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On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1995) 18, 227-287 Printed in the United States of America On a confusion about a function of consciousness Ned Block Department of Unguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 Electronic mall: [email protected] Abstract: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of"consciousness" based on the phenomenon ofblindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains ofblindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses." They cannot harness this information in the service of action, however, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are both access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access­ consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness. Keywords: access; attention; awareness; blindsight; consciousness; function; retrieval 1. Introduction with reasoning, not with data. Long stretches of text without data may make some readers uncomfortable, as The concept of consciousness is a hybrid, or better, a will my fanciful thought-experiments. But if you are mongrel concept: the word "consciousness" connotes a interested in consciousness, then if I am right you can't number of different concepts and denotes a number of afford to lose patience. A stylistic matter: because this different phenomena. We reason about "consciousness" paper will have audiences with different concerns, I have using some premises that apply to one of the phenomena adopted the practice of putting in footnotes items that will that fall under "consciousness," other premises that apply mainly be of technical interest to part of the audience. to other "consciousnesses," and we end up with trouble. Footnotes can be skipped without losing the thread. I now There are many parallels in the history of science. Aris­ turn to blindsight and its role in reasoning about a func­ totle used "velocity" sometimes to mean average velocity tion of consciousness. and sometimes to mean instantaneous velocity; his failure Patients with damage in primary visual cortex typically to see the distinction caused confusion (Kuhn 1964). The have "blind" areas in their visual fields. If the experimen­ Florentine Experimenters of the seventeenth century ter flashes a stimulus in one of these blind areas and asks used a single word (roughly translatable as "degree of the patient wh~t he saw, the patient answers "nothing." heat") for temperature and for heat, generating para­ The striking phenomenon is that some (but not all) of doxes. For example, when they measured "degree of these patients are able to "guess" reliably about certain heat" by whether various heat sources could melt paraffin, features of the stimulus, features having to do with mo­ heat source A came out hotter than B, but when they tion, location, direction (e.g., whether a grid is horizontal measured "degree of heat" by how much ice a heat source or vertical). In "guessing," they are able to discriminate could melt in a given time, B was hotter than A (Wiser & some simple forms. If they are ask~d to grasp an object in Carey 1983). These are very different cases, but there is a the blind field (which they say they cannot see), they can similarity, one that they share with the case of"conscious­ shape their hands in a way appropriate to grasping it, and ness." The similarity is: very different concepts are treated there are some signs of color discrimination. It is interest­ as a single concept. I think we all have some tendency to ing that visual acuity (as measured, e. g., by how fine a make this mistake in the case of "consciousness." grating can be detected) increases further from where the Though the problem I am concerned with appears in patient is looking in blindsight, the opposite of normal many lines of thought about consciousness, it will be sight. (Blindsight was first noticed by Poppe! et al., 1973; convenient to focus on one of them. My main illustration there is now a huge body of literature on this and related of the kind of confusion I am talking about concerns phenomena. See Bornstein & Pittman 1992; Milner & reasoning about the function of consciousness. The issue Rugg 1992.) [See also Campion et al.: "Is Blindsight an of the function of consciousness is, in fact, more the Effect of Scattered Light, Spared Cortex, and Near­ platfonn of this article than its topic. Because the article threshold Vision?" BBS 6(3) 1983.] attempts to expose a confusion, it is primarily concerned Consciousness in some sense is apparently missing l!:l 1995 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X/95 $9.00+.10 227 Block: Confusion about consciousness (though see McGinn, 1991, p. 112, for an argument to the One patient who has been studied by my colleagues in contrary), and with it the ability to deploy information in the Boston area is LH, a Harvard undergraduate who reasoning and rational control of action. For example, emerged from a car accident with very localized brain Marcel (1986) observed that a thirsty blindsight patient damage that left him unable to recognize even his mother. would not reach for a glass of water in his blind field (one His girl friend began to wear a special ribbon so that he must grant Marcel some "poetic license" in this influential would know who she was. Now, years later, he still cannot example; blindsight patients appear to have insufficient identify his mother or his wife and children from photo­ form perception in their blind fields to pick out a glass of graphs (Etcoff et al. 1991). Still, if shown a photo and water). It is tempting to argue (Barrs 1988; Flanagan 1991; asked to choose another photo of the same person from a 1992; Marcel 1986; 1988; van Gulick 1989) that because set of, say, five photos presented simultaneously with the consciousness is missing in blindsight, consciousness original, LH can do almost as well as normal people must have a function of somehow enabling information despite differences between the target and matching represented in the brain to be used in reasoning, report­ photos in lighting, angle, and expression. ing, and rationally guiding action. I mean the "rationally" Now we are ready for the analog of blindsight. The to exclude the "guessing" kind of guidance of action that phenomenon is exhibited in many experimental para­ blindsight patients are capable of in the case of stimuli digms, but I will mention only this: it has recently been presented to the blind field. The idea is that when a discovered (by Sergent & Poncet 1990) that some pro­ content is not conscious - as in the blindsight patient's sopagnosics are very good at "guessing" between two blind field perceptual contents, it can influence behavior names in the same occupational category ("Reagan" and in various ways, but only when the content is conscious "Bush"") for a person whose face they claim is unfamiliar does it play a rational role; and so consciousness must be (see Young 1994a; 1994b; Young & de Haan 1993, for a involved in promoting this rational role. description of these phenomenon). Interestingly, LH A related argument is also tempting: van Gulick (1989) d_oes not appear to have "covert knowledge" of the people and Searle (1992) discuss Penfield's (1975) observations of whose faces he sees, but he does appear to have "covert epileptics who have a seizure while walking, driving, or knowledge" of their facial expressions (Etcoff et al. 1992). playing the piano. The epileptics continue their activities Many such phenomena in brain-damaged patients have in a routinized, mechanical way despite, it is said, a total now been explored using the techniques of cognitive and lack of consciousness. Searle says that because conscious­ physiological psychology. Further, there are a variety of ness as well as flexibility and creativity of behavior are phenomena that occur in normal people like you and me. missing, we can conclude that a function of consciousness For example, suppose that you are given a string of words is somehow to promote flexibility and creativity. These and asked to count the vowels. This can be done so that two arguments are the springboard for this target article. you will have no conscious recollection or even recogni­ Although some variants of this sort of reasoning have some tion of the words, and you will be unable to "guess" at a merit, they are often given more weight than they de­ level above chance which words you have seen. However, serve, because of a persistent fallacy involving a conflation if I give you a series of word stems to complete according of two very different concepts of consciousness. to your whim, the likelihood of your completing "rea-" as The plan of the paper is as follows: in the following "reason" is greater if"reason" is one of the words that you section I will briefly discuss some other syndromes much saw, even if you do not recall or recognize it as one of the like blindsight, sketching one model that has been offered words you saw (see Bowers & Schacter 1990; Reingold & for explaining them. Then, in the longest part of the Merikle 1993).1 paper, I will distinguish the two concepts of consciousness Recall that the target reasoning (the reasoning I will be whose conflation is the root of the fallacious arguments.
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