letters’). Descartes famously appealed to such states of consciousness in the ‘method of doubt’ (see his Meditations 1641/1985). Still another significant if subtle form of consciousness has sometimes been given the name ‘fringe’ consciousness (see Mangan 2001, following James 1890/1950, ch. 9), which refers to the background of awareness which sets the context for experience. An example is our sense of orientation or rightness in a familiar environment (consider the change in your state of consciousness when you recognize someone’s face who at first appeared to be a stranger). Moods present another form of fringe consciousness, with clear links to the more overtly conscious emotional states but also clearly distinct from them. But I think there is a fundamental commonality to all these different forms of consciousness. Consciousness is distinctive for its subjectivity or its first-person character. There is ‘something it is like’ to be in a conscious state, and only the conscious subject has direct access to this way of being (see Nagel 1974). In contrast, there is nothing it is like to be a rock, no subjective aspect to an ashtray. But conscious beings are essentially different in this respect. The huge variety in the forms of consciousness makes the problem very complex, but the core problem of consciousness focuses on the nature of subjectivity. A further source of complexity arises from the range of possible explanatory targets associated with the study of consciousness. One might, for instance, primarily focus on the structure or contents of consciousness. These would provide a valid answer to one legitimate sense of the question, What is consciousness? But then again, one might be more interested in how consciousness comes into being, either in a developing individual or in the universe at large. Or one might wonder how consciousness, seemingly so different from the purely objective properties of the material world studied by physics or chemistry, fits in with the overall scientific view of the world. To address all these aspects of the problem of consciousness would require volumes upon volumes. The history presented in this chapter focuses on what has become perhaps the central issue in consciousness studies, which is the problem of integrating subjectivity into the scientific view of the world.
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