{"id":11687,"date":"2010-04-13T19:21:55","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T19:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/04\/13\/consciousness-without-selfconsciousness\/"},"modified":"2010-04-13T19:21:55","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T19:21:55","slug":"consciousness-without-selfconsciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/04\/13\/consciousness-without-selfconsciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness Without Self-Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over the transom:<\/font><\/p>\n

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A friend of mine and I have ongoing discussions about consciousness. Some of his beliefs I have a hard time accepting. He believes for example that his cat doesn't have conscious experience. I can't put my finger on why I have such a hard time accepting this, but I do. One issue that has come up is whether you can have consciousness without self-awareness. In the discussions he has brought up the issue of blindsight, and claimed its an example of perception without consciousness. This doesn't make any sense to me. It seems to me that talk of perception presupposes consciousness. I was curious as to your thoughts on this matter.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There appear to be two separate questions here. <\/font><\/p>\n

Q1: Are animals such as cats conscious?  It would suffice for their being conscious that they experience pleasure or pain.  Do cats experience pain?  When I inadvertently step on my cat's foot, she exhibits pain-behavior (makes a certain characteristic sound, shrinks back, gives me a certain look, begins licking the foot.)  Now that pain-behavior is not identical to the felt pain, if there is one; but it is evidence for its existence.  Or so say I.  But now we are approaching the problem of other minds which is too intricate to be discussed in this post.  In any case, I don't believe this is what you are asking about.  For my part, I no more doubt that my cat is conscious than I doubt that my wife is.  Both are sentient beings!  But how do I KNOW that?  This, roughly, is the problem of other minds.  Here is an organism in my visual field.  I believe it has a mind  more or less similar to my own (less in the case of the cat, more in the case of the wife).  The problem is to provide the grounds<\/em> for that belief.  The belief goes well beyond what is strictly evident to the senses; so what justifies it?  It is an epistemological problem.  Not to be confused with the ontological question whether wife or cat could be philosophical 'zombies.'<\/font><\/p>\n

Q2:  Can there be consciousness without self-consciousness?  This may be what you are really asking about.  Can one be conscious of an object without being conscious of being conscious of it?  I would say yes.  The following sometimes happens to some people.  They have been driving for some time, negotiating curves, braking, accelerating, etc.  But then they suddenly realize that for the last few miles they haven't been conscious of doing these things.  They've been 'blanked out.' And yet they were conscious of the road, the cars in front of them, etc., else they would have crashed.  We could say that they were conscious of their environment and of the objects in its without being conscious of being conscious of all these things.<\/font><\/p>\n

In a famous passage Kant says that "The 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations."  That is a good way of putting it.   It must be possible for me to say 'I am now aware that the light is red' when I see that the light is red, but there needn't be this self-awareness for there to be the conscious perception that the light is red.  So I suggest we say this:  every consciousness is potentially self-conscious, but not every consciousness is actually self-conscious.<\/font><\/p>\n

This is a murky topic due to the murkiness of the phenomenology.  It is made even more murky when the first-person POV of phenomenology is blended with the third-person POV of neuroscience.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just over the transom: A friend of mine and I have ongoing discussions about consciousness. Some of his beliefs I have a hard time accepting. He believes for example that his cat doesn't have conscious experience. I can't put my finger on why I have such a hard time accepting this, but I do. One issue that … Continue reading “Consciousness Without Self-Consciousness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness-and-qualia","category-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}