# The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness  ## Metadata - Author: [[Susan Schneider and Max Velmans]] - Full Title: The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness - Category: #books ## Highlights - Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by, e.g., Newell 1990; Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. ([Location 2845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=2845)) - In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. ([Location 2873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=2873)) - There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene,” then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced,” they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question. ([Location 2896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=2896)) - The panda’s “thumb” evolved, but if Gould (1980) is right it was not selected for by natural selection, so it is not an adaptation. ([Location 4165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=4165)) - entirely neutral about whether evolutionary change is gradual, or “punctuated,” or sometimes both. These disputes concern not whether adaptation is the primary mechanism that shapes organisms on our planet, but how dominant it is, just how it works, and what other biological processes also play a role in evolution. Such disagreements are, as they say, in‐house. ([Location 4172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=4172)) - Dualism comes in two forms. Substance dualists believe that reality is made up of two fundamentally different kinds of entities: nonphysical mental entities and nonmental physical entities. Property dualists hold that there are only physical entities, but that at least some physical entities have two kinds of fundamental property: nonmental physical properties and nonphysical mental properties. ([Location 5018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=5018)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Cosmopsychism may be the only view out of all of those discussed in this chapter which is able to avoid conceivability worries. ([Location 5332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=5332)) - when it is recalled that current approaches to psychiatric diagnosis have been developed largely on the basis of clinical intuition, rather than as a consequence of scientific research. The designers of widely used diagnostic manuals such as DSM‐5 and ICD‐10 simply determined their diagnostic criteria by seeking consensuses among their fellow clinicians. ([Location 6491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=6491)) - Another important distinction between psychiatric hallucinators and non‐psychiatric hallucinators concerns the individual’s attitude toward the voices; in the former group, the self is often experienced as weaker than the voices whereas, in the latter group, the opposite is often the case (Honig et al. 1998). Indeed, psychiatric patients’ beliefs that their voices are omniscient and omnipotent have been identified as an important cause of distress, and therefore a potential target for psychotherapeutic intervention (Chadwick & Birchwood 1994). Interestingly, hallucinating patients appear to have dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs that are quite similar to those reported by patients with obsessional thoughts (Morrison & Wells 2003). ([Location 6608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=6608)) - The new neuroimaging technologies have provided a further source of evidence for the inner speech hypothesis; one of the best‐replicated structural findings is that hallucinations are associated with a reduction of grey matter volume in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG), a brain region known to be important in speech perception (Modinos et al. 2013). ([Location 6631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=6631)) - For example, Garety, Hemsley, and Wessely (1991) found that deluded patients tend to “jump to conclusions” (JTC) on probabilistic reasoning tasks in which they were given the choice of making a guess or seeking more information to test their hypotheses, and this finding has subsequently been widely replicated. ([Location 6696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=6696)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. (Huxley 1954, p. 23) ([Location 7249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=7249)) - Determine without a priori metaphysical assumptions the epistemic claims implicit in some AE. Some centuries ago in Western countries, the ontological consensual validity of some claims, such as the existence of angelic beings, was accepted without considering the relevant empirical evidence because it was based on a metaphysical accepted view. That perspective has been largely superseded, but another has taken its place in which some followers of a different metaphysical view, let us call it reductionist materialism, dictate that alternatives to the brain‐creates‐mind hypothesis and claims of consensual validity for some ostensible anomalous events must be rejected out‐of‐hand without considering the evidence proffered. Instead of either position, an open scientific stance demands critical but open evaluation of the evidence on its own merits (Cardeña et al. 2014; Kelly et al. 2015). ([Location 7543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=7543)) - The best‐known example of a Christian mystic who had personal experience of immanence is Meister Eckhart, who in his teachings insisted that “God must be very I and I very God, so consummately one that he and this I are one ‘is’” (see, e.g., Forman 1991). In an extensive comparison between Eckhart’s mystical experiences and those reported in Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, one of the best‐known interpreters of Zen for the West, concludes that “Eckhart is in perfect accord with the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, when he advances the notion of Godhead as ‘pure nothingness’” (Suzuki 1979). ([Location 8382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=8382)) - The Hindu saint Ramakrishna put it that when one needs the Divine like a drowning man needs air, then the Divine will be found (Gupta 1978). ([Location 8485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=8485)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Hits close to home - (I am not here considering the special sense of presence that we may feel on sitting with certain men and women who have had abiding mystical experiences, and which the Hindus call darshan), ([Location 8542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=8542)) - Most cognitive scientists agree that the mind is, in some sense, a computer. It is a device that processes information by transforming representations in accordance with rules. ([Location 9452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=9452)) - Consider this simple argument against materialism. Imagine as vividly as you can the Canadian flag, and note the shape and redness of the central maple leaf. Now consider that nothing in your brain is a bright red maple‐leaf‐shaped blob. Nothing in the brain can be identified with the flag you have just mentally generated (and nothing outside the brain is a possible candidate either). So much for materialism! ([Location 9958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=9958)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Chalmers, on the other hand, believes that consciousness is a phenomenon that needs explaining in its own right (Chalmers 1996). “And if it turns out that it cannot be explained in terms of more basic entities, then it must be taken as irreducible” (Chalmers 1996). ([Location 11552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=11552)) - At least provisionally, we can take a physical entity to be a space‐occupier with mass. ([Location 11983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=11983)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Lehar (2003), however, points out that biological naturalism forces one into a surprising conclusion: if the brain is inside the skull and the phenomenal world is inside the brain, the real skull must be outside the phenomenal world (the former and the latter are logically equivalent). Let me be clear: if one accepts that: The phenomenal world appears to have spatial extension to the experienced horizon and dome of the sky. The phenomenal world is literally inside the brain. It follows that The real skull (as opposed to the phenomenal skull) is beyond the experienced horizon and dome of the sky. While Lehar, Revonsuo, and Gray accept this conclusion, Lehar admits that this consequence of biological naturalism is “incredible.” ([Location 12624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=12624)) - There are neuroscientists who believe, with some passion, in the causal/explanatory role of consciousness (Marcel 1988); there are others who are highly skeptical about the possibility that consciousness might play a role in neuroscientific theorizing (Bisiach 1988). ([Location 15298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=15298)) - 35 Philosophical Psychopathology and Self‐Consciousness G. Lynn Stephens and George Graham ([Location 16370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=16370)) - Here is one from Slade and Bentall (1988): “There is a fundamental assumption about the nature of hallucinations that all theories have in common, that hallucinators mistake their own internal, mental, or private events for external or publicly observable events” (p. 205). Here is another from McGuire et al. (1996): “Auditory verbal hallucinations are related to the psychotic patient’s own verbal thoughts. They arise when verbal thoughts are misrecognized as being of alien [non‐self] origin and are perceived as external voices” (p. 148). ([Location 16437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=16437)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Some thoughts occur in me as a result of my intention to (for example) solve a certain problem or attend to or carry out a certain cognitive task. Other thoughts come to me unbidden due to causes independent of my current goals and ongoing projects. Frequently such unintended thoughts are, in Frith’s terminology, “stimulus driven,” that is, more or less automatic responses to environmental events. Pathological impairment of this monitoring system might lead me to experience my intended thoughts as stimulus‐driven responses to external events and thus as not mine. ([Location 16628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=16628)) - Allen, Halpern, and Friend (1985, p. 603) describe one patient’s experience as follows: “The voices are not received as auditory events coming from without through the ears. They feel distant and diffuse, ‘like thoughts,’ she adds ironically. ‘Ironically’ because she cannot accept them as her thoughts, but as messages sent to her by a being external to herself.” Investigators have marked the difference between auditory and non‐auditory verbal hallucinations by introducing distinctive terminology such as “psychosensory hallucinations” vs. “psychic hallucinations” or “outer voices” vs. “inner voices” (cf. Stephens & Graham 2000). ([Location 16736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=16736)) - something that it feels like to be oneself,” writes Barry Dainton (2000), and this something is part of the “atmosphere of the conscious mind” (p. ([Location 16762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XQR4ND4&location=16762))