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Consciousness Cannot Be Limited to SensoryQualities: Some Empirical Counterexamples:Commentary by Bernard J. Baars and Katharine A.McGovern (Berkeley, CA)Bernard J. Baars & Katharine A. McGovernaa The Wright Institute, 2728 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704, e-mail:Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Bernard J. Baars & Katharine A. McGovern (2000) Consciousness Cannot Be Limited to SensoryQualities: Some Empirical Counterexamples: Commentary by Bernard J. Baars and Katharine A. McGovern (Berkeley,CA), Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 2:1, 11-13, DOI:10.1080/15294145.2000.10773274

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Commentary on the Unconscious Homunculus

Shear, 1. (1997), Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shepherd, G. M. (1991), Foundations of the Neuron Doc-trine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Siewert, C. P. (1998), The Significance of Consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Solms, M. (1997), What is consciousness? J. Amer. Psy-choanl. Assn., 45:681-703.

--- (1998), Before and after Freud's Project. In: Neuro-science of the Mind on the Centennial of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, ed. R. M. Bilder & F. F. LeFever. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 843:1-10.

Stevens, R. (1997), Western phenomenological approaches to the study of conscious experience and their implica-tions. In: Methodologies for the Study of Consciousness:

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A New Synthesis, ed. J. Richardson & M. Velmans. Kala-mazoo: Fetzer Institute, pp. 100-123.

Tootell, R. B. H., Dale, A. M., Sereno, M. I., & Malach, R. (1996), New images from human visual cortex. Trends Neurosci., 19:481-489.

Young, M. P., & Yamane, S. (1992), Sparse population coding of faces in the inferotemporal cortex. Science, 256:1327-1331.

Christof Koch Division of Biology, 139-74 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125 e-mail: koch@klab.caltech.edu Phone: 626-395-6855 Fax: 626-796-8876 Web: klab.caltech.edu

Consciousness Cannot Be Limited to Sensory Qualities: Some Empirical Counterexamples: Commentary by Bernard J. Baars and Katharine A. McGovern (Berkeley, CA)

The idea proposed by Crick and Koch that conscious contents are confined to sensory events is attractive, in part because it is easier to study consciousness in the senses than anywhere else. The last 10 years have seen particularly good progress in studies of the visual cortex, where the question of visual consciousness has almost become normal science. This is an exceptional event in this period of scientific evasion of conscious-ness (and unconsciousness as well), and it bodes well for a better understanding of both of these essential concepts. Francis Crick and Christof Koch have made pioneering contributions to this emerging literature.

According to Crick and Koch, Freud wrote at times of consciousness as "a sense-organ for the per-ception of psychical qualities" (1900, p. 615). How-ever, the expression "psychical qualities" would seem to extend beyond sensations to other mental states like thoughts, feelings, intuitions, concepts, be-liefs, expectations, and intentions. Fifteen years later Freud wrote of this point as an analogy: "to liken the perception of (unconscious contents) by means of copsciousness to the perception of the external world by bteans of sense-organs" (1915, p. 171). It is only

Bernard J. B,.ars is Institute Faculty Professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and author of a number of significant books and articles on the problem of consciousness.

Katharine A. McGovern is a cognitive psychologist and Adjunct Pro-fessor at the Wright Institute. She has a special interest in the problem of emotional feelings in the Jamesian "fringe" of consciousness.

in 1923 that he seems to take it literally: "It dawns upon us like a new discovery that only something which has once been a perception can become con-scious, and that anything arising from within (apart from feelings) that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perception" (1923, p. 19). This is essentially Crick and Koch's claim, following Iackendoff. If we extend the notion of per-ception to events like mental images, inner speech, and somatically referred sensations, which are internally generated perceptlike experiences, it seems as if all of our mental lives can be understood as sensory in some way. It is in fact quite an old idea. Long before Freud, Plato and Aristotle made their claims upon it.

Shortly before 1900 a long and intractable con-troversy took place in Continental psychology about precisely this issue, in the so-called ' 'imageless thought" debate. The Wurzburg School of empirical psychology asked, can thoughts exist without images, which are internally generated sense experiences? It was a difficult claim for the nineteenth century to re-solve. The debate is therefore quite old. Note that this is not a neuroscientific question primarily, but a psy-chological one, dependent on the best information we can get about the actual experience of human beings. In the next section, therefore, we will provide some evidence the reader can assess experientially, to see whether his or her own conscious experience is funda-mentally sensory.

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Some Empirical Cases

1. Homonyms preserve sensory form while changing meaning. Consider the following word-pairs. The first is called a prime, a word that tends to change the meaning of the second, target word, which is al-ways "set." The word set was chosen simply because it has many different meanings. Does the conscious experience of "set" change for you, the reader, as a resfilt of the prime?

a. tennis: set b. Boolean: set c. table: set d. chess: set e. ready, go: set

Were you conscious of differences between the different meanings of set? If so, rather subtle aspects of meaning and association must have differentiated between visually identical stimuli. That result suggests that your conscious experience is not limited to the visual sensory contents (Baars, 1997).

One might argue that mental images, which can be considered to be quasi-sensory, provide the differ-ences in meaning. That is possible, but images associ-ated with meanings are not the same as the meanings themselves. Thus one may experience the mental im-age of a Venn diagram when given the words, "Bool-ean: set." But a Venn diagram is only a visual representation of the technical meaning of a Boolean set; it is not the same as that abstract meaning.

2. Synonyms preserve meaning while changing sensory form. Just as meaning can change without changing the sensory qualities of a word like set, so sensory qualities can change with only small changes in meaning. Thus love and adoration are similar ab-stractly, but not sensorily. Entire sets of synonyms can be found, such as love, fondness, liking, passion, tenderness, ardor, etc. These words are not identical in meaning, but their meaning clearly overlaps sig-nificantly. That is not a result of any sensory similar-ity. As we look from one word to the next, what is it that is in our awareness that tells us they are similar? Clearly there is something that is not just sensory.

3. Habituation of meaning. Now consider the perceived loss of meaning of a repeated word (often called "semantic satiation"). Try repeating the word repeating a dozen times, for example. Does its mean-ing tend to fade from consciousness? If it does, this suggests that meaning, again, is a conscious but non-sensory entity, however difficult it might be to de-

Baars-McGovern

scribe in detail. Notice, by the way, that the faded meaning of a satiated word can be reinstated rapidly by putting it into a meaningful sentence. If you re-peated "repeating" a number of times to the point of satiation, some of its meaningfulness should return when it is consciously considered in a sentence like "I'm tired of repeating this word over and over again" (Baars, 1988). Again, nothing has changed in the sen-sory aspect of the word.

4. Abstract ideas. From Plato onward, Western philosophers have worried about the paradox of ab-stract ideas, which do not have a concrete referent, but are clearly conscious. This is especially clear for mathematical ideas, like equal, prime, or real number. The entire Platonic tradition from Socrates to Roger Penrose draws profound implications from the funda-mental fact that we can be conscious of contents that can never be fully captured by sensory events (Baars, 1997).

5. Consciously accessible intentions and expec-tations. "Intense" expectations and intentions appear to become conscious in some way. The classic exam-ple is given by William James, who pointed out in a famous passage that the intention to say a forgotten word is not sensory in content. Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mold and the gap of one word does not feel like that of another (1890, p. 243; emphasis added).

6. Fringe experiences. As James (1890) empha-sized, and as Bruce Mangan (1991,1993), David Galin (1994), and one of us (McGovern, 1993, 1999) have recently rediscovered, there is a class of mental events that are quite precise (in the sense of controlling accu-rate responses) but which have almost no sensory or featural conscious aspects. In the experimental psy-chology literature such phenomena are studied in the domain of metacognition (see Nelson, 1992; Metcalfe and Shimamura, 1994; Yzerbyt, Lories, and Dardenne, 1998, for recent work in this area) and are called "feelings of knowing" (FOKs) , "tip of the tongue experiences" (TOTs), or intuitions. Feelings of know-ing, for example, are well established as being quite accurate in directing problem solving, guiding study during learning, and controlling the flow of conscious

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Commentary on the Unconscious Homunculus

contents, without giving rise to focal sensory con-sciousness. Judgments of beauty, rightness, wrong-ness, meaningfulness, self-association, relational concepts, and the like, are all in this category of what William James called "the vague" or "the fringe." James thought that perhaps one-third of all conscious experiences were like this, and that they played a cen-tral role in the functioning of the mind. Arguably, how-ever, they are always present, usually simultaneous with focal conscious contents. Mangan (1993) has ar-gued that the function of some fringe events is to cir-cumvent the capacity limits of focal consciousness.

We cannot resist letting James describe the fringe of consciousness for us.

Every definite image in mind is steeped and dyed in the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it~r rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood [1890, p. 246].

7. Feelings of emotion. McGovern (1999) and Galin (1994) have argued that emotional feelings have much the same character as William James's fringe of consciousness. That is, the affective coloring or "feel-ing" of an emotion is not a sensory quality but rather a nonfeatural (to use Galin's term) quale that accom-panies the sensory contents of emotion-provoking epi-sodes. As psychotherapists have been fond of noting for some time, the affective qualia of emotions are themselves information bearing-pointing to content or computation which is currently not in conscious-ness. In contrast to the case of metacognitive "feel-ings" where the nonconscious contents being referred to are cognitive representations, in emotional feelings the nonconscious content is hypothesized to point to goal, value, and belief representations (Lazarus, 1991; McGovern, 1999).

In sum, Crick and Koch's hypothesis that con-sciousness can be reduced to just sensory events, or even to imagined or remembered sensory events, can-not account for this evidence. Consciousness is more complex than we might like it to be. This might be an achievement of the primate brain, which has a very large nonsensory cortex (the frontal lobes, which con-stitute two-thirds of the cortical surface in humans). In animals without this massive nonsensory cortex it

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is possible that more conscious contents are sensory. If that is true, then nonsensory consciousness may be largely a primate, and by extension, a distinctively human trait.

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Galin, D. (1994), The structure of awareness: Contemporary applications of William James' forgotten concept of "the fringe." J. Mind & Behav., 15(4):375-400.

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McGovern, K. (1993), Feelings in the fringe. Conscious-ness & Cognit., 2:119-125.

--- (1999), Feelings in the fringe: The role of feelings in self-monitoring. Paper presented at Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference, Lon-don, Ontario, June 6.

Metcalfe, J., & Shimamura, A., Eds. (1996), Metacognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nelson, T. (1992), Metacognition: Core Readings. Boston: Allyn Bacon.

Yzerbyt, V., Lorie, G., & Dardenne, B., Eds. (1998), Meta-cognition, Cognitive and Social Dimensions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Katharine A. McGovern The Wright Institute 2728 Durant Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704 e-mail: kamcgovern@aol.com

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