What zombies can't do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness

Abstract

Could an individual act and speak just like other individuals without having any internal conscious experience? Belief in the possibility of so-called philosophical zombies serves as a litmus test for whether someone believes in some form of mind–body dualism or materialism. This chapter focuses on a related hypothesis that is emerging within psychology referred to as the psychological zombie hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that our behaviors and judgements are produced by an ‘inner-zombie’ whose mental work does not depend on conscious awareness, and that those mental operations which are typically accompanied by conscious awareness do not rely on awareness to generate the operations and their outputs. This hypothesis suggests that mental operations which are typically accompanied by conscious awareness can be produced in the absence of conscious awareness, thus demonstrating the superfluousness of awareness.

Making sense of one’s actions in an explanatory vacuum: The interpretation of nonconscious goal striving

“…Lieberman (2009) suggests that reflexive and reflective processes should be associated with dissociable brain mechanisms. He suggests that brain areas related to reflexive and reflective processes should be independently related to performance outcomes, and activity in areas associated with reflective processing should be associated with diminished activity in brain regions associated with reflexive processing.…”

Content and Consciousness Revisited

“…3 In the fi eld of reasoning and decision making, dual-process theories were originally proposed to explain confl icts between normative and biased responses on experimental tasks. However, the theories have subsequently been supported by a wide range of other evidence, including, (a), experimental manipulations (including explicit instruction) designed to shift the balance between the two types of processing (e.g., De Neys 2006 ; Roberts and Newton 2001 ), (b), psychometric studies showing that cognitive ability is differentially linked to performance on tasks where Type 2 thinking (which is demanding of resources) is required for production of the normative response (e.g., Stanovich 1999 ;Stanovich and West 2000 ), and, (c), neuroimaging studies indicating that responses associated with the different types of processing activate different brain regions (e.g., De Neys et al 2008 ;Lieberman 2009 ;McClure et al 2004 ). Theorists disagree about the relations between the two processes and about whether they operate in parallel or in sequence.…”

A Computational Dual-Process Model of Social Interaction

“…Early on, Logan (1988) characterized automatic processing as fast, effortless, autonomous, stereotypic, and unavailable to conscious awareness. This characterization is very much in the spirit of Lieberman's (2009) We determined this characterization a reasonable basis from which to begin our computational modeling effort.…”

“…Broadly speaking, we start from a base of mind as process (Edelman, 1987;) most closely following the early work of Logan (1988) and what we see as the elaboration of that work as pursued in the new area of cognitive social neuroscience by Lieberman (2009;2010). In our model, there may be multiple implicit selection processes executing concurrently with an explicit selection process that is a conscious, attended process.…”