Two decades of event-related potential (ERP) research have established that the most consistent correlates of the onset of visual consciousness are the early visual awareness negativity (VAN), a negative component in the N2 time range over posterior electrode sites, and the late positivity (LP), a positive component in the P3 time range over fronto-parietal electrode sites. A review by Koivisto & Revonsuo (2010) had looked at 39 studies and concluded that the VAN is the earliest and most reliable correlate of visual phenomenal consciousness, whereas the LP probably reflects later processes associated with reflective/access consciousness. However, an “early” vs. “late” debate still persists. This thesis provides an update to that earlier review. All ERP and MEG studies that have appeared since 2010 and directly compared ERPs of aware and unaware conditions are considered. The result corroborates the view that VAN is the earliest and most consistent signature of visual phenomenal consciousness, and casts further doubt on the LP as an ERP correlate of consciousness. Important new methodological, empirical, and theoretical developments in the field are described, and the empirical results are related to the theoretical background debates.

Two influential theories of consciousness disagree about if consciousness initially arises along the occipitotemporal cortex to later engage frontoparietal regions and attentional mechanisms, or if it necessarily requires the latter. Consequently, different predictions are made about the temporal emergence of consciousness. The event-related potential (ERP) technique can be used to resolve the issue. It can temporally track neural activity of consciously perceived stimuli relative to stimuli bypassing consciousness. This essay describes the two theories and reviews ERP studies on visual consciousness and its relationship to attention. Three ERP correlates of consciousness have been proposed. The question is if they should be interpreted as supporting the one or the other theory. Most plausibly, visual consciousness arises along occipitotemporal regions and later incorporates frontal areas engaging higher cognitive functions. Importantly it seems that consciousness cannot arise without spatial attention/parietal regions.

The way the vast majority of us think about the self, consciousness and free will is incorrect – dramatically out of step with what the majority of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists scientists and analytic philosophers have to say about those subjects. One consequence of these erroneous views is that the manner in which the majority of us understand ‘freedom’ – as a metaphysical term and as a political concept -- is sharply at odds with how things actually are. We replicate similar kinds of errors when we think about how various forms of human association are constructed and how change actually occurs within such associations. Once again, epistemological fallacies with regard to social theory have the consequence of leading us to attribute far greater ‘freedom’ to groups than they actually possess. This second misattribution of autonomy results in institutional political arrangements and constitutional doctrines at odds with what we know about the human condition. As things stand, the various models of political theory with which the South African Constitutional Court operates rest upon a belief that the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Final Constitution should enable individuals to exercise relatively unfettered control over decisions about the intimate relationships and the various practices deemed critical to their self-understanding. However, individual autonomy as a foundation for constitutional theory overemphasizes dramatically the actual space for self-defining choices. In truth, our experience of personhood, of self-consciousness, is a function of a complex set of narratives over which we exercise little in the way of (self) control. The involuntary and arational nature of identity formation – at the level of both the individual and the social -- requires a constitutional theory that supplants the model of a rational individual moral agent which undergirds much of our current jurisprudence with a vision of the self that is more appropriately located within and determined by the associations to which we all belong. Despite the involuntary and arational nature of identity formation, we can live within communities that determine the greater part of the meaning we make, and still remain committed to the possibility of significant change (for the better) within those communities. This thesis then goes on to explain how a commitment to experimentalism in the political domain, when married to a robust conception of basic entitlements and citizenship, services human flourishing. (To expand the conditions for flourishing, however, is not to make us metaphysically ‘free’ to ‘will’ our actions: a commitment to flourishing reflects an attempt to create an environment in which all inhabitants of South Africa have the opportunity to live lives worth valuing.) Experimental constitutionalism dovetails with a very modest, naturalized account of flourishing because both accounts (1) take the radical givenness of existing constitutive attachments seriously; (2) recognize the boundedness of individual and collective rationality; and (3) describe various kinds of feedback mechanisms that allow for error correction and the enhancement of the conditions of being. Experimental constitutionalism, in particular, enables more citizens to see what ‘works’ and what doesn’t – both with respect to the means and the ends of our existence. Experimental constitutionalism offers the promise of improving the conditions for being by suggesting a range of alterations in constitutional doctrine and a host of changes in the manner in which many political institutions operate. In South Africa, the innovations associated with experimental constitutional design embrace: (1) a doctrine of constitutional supremacy that maintains a meaningful equilibrium with a doctrine of separation of powers, and thus sets relatively clear guidelines for how authority for constitutional interpretation might best be shared by the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and non-state-actors; (2) the use of various standard judicial mechanisms – such as cost orders, court procedures, amici and intervenors, expanded constitutional jurisdiction and structural injunctions – to create bubbles of participatory democracy better able (than courts or legislatures) to resolve various kinds of polycentric conflict; (3) an approach to limitations analysis that provides a better process than ‘balancing’ for experimentalist adjudication; and (4) greater roles for Chapter 9 Institutions with respect to investigation, information-sharing and norm-setting; and (5) a principle of democracy that invites public participation in law-making that will both elicit better information about which government policies work best and effect widespread reflection about the meaning of those constitutional norms that govern our lives. The thesis then (a) mines the brief historical record of two important policy areas – Housing and Education – to show how the principles of experimental constitutionalism have already been put to work and (b) re-examines six Constitutional Court cases to demonstrate how the dual commitment to experimental constitutionalism and flourishing might generate more optimal outcomes. / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Public Law / unrestricted

En 1995, le philosophe Ned Block a proposé de distinguer deux notions de conscience : une notion purement expérientielle, la « conscience phénoménale », qui désigne l’effet que cela fait d’être dans tel ou tel état mental, et une notion purement fonctionnelle, la « conscience d’accès », ou « accès cognitif » (Block, 2007), entendue comme la capacité du sujet à utiliser ses représentations pour le contrôle de ses opérations cognitives, et, via ces opérations, pour le contrôle de la parole et de l’action. Block défend depuis l’hypothèse très discutée selon laquelle l’expérience consciente, ou « conscience phénoménale », déborde l’accès cognitif du sujet. L’objet central de ce travail est de mettre cette hypothèse à l’épreuve de la recherche sur le rêve. Nous y soutenons principalement les trois arguments suivants : 1. Sous hypothèse d’une continuité entre les propriétés de la mémoire onirique et vigile, on peut objectiver la réalité d’expériences conscientes pendant le sommeil en s’appuyant sur le critère canonique de rapportabilité. De fait, de nombreuses études convergent pour montrer que les sujets peuvent rapporter un contenu onirique qui reflète de manière non équivoque un stimulus présenté plus d’une minute avant l’éveil – ce qui, au regard de l’extrême évanescence de la perception subliminale, ne pourrait pas être le cas si le rêve était un processus inconscient. Sachant que le sommeil s’accompagne d’une sévère désactivation des aires frontales, et en particulier du cortex dorsolatéral préfontal (DlPFC), un tel résultat tend à questionner le modèle neuropsychologique de « l’espace neuronal global de travail » (Dehaeneet Naccache, 2001 ; Dehaene et al, 2006) qui fait dépendre la perception consciente de l’activation de ces aires.2. Le fait même d’objectiver la réalité d’expériences conscientes pendant le sommeil à travers des récits de rêves recueillis à l’éveil implique cependant de reconnaître que ces mêmes expériences ont été remarquées par le dormeur et qu’elles relèvent en ce sens minimum de la conscience d’accès. Pour autant, certains désordres cognitifs de la conscience rêvante, tels notamment que la cécité au changement, suggèrent qu’il ne suffit pas qu’une expérience soit remarquée par le dormeur pour qu’elle relève de plein droit de la conscience d’accès : il fautencore qu’elle puisse être maintenue activement dans la mémoire de travail. Le phénomène bien connu des « dissociations identité-apparence » (Schwartz, 1999) suggère pareillement que la rapportabilité d’une expérience onirique n’assure pas qu’elle soit posée pour le contrôle des opérations cognitives dans le rêve.3. Dès l’instant où l’on a pu objectiver la réalité des expériences oniriques à travers le critère canonique de rapportabilité, il devient possible – là encore, sous hypothèse de continuité –d’inférer de façon empiriquement contraignante l’existence d’une vie consciente non rapportable du dormeur. Se pose alors la question de savoir si un tel vécu, dont on peut soutenir qu’il constitue une forme d’inconscient psychique, relève de plein droit de la conscience d’accès.Enfin, à travers ces trois arguments portant spécifiquement sur la conscience onirique, nous montrons que la recherche sur le rêve permet de questionner de façon privilégiée la notion d’une nécessaire rapportabilité de l’expérience consciente et de faire valoir le concept de modularité de la conscience qui sous-tend l’hypothèse blockéenne du débordement expérientiel (Block, 1995, 1997). / In 1995, the American philosopher Ned Block proposed to distinguish between two notions of consciousness: “Access-consciousness” and “Phenomenal-consciousness”. “P-consciousness” is experience: it refers to what it is like to be in a certain mental state. “Aconsciousness” is a purely functional notion. A mental state is A-conscious when it allows the subject to cognitively control its reasoning, speech and action. Since 1995, Block supports the controversial hypothesis according to which conscious experience overflows our cognitive access to it. The main goal of this work is to assess this hypothesis from the point of view of scientific research on dreaming. This PhD dissertation makes the three following points : 1. Assuming there is a continuity between waking and dreaming memory, one can objectively verify that dreams are conscious experiences that occur during sleep relying on the canonical criterion of reportability. Indeed, many studies show that subjects can report on a dream content that unequivocally reflects a stimulus that has occurred more than one minute before awakening – which couldn’t be had this dream content been unconsciously processed. Considering that sleeping involves a severe deactivation of the frontal areas of the brain, especially of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DlPFC), this result seems to call into question the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness. Indeed, according to this theory the activation of these very areas is a necessary condition for a conscious perception to occur(Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Dehaene et al, 2006). 2. There is no way though to demonstrate scientifically that dreams are conscious experiences of the sleeper without implying they were noticed during sleep, which, in turn, implies an elementary level of access. Still, certain cognitive disorders of our dreaming consciousness, such as change blindness, suggest that, due to a severe weakness of working memory, noticing an experience during sleep might not suffice to constitute a genuine cognitive access to it. The well-known phenomenon called “identity-appearance dissociation” (Schwartz, 1999) also suggests that dreaming experiences that are reportable on awakening might not always be poised for cognitive control in the dream. 3. Once the reality of conscious experiences during sleep is objectively established relying on the criterion of reportability, it becomes possible – again under the assumption of continuity - to empirically infer the existence of dreaming experiences that the subject cannot report. The following question then arises: are these experiences, which can be seen as a form of unconscious mental life, access-conscious? Finally, and more generally, we show that the results of dreaming research offer a vantage point both to call into question the notion that conscious experience is necessarily reportable and to support the concept of modularity of our conscious selves (Nagel, 1971; Gazzaniga,1985) that underlies Block’s overflow hypothesis (Block, 1995, 1997)