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The Methodological Puzzle of the Neural Basis of Phenomenal Consciousness| old_uid | 1869 |
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| title | The Methodological Puzzle of the Neural Basis of Phenomenal Consciousness |
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| start_date | 2006/12/01 |
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| schedule | 11-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Suppose we take ourselves to have discovered a neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness (what Frances Crick and Christof Koch (Koch 2004) call the NCC--for ‘neural correlate of
consciousness’) for those phenomenally conscious states which we can report. But then we find that if mechanisms underlying reportability are blocked or destroyed, the result is that the NCC occurs although the subject cannot report the experience. One conclusion might be that there are unreportable phenomenally conscious states. However, another conclusion—one that would seem at least as plausible—is that we are the victims of a false hypothesis about the NCC, that is that the putative NCC is necessary for phenomenal consciousness but not sufficient. In other words, the putative NCC is really the neural basis of a proto-phenomenal or proto-conscious state, one that is only truly phenomenally conscious when it is reportable. How are we to choose between these two responses? It makes no sense to experimentally test whether a subject can report an unreportable phenomenally conscious state, so how can we proceed to find out if there are any and whether mechanisms underlying reportability are part of the NCC? In short, there seems a fundamental epistemic indeterminacy in empirical theorizing about the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness. This is the Methodological Puzzle of the title.
This paper argues that the appearance of a problem here comes about because of a mistaken picture of the methodology of investigating the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness. Having argued, abstractly that it is possible to empirically investigate phenomenal consciousness independently of reportability, the paper then shifts gears to an empirical line of investigation, which, although it does not prove phenomenal consciousness without reportability, does provide a first step in that direction. |
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| responsibles | Stojanovic |
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