Kihlstrom Consciousness Lectures

Questions for Kihlstrom's lecture 2 :

Who was Descartes? What major idea about thinking is attributed to him?

-Because he was thinking, he must be existing. (We don't have any reason to doubt our own experiences). Thought is very broadly used by then. He was an early philosopher (17th century)

Who was William James? In what way was his use (and that of Descartes) of the concept of "thinking" very general and inclusive?

-They thought that thinking encompassed feeling, wanting, perception, etc (All kinds of mental states). He was an early scientific psychologist and philosopher who was prominent in the U.S. and wasn't very interested in research (19th-20th century)

James (and many others) used introspection. What five characteristics of consciousness did he identify?

-Examining your own mental life and processes.

-5 characteristics:

1. Personal subjectivity (My thoughts are my own, they are personal)
2. Constant change (in our thoughts)
3. Continuity to our consciousness (stream of consciousness)
4. Intentionality (aboutness... thought is always about something)
5. Selective Attention (able to choose to pay attention to one thing rather than another, not everything all at once)

What is it like to be a conscious human being? What three components does this consciousness have, according to Immanuel Kant, and according to Ernest Hilgard? (And who are these two guys?)

-Kant (early 19th century philosopher) says there are three discrete kinds of mental states: Knowledge, Feeling, and Desire.

-Hilgard (Psychologist, late 20th century): Trilogy of Mind : Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation

What is cognitive science all about? What mental states does it not address (or at least not do so very explicitly)?

-Cognitive Science is about "how we know" (The knowledge or cognition from Kant and Kilgard). It doesn't address emotions or feeling, which are separate from knowledge.

Why is an affective science (or maybe an affective neuroscience) emerging? Why may there eventually be a conative science (or conative neuroscience)?

-People claim that affective science is different from motivation or cognition and it stands independently of those. This may come to be because of Kant and Hilgard's ideas say that cognition, emotion and motivation are distinct. These three are irreducible (can't reduce cognition to emotion, or motivation to cognition, etc).
-(Conative means motivational states)
-Asks the question if feeling and wanting are the same thing.

What are qualia? What are their four characteristics, according to Daniel Dennett?

-Qualities (Subjective qualities of consciousness in experiences).

-Modalities by which we experience the world (sensory modalities are different like visual or auditory).

-4 characteristics: 

1. Qualia are ineffable. Its hard to describe what the experience is like (what its like to see red?)
2. Qualia are intrinsic to the experience, they are not derived from anything else; you can't imagine them.
3. Sensory Qualia are private, other's don't know what your experience is really like.
4. Qualia are directly apprehended, they are not mediated by anything else... they just ARE. No inference.

What has the study of unusual individual cases shown us about these characteristics of qualia?

-no amount of knowledge could help people who are colorblind understand or experience color. They really are ineffable.

-Qualia are directly experienced, so the person who became colorblind can no longer think in color, or dream in color.

James said that consciousness is ABOUT something (other than itself). Are all mental states about something else? For example, are emotional states about something else? Are motivational states about something else? (Intentionality) Discuss these issues.

-This works best for cognitive states, but emotional or motivational states don't have propositional content, its just a statement. The nature of the intentionality is going to be kind of weird. For example, hunger... its not really about something else. 

-Russell- Propositional Attitudes: Other people though argue that you don't have emotional states, they just reduced emotion into cognitive beliefs (I believe I am hungry... not just I am hungry). Its still up in the air. 

At the close of this lecture, Kihlstrom reiterates three major properties of consciousness - qualia, intentionality, and subjectivity. Discuss what each of these means.

-Qualia are subjective qualities of consciousness. 

-Intentionality: ideas or representations (aboutness)... cognition is always about something else.

-Subjectivity: Consciousness is subjective. Conscious states only exists in our experience of them. A first person ontology in conscious states.

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Lecture 3

This lecture addresses experimental approaches to qualia.

A major broad issue in understanding qualia is to account for why seeing is different from hearing, from tasting, from smelling, from pain, etc. What four features make the different sensory modalities different from each other?

1. Each modality of sensation is associated with a different stimulus energy (ex. seeing is about light)
2. goes to sensory receptors that transduce the stimulus into a neural impulse (ex. eyes that transduce the light into a neural impulse). 
3. A sensory tract that carries the impulses to the brain (like the vision pathway).
4. Then to the sensory projection area (that processes the different modalities).

What are these four features for vision? Perhaps you can also say a bit about what they are for audition?

-Stimulus energy: lightwaves of different wavelengths, Sensory receptors : the eyes (rods and cones), Sensory tract: the optic nerve, Projection area: in occipital lobes.

-vibrations in the air, (hair cells) in baslar membrane, auditory nerve, auditory projection area on temporal lobe.

What was Müller's doctrine of specific nerve energies? (And who was he?)

-Early physiological psychologist (mid 19th century). Every modality of sensation is associated with a unique neural pathway. It depends on where it goes, not what it starts out as. (Ex. Pressing on your eye ball gives visual cues, even though eyes are not especially tuned for pressure).

What was (still partly is) psychophysics? What were their methods? What were they trying to do?

-Trying to match up psychological qualities of an experience to the physical qualities of the stimulus (Psycho-Physics). Interested in quantifying between the physical properties of a stimuli, and the corresponding psychological experience. Relationship between the physical stimulus, and how we sense or experience it (psychologically). Methods: variant on introspection called experimental introspection. 

What is an absolute threshold? a relative threshold?

-Absolute: the point at which we become aware of the presence of a stimulus for the first time, vs. Relative: being aware that the stimulus has changed. (i.e. how different do they have to be for us to perceive the difference? (Just noticeable difference)). 

Psychophysicists showed that the intensity of our sensory experience is related to the strength of the physical stimulus.

- What was Weber's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *delta i over i equals c- You have a stimulus of some intensity, and the amount of change that you have to put on the stimulus to produce a change in the experience is a constant amount of the original energy. The amount of change depends on how strong the stimulus was to begin with. (ex. flour, sugar bags. If you have to increase the sugar from 2 to 2.4, then you would have to increase the flour from 20 to 24).  He was a Psychopysicists who came up with the first law about the change in the physical experience. 

- What was Fechner's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *Later Psychophysisits (1960)  who made a generalization of Weber's law. s=k(log)i (is perceived strength), the intensity of the sensation tends to grow more slowly than the stimulation. Exceptions: perceived length, and pain (Perceived strength goes up faster than the stimulus).

- What was Stevens's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *Another Psychophysisits (recent) : s=Ki^n : for every psychological experience, there is an exponent that gives you a nice relationship between the stimulus and the reaction. So, n is different for any experience... a power law.

How did psychophysics address the differences in quality within a sensory modality?

     *We can quantify the differences in the stimulus by a rating, and by looking at the specialties within each modality. These laws don't just apply to intensity, but to all different sensory modalities. 

- Vision is characterized not only by brightness, but also by hue and saturation.

- What accounted for the experiences of different colors, according to Helmholtz? (Who was he?)

     *(A students of Meuller. Late 19th century, important across disciplines, but better known as a physicist) He says that within each modality, every quality of sensation is mediated by a specific neural system. All visible colors can be produced by a mixture of the three primary colors (so there may be three major pathways for vision?).  Each color can be mixed with others, so perhaps they are not so distinct, except the three. This may match up with the eyes because there are three different kinds of cones. Perhaps these are the primary pathways?

So what were Wundt and the other structuralists (Titchener and Boring) trying to do with mental experiences, using their method of introspection? 

-Trying to figure out what the fundamental qualities were of sensory experiences. They thought of it as mental chemistry.

What was the stimulus error?

-describing the object, not their experience that the object gives rise to.

- What primary colors were identified in vision? What evidence do we have for these primaries?

     *Red, Blue, yellow, and (green). (Red/Green seemed to be paired together, and Blue/Yellow seem to be paired together as opponents). You can get any color from the right combination of these three. This is accounted for by saying we have different cones for different colors. Unique neural pathways for each. Basic, so it should be reflected in many languages. 

- What primary qualities were identified in touch?

     *pressure, pain, warmth, cold, roughness, wetness. 
     *Smooth, soft, wet, tickle, and hot

- What primary tastes were identified? Why was one of these identified much later?

     *sweet, sour, salty, bitter. The foods he was exposed to could be broken down into those, but later savoriness was added from the Japanese cuisine. 

- What primary smells were identified?

    *Spicy, fragrant, etherial, rosiness, putrid, burned

How might this analysis into primaries be applied outside the study of these sensory qualia?

    *relate them back to the physical features of the stimuli, but also back to the physiological processes behind them. This could also been extended to emotions or other areas. There may be fundamental primary emotions that underly all others.