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The preceding chapter encapsulates the argument that extra-corporeal experiences (ECE) are probably best accounted for in terms of functional perturbations of brains in their recovery from severe preceding metabolic insults. This chapter articulates material on the brain and consciousness germane to the argument stressing, in particular, the degree to which our day-to-day environments are created by the brain, and that the content of much conscious-awareness is illusory. It further exemplifies that theme by considering ‘phantom limb’ phenomenology, that is, the ability of the brain to create an illusory limb or organ no longer present. The goal is to emphasize that if a normal brain can elaborate a non-existent limb, or a torso in someone with a broken neck, it could also manufacture a non-existent ‘body’ thereby generating an out-of-body experience.

This chapter continues the neurological theme relating to the realms of conscious-awareness and its disturbances, and their relevance to extra-corporeal experience (ECE) phenomenology. It makes a comparison between dream-state modes and near-death experience (NDE) phenomenology.

The empirical examination of the capacities and capabilities of the cognitive unconscious creates an ongoing debate, partly because each new piece of evidence may carry far-reaching implications for our understanding of consciousness, or, more generally, for our views on what is it like to be human. This chapter examines working memory (WM) and controlled processes, which—unlike their longtime companions, the automatic processes—are exclusively associated with conscious processing. The main purpose of this chapter is to advance the argument for nonconscious control and nonconscious controlled processes. First, it presents systematic data which show that WM can operate outside of conscious awareness. Second, it reviews recent findings in social cognition and shows how they suggest that motivational aspects of WM can flexibly control behavior outside of conscious awareness. Last, it presents a conceptual analysis that starts by pointing out that the notion of control is used in more than one sense. Importantly, once the meanings of control are un-confounded, the relations of conscious awareness and cognitive control become a matter of empirical inquiry.

There is evidence that mere activity within perceptual systems is not sufficient for consciousness. This chapter begins by reviewing evidence for subliminal perception. This raises the question, when do perceptual states become conscious? The answer defended here is that we are conscious when and only when perception is modulated by attention. Evidence for the necessity and sufficiency of attention is presented, and empirical results that aim to dissociated attention and consciousness are critically reviewed. The chapter also offers an account of the nature of attention, according to which attentional modulation is a change in information processing that allows perceptual states to gain access to working memory. It is argued that accessibility to working memory is the psychological correlate of consciousness; actual encoding in working memory is not necessary.

This chapter reviews evidence that both memory disturbances and emotional disturbances characterize schizophrenia and examines how memory and emotion interact in schizophrenics, whether these patients exhibit a particular difficulty in remembering emotional events, and whether they still show the Pollyanna tendency. Because conscious awareness may represent the fundamenal impairment in schizophrenia, this chapter emphasizes not only objective accuracy of memory but also states of awareness associated with emotional memories. It argues that memory for emotional material operates “normally” in schizophrenic states when emotional aspects of experience are genuinely noted. Of course, often these experiences are not interpreted by a person with schizophrenia in a fashion that accurately reflects the event's emotionality, with a corresponding memory impairment. But in many cases the emotional characteristics of an event require little controlled attention, and, under these conditions, we should expect to see intact emotional memory, even in this population which is disrupted in so many other ways. The chapter concludes by suggesting that intact emotional processing potentially plays a role in perpetualing delusional cognitions, through constructive memory processes.

This chapter provides the theoretical framework for determining whether a being has moral standing and is therefore entitled to be considered when we are making moral judgments and decisions. Clearly, normal adult human beings have moral standing, and just as clearly mere things do not. What are we to say about “marginal cases”: embryos, fetuses, nonhuman animals, dead people, plants, and the environment? The interest view maintains that all and only those beings who can have interests have moral standing. It then links interests with the capacity for conscious awareness or sentience. On the interest view, people, animals, and late-gestation fetuses have interests, and they are entitled to moral consideration. By contrast, embryos, early fetuses, plants, and the environment do not have interests and so cannot have their interests considered (although there may be other moral reasons for valuing or preserving them).

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.

This chapter grapples with the question of how the brain deals with the problem in its normal intact state. In particular, it attempts to address the question on how the brain generates conscious awareness. Two approaches that are traditionally polarized in addressing ‘How’-type questions are illustrated here and the contrast is sometimes described as the distinction between hardware and software. Though this may be relevant in some areas, the chapter contends that it can be seriously misleading in neuroscience. Also, studying the nervous system alone to provide a better understanding is also ignored by the chapter. Rather, the essential functional difference between the collections of nerve cells at the level of the cord and at the level of the brain inevitably implies that the awareness must be a matter of organization of systems.

This chapter is concerned with empirically-based explanations of the phenomenon of conscious awareness. It stresses the potential link between working memory and theories of consciousness based on the global workspace hypothesis. The author suggests that this pragmatic and empirical approach to the understanding of consciousness is both viable and fruitful given the technical and experimental methods now available to cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This approach is based on the assumption that consciousness serves as a mental workspace, and that the phenomenological experience accompanying consciousness provides an important component of its function, allowing different levels of representation, which allow multiple stimuli to be simultaneously registered.

The question of why awareness is important in an evolutionary sense is addressed in this chapter through a consideration of some aspects of the evolutionary issues of possession and loss of conscious awareness. As the chapter points out later, complex social exchanges, especially between parents and children, are crucial as a framework for the development of awareness. In addition, communication, especially in the form of human language, and bodily responses themselves can also result in awareness. One way to find out what something is good for is to examine what it is like not to have it. Through clinical analysis, the chapter draws inferences from a broad spectrum of syndromes in which there is a loss of acknowledged awareness of capacities or their contents, ranging from detection, through selective attention, semantic and associative meaning, episodic themory, to language, and the chapter examines what difficulties they might share.

Conscious awareness has not been properly addressed, since an individual's phenomenology and a child's perspective—two seemingly relevant aspects of conscious awareness—have not before been considered. The author believes that accounting for a child's viewpoint is important, because this will allow us to realize that the function and structure of the mind undergo certain changes. This chapter attempts to look into the hypothesis regarding how a new level of consciousness is believed to be brought about by early childhood experiences and how such may be associated with a new sense of self that occurs across several different social realities and times. Linguistic, particularly narrative, human communicative discourse is said to have made the formation of this new level possible, and that such involves other emerging levels, systems which are continuously developing: the development attributed to the consciousness of a child, and the sense of self that is parallel to it in the social world.

The concept of automaticity, long central in cognitive psychology, has come to occupy an important place in social psychology as well. It appears that unconscious vigilance for bias can lead to corrective processes that also operate without conscious awareness or intent. This chapter argues that the unconscious, in addition to being a passive categorizer, evaluator, and semantic processor, has processing goals (for example, accuracy, egalitarianism) of its own, can be vigilant for threats to the attainment of these goals, and will proactively compensate for such threats. One might call this “compensatory automaticity”: strategic yet nonconscious compensations for unintended thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. For some, this will pose a paradox because automaticity has been equated with lack of control or intent. This chapter entertains the possibility that intention operates at multiple levels of consciousness. There can be nonconscious intentions (for example, goals) that, when the potential for their imminent frustration becomes evident, automatic compensatory processes will promote and protect.

One of the most intriguing revelations from research into the ways we perceive the world and access stored information about it is the finding, repeated across a number of areas, that, in addition to that which is consciously processed, information is picked up, stored, and retrieved in ways that are variously described as implicit, covert, or unconscious. The possibility that such findings can shed light on the mechanisms that create and sustain certain aspects of conscious awareness has attracted the attention of psychologists and philosophers. This phenomenon has also provoked attention from those interested in face recognition. Strikingly, some of these automatic aspects of face recognition seem to be preserved in cases of prosopagnosia, a severe defect of face recognition which can be caused by brain injury.

The narratives that we tell ourselves and others aid in developing our conscious awareness, since such provide a central means for us to know ourselves and others. Conscious experience is both related to and consumed by the personal stories we make up and share with each other in a cultural frame. However, unless we are able to explain how consciousness is related to such narratives, the notion that narratives are vital to conscious experience does not provide that much reliable information. To further explore this notion through looking into how certain concepts and findings regarding neurobiological and psychological analyses with legitimate aims have possible relationships, we make use of Flanagan's “natural method.” This chapter introduces how this approach was initially intended to analyze the psychology, neurobiology, and phenomenology involved in issues regarding consciousness.

This chapter interrogates whether the existence of conscious awareness is really as untestable as it is usually made out to be. In other words, it tries to question whether the distinction between private (supposedly untestable) consciousness and public (testable) behaviour that we have kept to so far, is as hard and fast as it seems. It then draws conclusions about what is the central concern of this book – the existence and significance of animal consciousness. For many scientists, there are two kinds of questions: those that can be hoped to find answers to and those that one can never hope to answer. Consciousness is almost alone of all the phenomena of our world in being placed in the second category.

The role of conscious awareness, and by implication, working memory in the control of action forms the focus of this chapter. Action disorders have formed a rich and intriguing area of neuropsychological study in recent years. In this chapter, a range of the available evidence is reviewed first, followed by an interpretation offered by Frith et al., which relies heavily on the distinction between automatic and non-automatic sources of control. The author begins this chapter by discussing sources of evidence that are broadly consistent with Bargh's theme of the importance of implicit control, going on to consider evidence for which this interpretation appears to be insufficient, leading on to an outline of the Frith et al. (2000) model.

This chapter explains how recourse to consciousness as an explanatory characterization is called for by empirical data, specifically in pathologies of vision and memory. It gives a main distinction between objectively adequate behaviour (when induced) and the ability to comment on such functions or the acknowledgement of awareness. The chapter suggests that the main (perhaps the only) impairment in certain neurological disorders is one of conscious awareness, and that this has disabling consequences. As some other chapters do, this chapter characterizes the capacity as one of monitoring. It gives such a capacity a causal role in donating an adaptive flexibility. Finally it confronts a question left untouched by others — how one might know if non-verbal species also have consciousness.

This chapter considers arguments by Neil Levy for the proposition that direct conscious awareness is a prerequisite for responsibility. It argues that cases of negligent criminal harm indicate that Levy’s claim that moral responsibility requires synchronic conscious awareness of the moral significance of an act is too strict. Furthermore, the chapter claims that tracing conditions cannot be successfully used to bolster Levy’s account. Instead, current legal practices indicate that criminal responsibility requires the capacity for diachronic agency and self-control, not synchronic conscious control. This means that an agent may be responsible for harm related to lapses even if they at no point could have reasonably foreseen the possibility of causing criminal harm.

This chapter provides the general framework of the discussions that will be made in this book. It begins with an introduction of the main topic which is the study of brain-damaged subjects who retain the very capacities they think they have lost. This, according to the chapter, offers both a challenge and an opportunity to consider the brain mechanisms of conscious awareness, and what its functional status might be in patients’ lives and presses one to ask whether animals who share much the same brain anatomy as humans also share awareness. An explanation of the title of the book is also illustrated in this chapter. The latter part provides a general idea on each of the succeeding chapters that follow.