Consciousness is an invention, neither a hard neither an easy problem, never an illusion #5/#5
Conclusion
All allegedly empirical research on the brain shown every sign of being a dead end and ii) will be the case, will be the case that, as today’s neuroscientists suppose, if consciousness is a neural process that is inside the head and separate from the physical world it perceives, any question it’s a non-starter.
Nagels (1974) argument may be summarized as follow. First premise: it is impossible to known what it is like to have the sensations that another creature has unless one is capable of taking the point of view of that creature. Second premise: it is possible to know all of the physical facts about a creature without taking the point of viewof that creature. Conclusion: there is an obstacle to providing a physicalist reduction of sensations that may turn out to be insuperable. There is here, between the first and second premises, a fallacy of equivocation (Hill 1991, pp. 89-90). The expression "know how" in first premise is far from the "know that" (the "concept of") of the second premise (if I am going to strengthen the Nagels argument of "know what it is like to be a bat" and to recognize the key role played here by "know how"). The logical role of "know" is not the same in both first and second premises: in the first is idiomatic but in the second is attitudinal.
When we say that "x known what is like to be S ", we are, at least in part, to say that x had an experience that is characteristically accompanied by being S, we are not saying that x know that S (that x has the concept of S). For example, there are not pains without feelings but there are pains without the concept of them.
I conclude that a physicalist reduction of sensations may turn out to be superable and iv) will be the case, will be the case that phenomenological characteristics of co-occurring brain activity with consciousness mental states are in the outer world, are not separate from the physical world you perceive, it is the world. Phenomenological characteristics of co-occurring brain activity with consciousness mental states and things out there are one and the same.
References
Alivisatos, A.P., Chun, M., Church, G.M., Greenspan, R.J., Roukes, M.L. and Yuste, R. (2012). The brain activity map project and the challenge of functional connectomics. Neuron, 74 (6), 970-974.
Anderson, B. (2011). There is no such thing the attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 246.
Arthurs, O. J. and Boniface, S. (2002). How well do we understand the neural origins of the fMRI BOLD signal? Trends Neurosci, 25(1), 27-31.
Bandettini, P., Jesmanowicz, A., Wong, E. C. and Hyde, J. S. (1993). Processing strategies for time-course data sets in functional MRI of the human brain. Magnetic Resonance Medicine, 30, 161-173.
Baars, B.J. (2002). The conscious access hypothesis: Origins and recent evidence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 6 (1), 47-52.
Baars, B.J. (2003). The global BrainWeb: An update on global workspace theory. Science and Consciousness Review. Available from: http://sci-con.org/2003.
Binder, J.R., Desai, H.R., Graves, W.W. and Conant, L.L. (2009). Where is the semantic system? The critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex, 19 (12), 2767-2796.
Block ,N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. (eds.) (1997). The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Block, N. (2002). Some concepts of consciousness. Chalmers, D.J. (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 206-218. Oxford University Press.
Block, N. (2003). Consciousness, Philosophical Issues about. Nadel, L. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 760-777. Nature Publishing Group.
Block, N. (2011). Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 567-575.
Broadbent, D.E. (1958). Perception and Communication.Pergamon Press.
Brodmann, K. (1909). Vergleichende Lokalisationlehre der Grosshirnrinde in ihren Prinzipien dargestellt auf Grund des Zellenbaues. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth.
Burock, M. (2010). Evidence for information processing in the brain. [Preprint] URL: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/8845.
Carp, J. (2012). The secret lives of experiments: reporting methods in the fMRI literature. Neuroimage, 63, 289-300.
Carp, J. (2012). On the plurality of (methodological) worlds: estimating the analytic flexibility of fMRI experiments. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6, 149.
Carrasco, M. (2009). Cross-modal attention enhances perceived contrast. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106 (52), 22039-22040.
Cavanagh, P. (1967). Reconstructing the third dimension: Interactions between color, texture, motion, binocular disparity, and shape. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, 37, 171-l95.
Clark, A. (1993). Sensory qualities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Clark, A. (1996). Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2000). The theory of sentience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D.J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200-219.
Chun, M.M., Golomb, J.D. and Turk-Browne, N.B. (2011). The taxonomy of external and internal attention. The Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 73-101.
Churchland, P. M. (2005). Chimerical colors: Some phenomenological predictions from cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Psychology, 18(5), 527–560.
Cohen, M.A. and Dennett, D.C. (2011). Consciousness cannot be separated from function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 358–364.
Courtney, A. and Courtney, M. (2008). Comments regarding On the Nature Of Science. Physics in Canada, 64 (3), 7–8.
Cox, D., Meyers, E. and Sinha, P. (2004). Contextually evoked object-specific responses in human visual cortex. Science, 304 (115).
Crick, F. (1984). Function of the thalamic reticular complex: The searchlight hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 81, 4586-4590.
Crick, F. and Koch, C. (1997). Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Block N., Flanagan, O. and Guzeldere, G. (eds.), The nature of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cromwell, H.C. and Panksepp, J. (2011). Rethinking the cognitive revolution from a neural perspective: how overuse/misuse of the term "cognition" and the neglect of affective controls in behavioral neuroscience could be delaying progress in understanding the brain mind. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35, 2026-2035.
Dehaene, S. and Naccache, L. (2001). Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: Basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1-37.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. New York: Penguin Books.
Dennett, D. C. (1993). The message is: There is no medium. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(4), 919–931.
Dennett, D. C. (2001). Are we explaining consciousness yet? Cognition, 79, 221–237.
DeSimone, A. and Duncan, J. (1995). Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention. The Annual Review of Neuroscience, 18, 193-222.
Di Lollo, V. (2012). The feature-binding problem is an ill-posed problem. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 317-321.
Dronkers, N. F., Plaisant, O. , Iba-Zizen, M. T. and Cabanis, E. A. (2007). Paul Broca's historic cases: high resolution MR imaging of the brains of Leborgne and Lelong, Brain, 130, 1432-1441.
Edelman, G.M. (2006). Second Nature Brain Science and Human Knowledge. Yale University Press, 1961.
Edelman, G.M., Gally, J.A, and Baars, B. J. (2011). Biology of consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 4.
Eklund, A., Nichols, Thomas E. and Knutsson, Hans (2016). Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113 (28), 7900-7905.
Eriksen, C.W. and St. James, J.D. (1986). Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: A zoom lens model. Perception & Psychophysics, 40 (4), 225–240.
Espinosa-Soto, C., Martin, O. C. M. and Wagner, A. (2010). Phenotypic robustness can increase phenotypic variability after non-genetic perturbations in gene regulatory circuits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 24, 1284–1297.
Esterman, M. and Yantis, S. (2010). Perceptual expectation evokes category-selective cortical activity. Cerebral Cortex, 20 (5), 1245-1253.
Fahrenfort, J. and Lamme, V. (2012). The true science of consciousness explains phenomenology: comment on Cohen and Dennett. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 139-140.
Farah, M.J. (1990). Visual agnosia: disorders of object recognition and what they tell us about normal vision. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Farrell, B.A. (1950). Experience. Mind, 59, 170-198.
Fine, K. (1994). Essence and Modality. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1-16.
Graham, N. (1969). Visual Pattern Analyzers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gulyas, B. and Roland, P.E. (1991). Cortical fields participating in form and color discrimination in the human brain. Neuroreport, 2, 565-566.
Hill, Christopher S. (1991). Sensations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009). The human brain in numbers: a linearly scaled-up primate brain. Front. Hum. Neurosci, 3:31.
Ioannidis, J.P.A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2(8), e124, 0696-0701.
Iyengar, Satish (2016). Case for fMRI data repositories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,113 (28) 7699-7700.
Killeen, P. R. (2005). An alternative to null-hypothesis significance tests. Psychological Science, 16, 345-353.
Kouider, S. Dehaene, S., Jobert, A. and Le Bihan, D. (2007). Cerebral basis of subliminal priming and supraliminal during reading.Cerebral Cortex, 17 (9), 2019-2030.
Kouider, S., Sackur, J. & de Gardelle, V. (2012). Do we still need phenomenal consciousness? Comment on Block. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 140-141.
Lent, R., Azevedo, F. A. C., Andrade-Moraes, C. H. and Pinto, A. V. O. (2012), How many neurons do you have? Some dogmas of quantitative neuroscience under revision. European Journal of Neuroscience, 35: 1–9.
Lloyd, D. (1995). Consciousness: a connectionist manifesto. Minds and Machines, 5, 161–185.
Lloyd, D. (1996). Consciousness, connectionism and cognitive neuroscience: A meeting of the minds. Philosophical Psychology, 9(1), 61–80.
Loar, B. (1997), Phenomenal states. Block, N., Flanagan, O. and Güzeldere, G. (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Logothetis, N. K. (2008). What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI. Nature, 453(7197), 869-878.
Lucretius, T. Carus, De Rerum Natura, Bailey, Cyril (ed. and trans.) (1947), 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Malsburg von der, C. (1981). The correlation theory of brain function. Domany, E., Hemmen, J. L. Van and Schulten (eds.) (1994). Models of neural networks II: temporal aspects of coding and information processing in biological systems. Springer-Verlag, 95–119.
Mangan, B. (1993). Dennett, consciousness, and the sorrows of functionalism. Consciousness and Cognition, 2, 1-17.
Maxwell, N. (1968). Understanding sensations. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 46, 127-145. (In particular pp. 27, 134-137 and 140-141).
Mayo, Deborah G. (2017, April 1). Er, about those other approaches, hold off until a balanced appraisal is in [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://errorstatistics.com/2017/04/01/er-about-those-other-approaches-hold-off-until-a-balanced-appraisal-is-in/
McGinn, C. (1996). The Character of Mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed.
Mcginn, C. (1999). The Mysterious Flame - Conscious Minds in a Material World. Basic Books.
Mole, C. (2011). Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology. NewYork, NY:Oxford University Press.
Moonesinghe, R., Khoury, M.J. and Janssens, A.C.J.W. (2007). Most published research findings are false—but a little replication goes a long way. PLoS Medicine, 4 (2), e28, 0218-0221.
Mumford, J., Pernet, C., Yeo, T., Nickerson, L., Muhlert, N., Stikov, N., Gollub, R. and OHBM Communications Committee in consultation with Nichols, T. (2016, July 21). Keep Calm and Scan On [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/blog/keep-calm-and-scan-on
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83 (4), 435-450.
Nagel, T. (1998). Conceiving The Impossible and The Mind-Body Problem. Philosophy, 73 (285), 337-352.
Naccache, L., and Dehaene, S. (2007). Reportability and illusions of phenomenality in the light of the global neuronal workspace model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30 (5-6), 518-519.
Nishimoto, S., Vu, An T., Naselaris, T., Benjamini, Y., Yu, B. and Gallant, J.L. (2011). Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies. Current Biology, 21 (19), 1641-1646.
O’Brien, G. and Opie, J. (1999). A connectionist theory of phenomenal experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 127–148.
O’Brien, G. and Opie, J. (2001). Connectionist vehicles, structural resemblance, and the phenomenal mind. Communication and Cognition, 34(1–2), 13–38.
Ogawa, S., Tank, D. W., Menon, R. Ellermannn, J. M., Kim, S-G., Merkle, H. and Ugurbil, K. (1992). Intrinsic signal changes accompanying sensory stimulation: Functional brain mapping with magnetic resonance imaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 89, 5951-5955.
Poeppel, D. (1996). The critical review of PET studies of phonological processing. Brain and Language, 55 (3), 317-351.
Poeppel, D. and Embick, D. (2005). Defining the relation between linguistics and neuroscience. Cutler, A. (ed.), Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones, Lawrence Erlbaum.
Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends Cogn Sci, 10(2), 59-63.
Posner, M. I., Snyder, C. R. R. and Davidson, B. J. (1980). Attention and the detection of signals. The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 109, 160–174.
Putnam, M. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press.
Rosenthal, D. M. (1993). Multiple drafts and higher-order thoughts. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(4), 911–918.
Rouder, J. N., Morey, R.D., Speckman, P. L. and Providence, J. M. (2012). Default Bayes factors for ANOVA designs. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 56, 5, 356–374.
Sejnowski, T. J., Churchland, P. S. and Movshon, J. A. (2014). Putting big data to good use in neuroscience. Nat Neurosci, 17(11), 1440-1441.
Sober, S. J. and Körding, K.P. (2012). What silly postures tell us about the brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6, 154.
Sprigge, T. L. S. and Montefiore, A. (1971), Final causes. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 45, 149-192. (In particular pp. 166 et seq.)
Stoner, G.R. and Aibright, T.D. (1993). Image segmentation cues in motion processing: implications for modularity in vision. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 129-l49.
Stüttgen, M. C., Schwarz, C., and Jäkel, F. (2011). Mapping spikes to sensations. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 5, 125.
Sun, J. Z., Wang, G. I., Goyal, V. K. and Varshney, L. R. (2012). A framework for Bayesian optimality of psychophysical laws. Journal of Mathematical Psychology. [In 05/11/2012 still without volume, number and pages.]
Treisman, A. and Gelade, G. (1980). A feature integration theory of attention. Cognitive psychology, 12, 97–136.
Treisman, A. (1985). Preattentive processing in vision. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, 31, 156–177.
Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tye, M. (2000). Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ungerleider, L. G. and Haxby, J. (1994). What and where in the human brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 4, 157-65.
Wagner, A. (2012). The role of robustness in phenotypic adaptation and innovation, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279, 1249-1258.
Weiskrantz, L. (1998). Consciousness and commentaries. International Journal of Psychology, 33(3), 227–233.
Whiteley, L. and Sahani, M. (2012). Attention in a Bayesian framework. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 100.