The Cognitive Basis of Intuitions about Consciousness

Philosophers have long taken an interest in intuitions about consciousness. This symposium would offer a new twist on that familiar approach. Each of the researchers presenting talks would report experimental data on the nature of people’s ordinary intuitions. The speakers then draw on these data to offer specific hypotheses about the cognitive basis of intuitions about consciousness. The symposium would bring together researchers from a number of disciplines, including philosophy, neuroscience and social psychology.

Intuitions about Consciousness: Experimental Studies

Joshua Knobe (Chair) and Jesse Prinz
University of North Carolina. North Carolina, USA

- Monday, June 25. 8:30AM - 9:00 AM -

People's understanding of an entity's mental states can be influenced both by functional considerations and by strictly physical considerations. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these kinds of considerations impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking difference between two kinds of states — those that involve phenomenal consciousness and those that do not. Specifically, it appears that ascriptions of states that involve phenomenal consciousness show a special sort of sensitivity to purely physical factors.

Dimensions of Mind Perception

Heather M. Gray, Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University. Massachusetts, USA

- Monday, June 25. 9:00AM - 9:30 AM -

How do people decide what sorts of entities have minds? To date, it has generally been assumed that mind perception occurs on one dimension--things simply have more or less mind--and the dimensions of mind perception have remained unexamined. We studied the structure of mind perception through 2,399 completed online surveys. Participants were asked to compare the mental capacities of various human and non-human characters and to respond to hypothetical moral situations. Factor analyses revealed two dimensions of mind perception: Experience (e.g., capacity for hunger, fear, and pain), and Agency (e.g., capacity for self-control, morality, and memory). In other words, from a perceiver's perspective, there exists a broad distinction between phenomenal consciousness (our Experience factor) and the capacity to exert control. In addition, these dimensions were differentially related to ethical questions; only perceptions of Experience were correlated with a desire to provide protection from harm.

The genuine problem of consciousness

Philip Robbins and Anthony Jack
Washington University. Missouri, USA

- Monday, June 25. 9:30AM - 10:00 AM -

Those who are optimistic about the prospects of a science of consciousness, and those who believe that it lies beyond the reach of standard scientific methods, have something in common: both groups see consciousness as posing a special challenge for science. In this talk, we view this challenge through the lens of social neuroscience. We show that popular conceptions of the problem of consciousness, epitomized by David Chalmers' formulation of the "hard problem", can be best explained as a cognitive illusion, which arises as a by-product of our cognitive architecture. We present evidence from numerous sources to support our claim that we have a specialized system for thinking about phenomenal states, and that an inhibitory relationship exists between this system and the system we use to think about physical mechanisms. Even though the hard problem is an illusion, unfortunately it appears that our cognitive architecture forces a closely related problem upon us. The "genuine problem" of consciousness shares many features with the hard problem, and it also represents a special challenge for psychology.