‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection Home Introduction Introspection ] Psychophysics | [ Mind-Body Problem Neural Correlates: Psychosomatics Spirits Zombies Automatic Free Will Implicit Cognition | | Emotion/Motivation Comal Anesthesia Sleep Dreams Hysteria" Hypnosis Absorption Meditation Psychedelics SelfConsciousness Development Conclusion Lecture ilustrations | [Exam information | [The Current Scene (On the Internet Farthing Text Introspection: The Analysis of Consciousness To paraphrase William James: Everyone knows what consciousness is. [At least, consciousness is something we know we have. According to Descartes, that lwe are conscious is the only thing we can know for sure. This certainty formed the basis for Descartes’ insights, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore | am") and sum res cogitans ("| am a thing that thinks") From the time of Descartes on, introspection remained the primary — no, the only —- method for investigating consciousness. After all, the philosophical method consists of introspection and reasoning + Based on his introspections, Descartes concluded that body could be studied with the methods of science, but mind must be studied through introspection. + Leibnitz argued that apperception (inner awareness, or self-consciousness) was the essence of consciousness. In his view, perception was possible without consciousness, but consciousness entails awareness of perception -- and the ability to introspect on what one has perceived. + Kant discussed apperception as an “internal sense" analogous to sense-perception. How did Descartes know he was conscious? How do we know that we are? Because we experience ourselves as observing, sensing, perceiving, knowing, remembering, thinking, intuiting, feeling, wanting, 32 hitpshwuw. oct betkeley-odu-khltromConsciousneseWebllnrospecion{ntraspectionSupple‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection willing, intending, and doing. These paradigm cases of the monitoring and controlling aspects of consciousness are what consciousness is all about. Consciousness is the totality of sensations, perceptions, memories, ideas, attitudes, feelings, desire, activities, etc. of which we are aware at any given time. Conscious consists in our awareness of events and of the meaning we give to them, and of the strategies that we plan and execute to deal with them William James (1842-1910) -- trained as a physician, employed as a professor of philosophy, pioneering American psychologist ~ serves as a link between strictly philosophical and psychological analyses of consciousness. Called "the greatest of the 19th-century introspective psychologists” (Farthing, 1992, p. 25), James nonetheless had litte interest in the tightly controlled, experimental or analytical’ introspection of Wundt and Titchener. James assembled a collection of "brass instruments” for experimental introspection at the Harvard psychological laboratory, but he himself never used them, and as soon as he could he arranged for a new colleague, Hugo Munsterberg, to be hired to take over the laboratory work so that he could get back to his writing, based "first and foremost and always” on the method of "looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover" (1890, p. 185). William James on the Stream of Consciousness William James (1842-1910) ~- trained as a physician, employed as a professor of philosophy, pioneering American psychologist — serves as a link between strictly philosophical and psychological analyses of consciousness. Called "the greatest of the 19th-century introspective psychologists" (Farthing, 1992, p. 25), James nonetheless had little interest in the tightly controlled, experimental or “analytical” introspection of Wundt and Titchener. James assembled a collection of "brass instruments” for experimental introspection at the Harvard psychological laboratory, but he himself never used them, and as soon as he could he arranged for a new colleague, Hugo Munsterberg, to be hired to take over the laboratory work so that he could get back to his writing, based "first and foremost and always" on the method of “looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover" (1890, p. 185). James's Introspective Analysis The introspective analysis of "the stream of consciousness" that James offered in his Principles of Psychology (1890/1980, Chapter 9) has never been equaled. So here it is in full (emphases in red added). The Stream of Thought (The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. | use the ord thinking... for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. If we could say in English fit thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with ithe minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on hitpshwuw oct betkeley-edu-hlstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 2182‘2928, 1:36 PM Introspection FIVE CHARACTERS IN THOUGHT How does it go on? We notice immediately five important characters in the process, of hich it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way: 1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 12) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing \3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. \4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. '5) Itis interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects - chooses from lamong them, in a word - all the while. 1) Thought tends to Personal Form ..In this room ~ this lecture-room, say — there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, jsome of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether lanywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. the only states of (consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, ‘selves, concrete particular I's and you's [sic]. Each of these minds keeps it own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them, No thought even comes into direct sight of another thought in another personal jconsciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems las if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. 2) Thought is in Constant Change | do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has any duration -- even if true, that \would be hard to establish. The change which | have more particularly in view is that which takes place in sensible intervals of time; and the result on which I wish to lay stress is this, Ithat no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. 3) Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous | can only define ‘continuous’ as that which is without breach, crack, or division. | have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out laltogether to come into existence again at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the hip. berkeley ecul-lstromiConsciousnessWebnrospaconlinraspacionSupplementhim‘2928, 1:36 PM Introspection (quality, or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no ‘connection whatever with the one that went before. (Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits... It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river" or a'stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective lite. 4) Human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing. .The judgment that my thought has the same object as his thought is what makes the psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality. The judgment that my own past Ithought and my own present thought are of the same object is what makes me take the lobject out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus tthe basis of our belief in realities outside of thought... The first spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child probably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absolute way, as simple beings, neither in or out of thought. But later, by having other thoughts than this present one, and making repeated judgments of sameness among their objects, he corroborates in himself the notion of realities, past and distant as well as present, which realities no one single thought either possesses or engenders, but which all may Icontemplate and know.... A mind which has become conscious of its own cognitive lfunction, plays what we have called 'the psychologist’ upon itself. It not only knows the things that appear before; it knows that it knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more or less explicitly, our habitual state of mind. 5) It is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks. ‘The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of course patent examples (of this choosing activity... Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of lsimultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each lother, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting lagency of attention, The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the \data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, Which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on —From William James, Principles of Psychology (1890), Chapter 9 BJtere's a summary hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection 1. Personal Subjectivity: Consciousness is a property of individual minds, something that each person possesses him- or herself. 2. Constant Change: We never have quite the same conscious state twice, because the second instance has been affected by the first. 3. Continuity Despite Change: Consciousness is Consciousness flows continuously from the time we wake up until the time we fall asleep. 4, Intentionality: Consciousness is always consciousness of something: There are no "pure", content-free states of consciousness. 5. Selective Attention: We can voluntarily direct our attention towards some contents and away from others. Unconscious Mental Life Obviously, introspection is limited to conscious mental life, begging the question of whether there is an unconscious mental life consisting of percepts, memories, thoughts, feelings, and desires of which we have no phenomenal awareness. James's position on unconscious mental life was complicated Because he identified consciousness with thought, the notion of unconscious mental states (as opposed to unconscious brain processes) struck him as a contradiction in terms. Further, James adopted the doctrine of esse est sentiri: the essence of consciousness (its "to be") is to be sensed. Mental states are felt; therefore they cannot be unconscious. In Chapter 6 on "The Mind-Stuff Theory" (which otherwise was devoted to a critique of structuralism), James considered and rebutted 10 "proofs" of the existence of unconscious mental states. These 10 ostensible proofs are stated as follows. 1, "The minimum visible, the minimum audible, are objects composed of parts, which affect the whole without themselves being separately sensible.” Therefore, these petites perceptions (Leibnitz) are unconscious. This "proof" relates to the modern concept of “subliminal” perception and "preconscious" processing. But for James, if they're not sensed, they can't be mental states, because of the doctrine of esse est sentiri 2. Learned habits start out as deliberate, and then become automatic and take place outside of consciousness. This "proof" obviously anticipates the modern interest in automaticity and attention. But for James, these automatic processes are performed consciously, but so quickly that they leave no traces in memory. Remember that for James, introspection is really retrospection. 3. Thoughts of A can evoke thoughts of C through the logical link of B, even though we are not conscious of B. But for James, B may have been consciously thought, but quickly forgotten. Or else, B is just a brain-process, and not a mental state. 4, Incubation in problem solving during sleep, rational behavior of somnambulists, and awakening at a predetermined time without benefit of an alarm, all indicate that thought goes on while we are asleep, and thus unconscious. But for James, thought in sleep is conscious, but forgotten. 5. Epileptic or hysterical patients, and hypnotic subjects, will engage in complex behaviors without being aware of them upon regaining consciousness. But for James, the explanation is rapid forgetting of a mental state that was once conscious. 6. Musical concordance is produced by simple ratios which must be "counted" unconsciously. But for James, concordance is the product of brain processes, not counting 7. We often make judgment and reactions for which we cannot give logical explanations: "We know more than we can say" (note the reversal of this proposition in Nisbett & Wilson's 1977 article, "Telling More Than We Can Know..."). But for James, this is just brain-processes. 8. Instincts seem intelligent, because they pursue goals, but the intelligence is unconscious, because the goals are not in awareness. But for James, all of this happens via brain processes, without htpssiwwwoctberkel odu-uhistom/ConsciousnessWebinirospection{ntrospectionSupplementhtm 9132‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection requiring any mental states at all 9, Perception is the product of unconscious inference (Heimholtz). But for James, as for Gibson more recently, rapid perceptual judgments are the produces of cerebral associations, with no mental states being involved. 10, We frequently discover that what we thought we believed we do not believe, and that we really believe the opposite -- this "real" belief, then, was unconscious. But for James, such a situation merely involves giving a name to a mental state which has not as yet been named, even though it has been in consciousness all along ‘Some of these refutations, frankly, strike me as strained, glib, hand-waving. They are not, in my view, James at his best. And in some cases, James has simply been proved wrong. There is, now, good evidence of subliminal perception, of the automatization of mental processes, and of unconscious inference in perception. There are dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, etc., in hysteria and hypnosis. There is some evidence of incubation in problem-solving. All of these empirical facts seem to show that some of James's refutations were empirically wrong, and that there is "something it is like" to be an unconscious mental state after all. In fact, James was already well aware of some of this evidence, in 1890, and even in the Principles he describes in positive terms evidence of apparent "unconsciousness" in hypnosis, hysteria, and multiple personality. For example, in hysterical blindness, the person claims to be unable to see, while continuing to respond to visual stimuli. This looks like "unconscious" vision. James accepted the evidence of hypnosis and hysteria as legitimate, but his interpretation was different. Rather than postulate unconscious mental states, be referred to mental states of which we were unaware as co-conscious, subconscious, or as representing a secondary or tertiary (etc.) consciousness. This is not just playing with words. Remember that, for James, "thought tends to personal form”, For James, consciousness could be divided into parallel streams, each associated with a representation of the self. Each of them is a fully conscious condition, but each of them is unaware of the others. When we ask what a person is aware of, the result of the inquiry will depend on which stream is being tapped. If we tap the primary stream, which is usually the case, the person will seem unaware of what is in the secondary stream(s); but if we tap one of the secondary streams, one of the other selves, we will see immediately that consciousness is there. Esse est sentir, still, but it depends ‘on who's being asked All of this sounds a little odd, but it's what seems to happen in hypnosis and "hysteria" - about which more later. The "Stream of Consciousness" Before James \James' phrase "the stream of consciousness” is commonly sourced to the Principles of 1890, but Garry Wills has found it in an earlier paper, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology”, published in Mind for January 1884 ("An American Hero" [review of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson], New York Review of Books, 07/19/2007) However, the phrase popularized by James was not original with him. ‘Sandra Tropp found the phrase in Physiological Aesthetics by Grant Allen (1877, p. 200), with which James may have been familiar (New York Review of Books, 08/16/2007). But William Waterhouse (New York Review of Books, 11/22/2007) found it even earlier, in The Physiology of Common Sense by George Henry Lewes (1859, p. 61); and even earlier than that, in The Senses and the Intellect by Alexander Bain (1855, p. 359). James may have read Allen, but he was certainly familiar with both Lewes and Bain. hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 2‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection Experimental Introspection Introspection, the philosopher's traditional method for investigating consciousness, became the psychologist's method as well. And not just James (who, after all, was a philosopher -- and physiologist -- before he became a psychologist). In the hands of Wundt, Titchener (Wundt's most famous American student), and other "Structuralists", introspection came to be the method for a “mental chemistry” by which complex conscious states could be analyzed into their constituent elements (for comprehensive reviews, see Boring, 1953; Danziger, 1980). To quote from E.B. Titchener’s Text-Book of Psychology (1910) Scientific method may be summed up in the single word ‘observation’... The method of psychology, then is observation. To disitinguish it from the observation of physical science, which is inspection, a looking-at, psychological observation has been termed introspection, a looking-within. But this difference of name must not blind us to the essential likeness of the methods. In principle, then, introspection is very like inspection. The objects of observation are different: they are objects of dependent, not of independent experience; they are likely to be transient, elusive, slippery. sometimes they refuse to be observed while they are in passage; they must be preserved in memory, as a delicate tissue is preserved in hardening fluid, before they can be examined. And the standpoint of the observer is different; itis the standpoint of human life and of human interest, not of detachment and aloofness, But, in general, the method of psychology is much the same as the method of physics. Titichener (1898) also laid out the general rules for introspection (there were also specific rules, depending on the nature of the mental state being introspected): + Be impartial ("Take consciousness as it is"). « Be attentive ("Take the experiment seriously"). + Be comfortable ("Take the experiment pleasantly’ + Be perfectly fresh ("Take the experiment vigorously”). r, as Titchener, advised: "The rule of psychological work is this: Live impartially, attentively, comfortably, freshly, the part of your mental life you wish to understand. The big rule, however, was to avoid what Titchener (1905; Boring, 1921) called the stimulus-error. That is, the introspective observer should not confuse the sensation with the stimulus and its meaning. Observers were to base their reports on "mental material", not on the objects which gave rise to their mental states. The stimulus-error consists in describing the objects of perception and their meanings. But, for Titchener, the description of the stimulus, independent of experience, reflects the point of view of physics, not psychology. In any event, as Boring (1953) made clear, classical experimental introspection, as practiced by Wundt (1896), Titchener (1905, 1910), and other Structuralists, was a kind of mental chemistry (Boring should know, as he was a student of Titchener's and knew Wundt). Consciousness contains complexes, analogous to molecules, which are composed of sensory elements, analogous to atoms. Kulpe, another Structuralist, identified these elements as intensity, extensity, duration and, most important - because it was inherently psychological in nature — quality. The quest for identifying the basic qualities of sensation is discussed in the lectures on Psychophysics, to which we will turn shortly. hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 82‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection Titchener was clear that, to quote somebody (maybe James?), all introspection is retrospection. The Structuralists understood clearly that observing and reporting on experience would necessarily interfere with having the experience -- a kind of psychological anticipation of Heisenberg's (1927) uncertainty principle in physics. Accordingly, observers were carefully trained to have the experience first, and then report it from memory. This training, like training in avoidance of the stimulus-error, was painstaking, and involved as many as 10,000 trials (an anticipation of Anders Ericsson's "10,000 Hour Rule” Titchener was also clear that experimental introspection involved going above and beyond mere verbal reports. Verbal reports, in his terms, were responses to the stimulus. Introspections were observations of experience. In the final analysis, the psychologist’s introspection was distinguished from the philosopher's introspection by the “scientific means by which it was conducted: + ina laboratory setting, with only a very short interval between perception and observation; + employing experienced observers, for whom observation is an automatic habit with no self- consciousness attached; + and replication of stimulus conditions, with the expectation that identical stimuli should generate identical experiences, time after time. Critique of Introspection James' analysis of mental life relied primarily on introspection. He had a collection of "brass instruments" in his teaching laboratory, but he rarely used them. He preferred to introspect and then psychologize. However, there were some differences between James's approach to introspection and that of the structuralists. (1) He believed that introspection was essentially memory-based, rather than ‘on-line (i.e., "All introspection is retrospection"); the implication is that the introspective mental state (‘saying-|-feel-tired) is different from the pre-introspective mental state (feeling tired). (2) He believed that introspection was unreliable, and had to be checked by other means To this end, James outlined a number of methods to supplement introspection: (1) connecting conscious states with physical conditions; (2) analyzing space perception; (3) measuring the duration of mental processes; (4) reproducing sensory experiences and intervals of space and time; (5) studying how mental states influence each other (e.g,, excitation and inhibition; span of apprehension); and (6) studying the laws of memory. Still, introspection remained James’ preferred method of psychological analysis ~ and he thought that its results far outweighed those obtained (so far) by experimental analyses employing "brass instruments", But James was not entirely persuasive on this score, and as psychology developed, three quite different critiques of introspection emerged. The Cri ique from Inside Even the Structuralists understood that there were methodological problems with introspection. + Despite their acknowledgement that “all introspection is retrospection", and the careful training of observers to observe and then report, they understood that introspections could be distorted by hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm ase‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection the very act of observation. * And precisely because they understood that “all introspection is retrospection", they appreciated the possibility that forgetting, reconstruction, and inference could contaminate introspective reports, + They also worried about self-censorship (though it's not clear that any of the stimuli used in introspective studies were particularly threatening). + They understood the difficulty of verbal description ~- not just with respect to the stimulus error, but also the ineffability of qualia, « They also intuitively appreciated the importance of what Martin Orne (1962) would later call the demand characteristics of the psychological experiment - -that is, the tendency of subjects to perform the way they think the experimenter thinks they should «= And, of they appreciated that, because consciousness is inherently subjective, there was no possibilty for independent verification of their observers’ reports ~ aside from whatever consensus was achieved across observers. Aside from these methodological problems, which investigators like Titchener did their best to surmount, there was One Big Problem with introsepction - -which was that scientific psychology was gradually abandoning introspection in favor of an emphasis on human performance. + Partly this was due to an expansion of the subject matter deemed appropriate for experimental study. Wundt and Titchener, like Fechner and Helmholtz, had confined themselves to problems of sensation and perception -- to immediate experience, closely tied to stimulation. But beginning with Ebbinghaus, and also with the studies of animal learning by Paviov and Thorndike, psychology turned to aspects of mental life that could not be studied with introspection. Ebbinghaus (1884), by measuring memory strength in terms of savings in relearning, and Cattell (1885), by determining the span of apprehension to be approximately 7 items, shifted the emphasis in psychology from introspection, or even self-report, to behavioral performance. « This trend was exacerbated by the increasing interest in applied psychology, such as the invention of the intelligence test by Binet and Simon The Behaviorist Critique The behaviorist critique of introspection is pretty straightforward: mental states are gg | Subiective and private, and science is based on objective, publicly available observations. Therefore you can't have a science based on introspection. You can only have a science based on what's observable, which is behavior and the stimulus circumstances under which it occurs. Watson had other criticisms of introspection, such as the endless controversies over such topics as whether there was image-less thought (about which Buehler and Wundt battled endlessly). Watson actually didn't object to introspection in studies of sensation and perception, where the stimuli can be controlled by the experimenter. The problems really arose when introspection was applied to the higher" mental processes. If someone is going to introspect on thought processes, how could we be sure that two different observers were actually introspecting on the same thought? But these were merely methodological objections. The behaviorist critique of introspection was principled: you can't base a science on introspection; and psychology should be redefined as a science of behavior rather than as a science of mental life. Watson's critique was echoed by B.F. Skinner, who wrote (among many other things) Science and ‘Human Behavior (1953), intended to be an introductory textbook of psychology based on strict, radical hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 982‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection behaviorism. A Modern "Cognitivist" Critique After the behaviorists were overthrown in the cognitive revolution, you'd think that introspections would be let in. And in some sense they were. In the first place, the basic data for cognitive psychology is self-report and response latency -- that is, how fast people make their self-reports. + Ina perception experiment, the experimenter presents a stimulus, and the subject reports what he sees. + Ina recognition experiment, the subject studies a list of words, the experimenter presents a test consisting of targets and lures, the subject indicates which is which by pressing a key, and the computer records both the judgment and the response latency. + Inalexical decision task, the experimenter presents a series of letter strings on a computer screen, the subject presses a key to indicate whether the string is a legal English word, and the computer again records the judgment and response latency. More substantively, introspections provided the data for one of the landmarks of the cognitive revolution, Newell and Simon's (1972) "General Problem Solver". One of the first examples of artficial intelligence, GPS employed means-end analysis to solve all sorts of mathematical and scientific problems, and was explicitly based on subjects’ reports of how they went about solving various kinds of problems -- a technique known as protocol analysis which is basically introspective in nature. (Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in part for this work). Later, K. Anders Ericsson, who was a student of Simon and Newell (Ericsson & Simon, 1990, 1993) introduced the "Model of Verbalization of Thinking” — a refinement of protocol analysis that is, again, essentially introspective in nature. But that didn't mean that there weren't still problems with introspection that worried investigators (including Ericsson & Simon). * First, and foremost, was the persisting problem that individuals’ mental states are privileged, and introspection doesn't permit the kind of intersubjectivity that science traditionally mandates. For this reason, some psychologists, and other cognitive scientists have preferred physiological data, including brain-imaging data -- measuring things like event-related potentials instead of self- reports, But any bio-marker (including brain-imaging data) must be validated against self-reports anyway, so that doesn't really solve the problem. When it comes to the science of mental life, there really isn't any way of avoiding self-reports. * Setting this aside, there was James' point that "thought is in constant change". Sensations and perceptions might be stable enough to permit introspection, but thinking might be too dynamic —~ with thoughts changing as they pass through our minds -- to permit observers to describe them in any detail + Relatedly, there is the problem that the very act of introspection -- attending to, describing, and reporting on -- one’s thoughts may change the thoughts themselves. The problem here is a little like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics, where the act of measurement may change the thing that’s being measured. In the same way, thinking about a mental state can't help but change that mental state. The cognitive revolution made consciousness a legitimate topic of scientific research again, but — as welll see later — it also legitimized the study of unconscious mental life -- that is, percepts, memories, thoughts, and the like of which we have no awareness. This, in turn, drew attention to a further limitation of introspection — which is that introspection, by definition, offers us a view limited to hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hlstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 10182‘ig9r2s, 1:96 PM Inrospection conscious mental life. You simply can't introspect on unconscious mental life. And if the scope of unconscious mental life is broad, rather than narrow, introspection may miss as much, or more, than it hits. This argument was made expressly by Nisbett and Wilson (1977), in a paper entitled "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes", which argued that people simply have “little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes". They reviewed evidence, and presented new studies, supporting the following points: + People can be unaware of a stimulus that influenced their behavior. + People can be unaware of their response to a stimulus. + People can be aware of the stimulus, and also of their behavior, but unaware of the causal connection between the stimulus and their behavior. For example, Nisbett and Wilson conducted one of their studies in a department store, lunder the guise of a consumer survey. In one version of the study, the subjects -- actual shoppers, or at least window-shoppers -- were asked to evaluate four different } nightgowns; in another version, they were asked to evaluate four pairs of women's stockings that were actually identical. Both studies revealed a marked position bias, such that items on the right-hand side of the display were much more likely to be preferred than those ‘on the left. But when asked why they had their preferences, not a single subject mentioned its position. So, it seems, subjects were unaware of the connection between the position of the objects and their preferences. Nisbett and Wilson argue that this is the case more often than not. What's the problem? Nisbett and Wilson distinguish between content and process. It's one thing, they say, to be aware of some mental state, like our preference for one nightgown over another, and it's quite another to be aware of the processes by which that mental state is constructed. And in general, they argue that mental processes are largely inaccessible to conscious awareness. So, if we want people to tell us what they like, they can do that (usually). But if we want people to tell us why they like it, we may be asking them to tell us more than they can know. It might be said that the "nightgown" study and its like have certain methodological problems. For example, the study described doesn't really allow subjects a rational basis for their decisions. In the stocking version, for example, the four pairs presented for evaluation were, in fact, identical, so there was no way to choose between them. But the subjects were forced to express a choice, and they did. To be sure, they didn't seem to realize that their choices were biased by position -- and, more to the point, even if they did they would never have said so. Position is a ridiculous basis for preferring one pair of stockings over another, and subjects might think that, if they referred to position, they would be accused of not taking their job seriously. So even if they were aware of the influence, they wouldn't admit it. Distinguishing between what people are genuinely aware of, and what people are aware of but won't report, is a serious (but not unmanageable) problem in the scientific study of unconscious mental life, Still, the content-process distinction is one that turns out to be important. As will be discussed later, in the lectures on "Attention and Automaticity", a lot of mental operations appear to be performed automatically, and it's a property of automatic mental processes that they are unconscious in the strict sense that they are simply unavailable to introspective phenomenal awareness under any circumstances. Nisbett and Wilson do not explicitly refer to automaticity in their paper -- it was written before the distinction between automatic and controlled processes really took off. But if the argument is that we only have introspective access to controlled processes, but not to automatic processes, Nisbett and Wilson were onto something. In addition, the philosopher Jerry Fodor has argued that some cognitive systems are modular in nature, performed by dedicated mental systems that are associated with a fixed neural architecture. Cognitive modules take some input, perform some transformation on it, and output this transformation to other parts of the cognitive system. According to Fodor's doctrine of modularity, the internal operations of hitpsshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hlstrom/ConsciousneseWebilnrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm nine‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection these modules are inaccessible to other parts of the cognitive system -- which means, essentially, that these processes are inaccessible to introspection. Moreover, in the course of performing these transformations, the information may pass through one or more distinct states. Although these distinct states count as mental contents, and so might be accessible to introspection (by virtue of the process- content distinction discussed earlier), Fodor argues that these contents are also inaccessible to phenomenal awareness, and thus to introspection, precisely because they are encapsulated in these modules. And finally, as Nisbett and Wilson also point out, there are some stimuli that are “subliminal” -- too weak, or too briefly presented, to be consciously perceptible. There is now a considerable amount of evidence that such “subliminal” stimuli can have palpable effects on experience, thought, or action. We'll discuss this evidence later, in the lectures on “The Explicit and the Implicit”. So, Nisbett and Wilson were onto something, which is that there are limits to introspection. We can't introspect on subliminal stimuli, and we can't introspect on automatic processes, and we can't introspect on the inner workings of cognitive modules. But that doesn't mean that introspection is always invalid -— that we're always, or even often, telling more than we can know. We know a lot, about the stimuli in our environment, and our responses to them, and about what comes in between. Philosophical Analyses of Consciousness Many philosophers identify consciousness with phenomenal experience. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in a famous essay, "What is it like to be a bat?" (1979), there is something it is like to be conscious. Conscious organisms have certain subjective experiences. This phenomenal experience, in turn, comes in several forms -- but how many? Actually, some cognitive ethologists have tried to figure out what it's like to be a bat — well, if not a bat, exactly, some other kind of nonhuman animal * Carl Safina, in Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (2015), approvingly quotes Voltaire on Descartes: "What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and feeling". + Thomas Thwaites, for example, realized that "to inhabit the mental life of a goat, he would need to relate to his surroundings in a goatlike way", and built a kind of prosthetic device which enabled him to do so, after a fashion -- an experience he wrote about in GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human (2016). Actually, he initially wnated to be an elephant, and the Welcome Trust, a British foundation that. supports scientific research, approved his proposal. But when he consulted a Dutch shaman, she said his proposal was “idiotic’, and that he should become a deer, or a sheep, or a goat instead. And so he did. * Charles Foster tried to accomplish much the same goal simply by living like a badger, as well as he could, for six weeks in the woods -- a story he told in Being a Beast (2016; reviewed by Vicki Constantine Croke in "I Want to know What It Is Like to Be a Wild Thing”, New York times Book Review, 07/17/2016). Foster also tried his hand at hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 12082‘2928, 1136 PM Introspection being a fox, red deer, and an otter ~- the last project one in in which he also enrolled his children, * Goats and badgers are, at least, mammals. In What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (2016), Jonathan Balcome tries to understand how the world appears to a fish -- and, more importantly, marshals anecdotal and scientific evidence about intelligent problem solving in various species of piscines. * And, for good measure, Andrew Barron and Colin Klein that insects and other invertebrates also possess at least the limited degree of self-awareness that comes with knowing where their bodies are in space and what they are doing ("What Insects Can Tell Us About the Origins of Consciousness", PNAS 2016). + From a more conventionally scientific basis, Franz de Wall, in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) that the whole enterprise of comparative psychology mistakenly tries to compare other animals to humans. Instead, we should recognize that each animal species has its own unique, self-centered, subjective world -- what Jacob von Uexkull calls its Umwelt — which cannot be fully comprehended by any other species (reviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert in "He Tried To Be a Badger", New York Review of Books, 06.23.2016, which also reviews Foster's and Balcome's books). For more on animal consciousness, see the lectures on "The Origins of Mind"; also "The Metamorphosis" by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 05/30/2016), from which some of these quotes are drawn. Technically, Brian Farrell, a British philosopher, first posed the question of "what it would be like to be a bat" in a paper entitled "Experience" (Mind, 1950). But Nagel popularized the question, and it's his essay with that title that has entered the canon of philosophical examinations of consciousness. Faculties of Mind = ]In the late 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant offered a tripartite classification of “irreducible” mental faculties: knowledge, feeling and desire — or, as the 20th-century psychologist Ernest R. ("Jack") Hilgard (1980) put it, the "trilogy of mind": cognition (having to do with knowledge and belief), emotion (having to do with feeling, affect, and mood), and motivation (having to do with goals and drives). Cognition, emotion, and motivation are three different mental functions, but they also serve as three broadly different types of mental states. According to this view, perceiving and remembering are different mental states, but they have in common that they are cognitive states of knowing; anger and fear are also different mental states, but they have in common that they are emotional states of feeling; hunger and thirst are different mental states, but they have in common that they are motivational states of desire. Based on the Kant-Hilgard analysis, then, as a first pass we can identify three different qualitative states of mind, each corresponding to one of his “irreducible” mental faculties. Put another way, * cognitive states of "knowing" something are qualitatively different from + emotional states of “feeling” something, which in tum are qualitatively different from = motivational states of "desiring" something, Kant asserted that the trilogy of mind was irreducible, in that states of feeling and desire, for example, could not be further reduced to states of knowledge and belief. However, this point is controversial. Within both psychology and cognitive science, some theorists believe that cognition is the fundamental faculty, and that emotional and motivational states are reducible to cognitive states. Put another way, emotions and motives are cognitive constructions. In this view, the basis mental state is one of belief, hitpshwuw: oct betkeley-edu-hstrom/ConsciousneseWebiInrospacion{inraspecionSupplement. htm 9182