Do we even know what consciousness is at all?

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@eburacum45

About ten years ago there were a number of experimental results that seemed to show that human subjects sometimes or often decide to act rapidly and unconsciously, before they have time to make a conscious decision. They then rationalise their actions and their choices post-hoc - a kind of post-rationalisation, if you will.

Hmm, sounds like the Libet experiments, but the original was performed in the late 70s I think… Anyway, there have been more recent studies casting doubt on this sort of interpretation:

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

The notion that the readiness potential acts as an unconscious cause of spontaneous activity has come under severe fire. Most notably, it also occurs as a random fluctuation without causing any sort of action—it’s just the sort of thing complex systems sometimes do. What rather seems to have happened in the Libet experiments is that it acted as a sort of symmetry breaker, something that tipped the scales in a brain already poised to make a decision, and enabled the translation of that decision into action. Think of it like one of these paternoster lifts, where cabins are continually carried up. You stand outside, waiting for the next cabin to pass, and enter it to move up; but even though one could detect that cabin going up before you use it to ascend (to bring a decided action to bear, in the image), that doesn’t mean that the paternoster cabin is what caused you to do so.

This is borne out by experiments in which the neural activity of probands that are instructed not to act is compared to that of people that do perform some action at their leisure:

To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment. [source]

So at least that particular signal does not seem to grant the ability to predict actions before you’re aware of them.

@Mijin

I think the discussion of intentionality muddies the waters a bit here.

Just to avoid some potential confusion, I think you are talking here about intentional, i.e. deliberate, action, right? In the philosophy of mind, the word ‘intentionality’ usually denotes that quality of a mental state that makes it about or refer to something external. I.e. if you think about an apple, that apple is the thought’s intentional object (or, in Brentano’s formula, the apple has ‘intentional in-existence’ within the thought).

@Irishman

From what I gather, to you a quale is an experience. Does that mean any conscious thought, or just experience of a condition derived from sense data?

Qualia are the qualitative component of experience: if I see red, the redness I experience is the associated quale; if I feel pain, it’s the pain’s unique painfulness. In Thomas Nagel’s phrasing, they’re ‘what it is like’ for me to be having that particular experience. Hence, qualia are associated with any sort of conscious experience, not just that derived from sensory data.

@Irishman

Yes, it is possible to conceive of a set of reactions that are a response to bumping something without a pain signal. However, the specific reactions aren’t unconnected. The jumping up and down and cursing and screaming are responses explicitly because of the damage signal.

Sure, but there is no reason for the ‘pain signal’ to feel like anything. Your reaction is fully determined by the neural lightning storm triggered in reaction to the stimulus, and that’s just a (long, complicated) chain of physical cause and effect. What role is played by the pain quale, and how does it come about? Generally, we don’t expect physical causality to be accompanied by phenomenal experience in cases that don’t occur within brains, and it seems entirely possible to imagine the sort of causality that occurs there to also fail to have any phenomenal content. (That’s in the end why we’ve often had the statement in this thread that we can’t even be sure that another person is conscious.) Yet here we are, merrily experiencing away.

Indeed, since we believe that the physical is causally closed, it’s hard to find any role for qualia to play at all, which has led to the doctrine of epiphenomenalism: qualia are just by-products of our mental processes, but don’t have themselves any causal role to play.