What makes you think you are conscious? An agnosticist manifesto

Abstract

The qualitative character of consciousness, its “what-it-is-likeness”, is a contested issue, both in philosophy and psychology. I argue that, rather than by conceptual analyses, the status of “what-it-is-likeness” has to be decided by empirical investigation. Pending the outcome, we should maintain an agnostic stance, in order to remove the bias in favor of fictionalism from our study of consciousness,. I illustrate this with the notion of “ownership unity”. People adhere to the belief of a single, unified self as the owner of their experiences, in spite of abundant dis-unities in the informational content of their experience. On one reading, this supports the notion that the unity of experience is no more than a convenient fiction, based on an illusory experience of unity. Cognitive neuroscience is slanted in favor of such understanding, insofar it emphasizes functional specialization and localization. To restore the balance, I present a complementary perspective: the view that the experience of unity is afforded by the intrinsic, multiscale brain dynamics. This approach offers a biological substrate for unity of experience as a regular scenario within certain boundary conditions, as well mechanisms that may let it go astray.

System, Subsystem, Hive: Boundary Problems in Computational Theories of Consciousness

“…It is important to note however, that while our framework naturally accommodates the unity of experience, it is agnostic as far as the experience of unity goes (Welshon, 2013 ; Bennett and Hill, 2015 ; van Leeuwen, 2015 ): many facets of the content of our experience are “unified” in one sense or another, whether in objects, across different sensory modalities, or in seemingly more fundamental ways such as perspectivalness and even selfhood. However, as both brain-damaged patients and the effects of psychoactive drugs demonstrate (Shanon, 2002 ; Welshon, 2013 ; Bennett and Hill, 2015 ; van Leeuwen, 2015 ), such variants of content unity likely arise from specific mechanisms and do not constitute necessary aspects of experience, whereas unity in its barest form is simply synonymous with there being something it is like to undergo it.…”

“… 2 This is not to be confused with the experience of unity (Welshon, 2013 ; van Leeuwen, 2015 ; and see Section Discussion). …”

Parental Involvement and Influence in the Development of Talents for Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder. Three Modern Case Studies

“…Some of Kim"s interests included history and world facts. He was also fascinated by movie trivia, sports facts, geography, the space programme, actors and actresses, the bible, church history, classical music and literature (Hutchinson, 2013;Van Leeuwen, 2015).…”

Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: a positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy

“…Functional studies have now largely confirmed the correlation between coordinated patterns of GNW activity and waking consciousness (Baars et al 2013;Dehaene et al 2014), although the implementation of conscious awareness and consciously-directed activity is by no means settled (e.g. Block et al 2014;Graziano 2014;Hoffman and Prakash 2014;Tononi and Koch 2015;van Leeuwen 2015). While it is standard to conceptualize the GNW as a network of functionally-coherent anatomical regions connected by white-matter tracts (e.g.…”