The project examines the relationship between perception and action, and is divided into two parts. The first establishes a detailed philosophical critique of recent sensorimotor or enactive approaches to perception, targeting in particular the work of Alva Noë. In the second part I defend what may be called an 'action-space' account, according to which conscious experience is constituted by an agent's representing his surroundings in such a way as to enable a certain suite of actions. The enactive approach, I argue, misconstrues the relationship between perception and action and fails in its aim to provide an explanation of consciousness. It faces difficulties, too, when it comes to illusion, hallucination and non-visual perception. The action-space model, by contrast, drawing upon work by Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett and Philip Pettit, has the resources to provide a reductive, functionalist account of phenomenal consciousness; an account that locates consciousness where we want it - in the service of fluid world-engagement by embodied, active perceivers. Thus the perception/action interface is taken to be less direct than on the sensorimotor interpretation, but is nonetheless deep and important. The approach I endorse, furthermore, is consistent with and informed by empirical results from the cognitive sciences, including work on embodied, situated cognition and dual-streams analyses of visual processing.

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1 v. (various pagings) / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (D.Litt.) from the Dept. of Philosophy, University of Adelaide, 1972

Jesse Prinz proposes that attended intermediate-level representations (AIRs) are sufficient for conscious awareness. He extends this claim to emotion, arguing that attention is the mechanism that separates conscious from unconscious emotions. Prior studies call this entailment into question. However, they do not directly address the intermediate-level requirement, and thus cannot decisively refute the AIR theory of consciousness. This thesis tests that theory by manipulating participants’ attention to different features of subliminally processed words while recording both behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Both measures suggest that subliminally processed stimuli are attended according to participants’ conscious intention to complete a task. In addition, the EEG data demonstrate that intermediate-level neural activity was modulated by the subliminal stimuli. Thus, these results suggest that AIRs are not sufficient for conscious emotion. This finding undermines Prinz’s AIR theory, and its account of the distinction between conscious and unconscious emotion.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2009. / Title from title screen (site viewed February 25, 2010). PDF text: 225 p. ; 2 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3386555. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb. 25, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Andrew Melnyk. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Here we examined hemispheric differences in conscious and nonconscious perception using a masked priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants judged the direction of a grey target arrow (either left- or right-pointing), which was preceded by a grey prime arrow in either the left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere (RH) or the right visual field (RVF)/left hemisphere (LH). The prime was either masked or unmasked. Participants reported unaware of the prime in the masked condition. We found a significant congruency effect (i.e., a faster response when the prime and target directions were congruent than when they were incongruent) when the prime was presented in the LVF/RH but not the RVF/LH in the masked (subliminal) condition. In contrast, in the unmasked (supraliminal) condition, the RVF prime had a stronger congruency effect than the LVF prime. In Experiment 2, a backward mask was used in all trials and the prime duration was manipulated to create subliminal and supraliminal conditions. In the subliminal condition, LVF/RH primes but not RVF/LH primes generated a congruency effect, whereas in the supraliminal condition, RVF/LH primes had a bigger congruency effect than LVF/RH primes. These qualitatively different hemispheric asymmetry effects in Experiment 1 and 2 suggest that nonconscious and conscious perception may involve different underlying mechanisms. In Experiment 3, color stimuli instead of grayscale stimuli were used. Neither the congruency effect nor the LVF/RH advantage was found in the subliminal condition, while a similar RVF/LH advantage in the congruency effect was found in the supraliminal condition. This result suggests that parvocellular input does not support the subliminal priming effect in the LVF/RH. Taking together, our results revealed a dissociation between the mechanisms underlying nonconscious and conscious processing, and this dissociation may be due to the dominant role of the magnocellular pathway in nonconscious vision. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness, attention, and experience in the periphery of the visual field. I argue that there are some visual experiences that lack content in the sense of lacking accuracy conditions and also in stronger senses. I define subjective space as the manifold constituted by the various factors that modulate awareness of an object including attention, eccentricity, eccentricity-relative spacing, and so on. The subjective periphery is that area of subjective space in which no objects or properties are experienced. It is subjectively peripheral experiences that lack content. In part my argument depends on claims about phenomenal experience. I establish these by considering a variety of introspective and experimental phenomena related to attention and conscious awareness and extracting a set of data that are neutral with respect to the theories that might explain them. I pursue an argument to the best explanation, refuting three popular explanations and championing my own. The first is that endorsed by Dennett (1991) and Noë (2004). They each claim that our experience of phenomenal character in the subjective periphery is an illusion (or a defeasible illusion). The second explanation, endorsed by Block (2007), is that there is phenomenal experience and content in the periphery but no cognitive awareness of it; thus, reports and other indicators of content fail. The third explanation is that there are indeterminate or general contents in the subjective periphery. This is the representationalist’s explanation. The fourth explanation, my explanation, is that there are in fact experiences that do not present objects or properties at locations in the subjective periphery, and that consequently lack content. I argue that this is the best explanation of the data since the others either fail to account for all the neutral data, can be shown to be false for independent reasons, or both. I also defend a number of distinct conclusions that nevertheless strengthen the main line of argument. For example, I consider the view that all attention is conscious, which helps to salvage the reliability of introspection as a method of investigating attention and experience.

This essay is on ‘Phenomenal Consciousness’. By introducing the ‘hard problem’ of phenomenal consciousness, I will focus on Chalmers’ efforts on developing a theory of consciousness, which he believes is a project toward finding a solution to the hard problem. As a result of focusing on the hard problem, this paper deals with the questions such as “how and why cognitive functioning is accompanied by conscious experience”, “how the physical systems or the physical brain processes give rise to conscious experience”, “why these processes do not take place ‘in the dark’ without any accompanying states of experience”, “what is the relation between the physical, the psychological and the phenomenal” and finally “what is the phenomenal experience or phenomenal feel”. There are two main streams trying to find a solution to (or dissolve) these kinds of questions about consciousness: the reductive doctrines (materialists) and the nonreductive doctrines. Before exploring Chalmers’ answer to these questions, which is by his nonreductive theory of consciousness, I will explore some of the most important reductive (materialist) theories by focusing on Chalmers’ arguments against them and I will indicate his main objection to materialist theories by pointing out what he thinks is missing in these theories. This issue will be followed by the part in which I will argue that what makes Chalmers’ arguments against materialists views applicable, actually applies to his own theory of consciousness as well. I will argue that what is missing in all theories of consciousness, (including Chalmers’) which could play a significant role in a theory of consciousness, is a ‘first person point of view’ and an ‘ability to have a first person point of view’, by which I mean an ability for a being to have a first person (subjective) access to the results of his own physical cognitive information processing system. As a result, I will argue that phenomenal consciousness is actually an epistemic phenomenon which is the result of being in a sort of epistemic relation to one’s own cognitive system. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-09 00:24:44.795