Tag Archives: Block

Are Babies Conscious?

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sleeping babyProbably, according to a new paper  by Sid Kouider et al. Babies can’t report their own mental states, so they can’t confirm it for us explicitly: and new-borns are regarded by the medical profession as unknowing bags of instinct and reflex, with fond mothers quite deluded in thinking their brand-new offspring recognises anything or smiles at them (it’s just wind, or some random muscular grimace). However Kouider and his associates tracked ERPs (event-related potentials) in the brains of infants at 5, 12, and 15 months and found responses similar to those of adults, albeit slower and weaker, especially in the younger babies. So although few babies are able to pull off the legendary feat of St Nicholas, who apparently uttered a perfectly-articulated prayer immediately on emerging from the womb, they are probably more aware than we may have thought.

Kouider has a bit of form on consciousness: last year Trends in Cognitive Sciences carried a dialogue between him and Ned Block. This arose out of a claim by Block that classic experiments by Sperling support the richness of phenomenal consciousness as compared with access consciousness. Block is probably best known for introducing the distinction between phenomenal, or p-consciousness, and access, or a-consciousness, into philosophy of mind. Roughly speaking, we can say that p-consciousness is Hard Problem consciousness, to do with our subjective experience, and a-consciousness is Easy Problem consciousness, the kind that plays a functional role in decision-making and so on.

Sperling, some fifty years ago, showed that subjects shown an array of letters could report only 3 or 4 of them; but when cued to think of a particular line, they were able to report 3 or 4 from that line. They must therefore have had some image of more of the array – probably the whole array – than 3 or 4 items, but could only ever report that many.

Block’s analysis is that the whole array was in phenomenal consciousness, but access consciousness could only ever get 3 to 4 items from it. This is apparently supported by what test subjects tended to say: they often claimed to be conscious of the whole array at the time but not able to recall more than a few of the items (although the Sperling experiments show they could report the quota of items afterwards from any row, indicating that the problem was not really with recall but with access).

Kouider, among others, rejected this view, suggesting instead that the full array is retained, not in phenomenal consciousness, but in unconscious storage. In his view it’s not necessary to invoke phenomenal consciousness, which is an unverifiable addition which we’re better off without. The subjects’ feeling that they had been aware of the whole array can be attributed to a sort of illusion; you don’t notice the absence of things you’re not aware of, any more than you can see whether the refrigerator light goes off when the door is closed.

It’s tempting to think that the dispute is at least aggravated by terminology; everyone agrees that information about the array is retained mentally in a place other than the active forefront of the mind; isn’t the argument merely about whether we call that place phenomenal or un- conscious? That doesn’t seem altogether satisfactory, though, if we take phenomenal consciousness seriously – we are talking about whether the subjects are right or wrong about the contents of their own consciousness, which seems to be a matter of substance. I wonder though, whether there is some unhelpful reification going on – are phenomenal consciousness and the unconscious really two ‘places’? Is it really more a matter of retaining information phenomenally or unconsciously? That might be a slightly more promising perspective, although I also think that mental states are generally a trackless swamp and a dispute with only two alternatives may actually be underselling the problem (could it be kept both unconsciously and phenomenally? Could it be not unconsciously but subconsciously? Could the route from unconscious storage to access consciousness lead via phenomenal consciousness?)

So what about the babies? Is it possible that we are again in an area where what we mean by ‘conscious’ and the way we carve things conceptually is half the problem? It does look a bit like it.

After all (and my apologies to any readers who may have been grinding their teeth in frustration) babies are obviously conscious, aren’t they? The difference between a sleeping baby and one that is awake (which for some common sense values, equals ‘conscious’) is far too salient for any parent to overlook. On the other hand, do babies soliloquise internally? Equally obviously, no, because they don’t have the words to do it with.

But Kouider et al do make it fairly clear that they are specifically concerned with perception, and they make only sensible claims, noting that their results might be relevant, for example, to questions of infant anaesthesia (although it may be difficult to keep the can of phenomenal worms fully sealed on that issue). It is interesting to note the gradual development in speed and intensity which they have uncovered, but by and large I think common sense has been vindicated.

Still HOT

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So now let’s look at the review by Richard Brown of Rocco J. Gennaro’s new book, which sets out his HOT.  I should disclose that I have not read Gennaro’s book, so I’m merely reviewing a review of a theory. You could call it a higher order review.

Gennaro’s own concerns feature concepts strongly: his theory includes conceptualism, the belief that concepts provide key structure for our conscious experience.  This causes him some difficulty over animals and infants, as he needs them to have sufficiently advanced concepts to form the required higher order awareness. He needs at least some account of how the required concepts are acquired (or how they came to be innate), and he needs to avoid getting into the bootstrap bind where you need to have sophisticated conceptual structures in order to pick up the concepts you need in order to have sophisticated conceptual structures.

My personal bias is that conceptualism tends to bring unnecessary complications, and in this particular case I’m not sure why we need to make the weather so heavy (though no doubt Gennaro has his reasons). All we need is the awareness of an awareness: the higher order awareness does not need to look through to the objects in the external world. The conceptual apparatus required surely ought therefore to be modest, and I wouldn’t fight very hard against the idea that it could be built in or be the result of a very early internal rewiring exercise in the infant mammalian brain.

The main point of interest for us is the difference which Brown sets out between his own view and Gennaro’s. This hinges on a fundamental point: are we talking about higher order awareness of a mental state (Gennaro), or of our being in that mental state (Brown)? At this point I’d say I find Brown’s view, which he characterises as the non-relational view, more appealing. It seems important to specify that the awareness involved must be ours, after all.

However, both sides claim that their view is best able to deal with the kind of objections raised by Block and discussed last time, arising from cases where we have the higher order awareness but actually through some error the lower-order awareness which it targets is not actually there. Gennaro, it seems, wants to disqualify these states altogether: where the first-order state is not there, there’s no consciousness. If you’re not seeing something red, you can’t have the subjective consciousness of redness. This is neat in its way, but seems arbitrary (How come subjective experience, of all things, comes to have a special kind of immunity from error?), and surely we want to retain the possibility of a subjective experience not based in reality? I can see that some might argue that dreams lack real subjective experience, but are we prepared to say the same of illusions and mirages? That seems a high price to be paying.

Brown’s escape route is quite different: by adopting the non-relational view he can cut free from the first-order state altogether. Who cares whether it’s there or not? It’s just about the right kind of second-order state, that’s all. This may seem a little weird, but after all the orthodox view of qualia, our subjective experiences, is that they are largely decoupled from ordinary causal reality. On Brown’s view, if we see green, we can have the experience of red without invalidating the experience. We’ll still behave as though we were having the experience of green.  Block might denounce our qualia as fake, but meh, if that’s what you mean by fake, all qualia were always fake, so who cares?

The logic of that seems faultless, but I couldn’t help feeling that my sympathies were swinging back to Gennaro somewhat. Brown mentions a second problem, the problem of the rock: why can’t we make a rock conscious by having the right kind of second-order mental state about it? For Brown’s decoupled  view, there’s no problem because we’re not even talking about the first order awareness – rock, schmock, it’s simply irrelevant. Gennaro does have to face the issue and it seems he seeks to do it simply by disqualifying rocks with an additional rule or specification. Brown considers this another unattractively arbitrary lash-up, and perhaps it is, but in another light it seems far closer to common sense (though of course the realm of common sense is some way off by now in any event).

For myself the net effect of the discussion is to make me feel more strongly than before that if we are to have a HOT (and I’m not absolutely wedded to that in itself), we’d do much better to stick with what Block calls the unambitious variety, the kind that doesn’t seek to explain subjective experience or exorcise those deadly sirens we call qualia.