Qualitative consciousness is sensory: Explicit consciousness is conceptual
The philosopher Ned Block makes a distinction between qualitative (sensory) consciousness and explicit propositions, which are not clearly experienced as having sensory qualities. These include beliefs about oneself and the world; reportable feelings of knowing (FOKs; see below); novel skills as opposed to overpracticed ones; and concepts that are abstract but still reportable.
Our many examples of language and semantic networks covers the domain of explicit propositions, which also fade from consciousness when they become completely predictable.
Conscious Contents
In general, the reportable contents of consciousness include perceptual stimuli, which are “qualitative in nature;” inner speech, reportable dreams and visual imagery; the fleeting present and it’s fading traces in immediate memory; interoceptive feelings like pleasure, pain, anticipatory anxiety and excitement; the exteroceptive body senses, including external touch and pain; reportable emotions; autobiographical episodes as they are experienced and recalled; clear and immediate intentions, expectations and effortful voluntary control.
This basic list has not changed since Aristotle, and may be a cultural universal.
Feelings of knowing.
Perceptual consciousness shows multiple levels of highly discriminable details — tiny dots of light, contrast edges, inferred size constancy, object identity, etc. But “feelings of knowing” (FOKs) are classically said to be experienced as “vague” or “fringe-like.” FOKs include judgments (as opposed to percepts), feelings of familiarity, feelings of rightness and wrongness, and much more. William James made an empirically persuasive case for “the vague” in mental life in his Principles of Psychology (1890), and that evidence has only expanded since then. Bruce Mangan also includes intuitive feelings of beauty and goodness, which are highly reliable under experimental conditions. While the phenomenal experience of FOKs is “vague,” the actual cognitive processes involved can be very precise and complex. Introspection is not a reliable guide to the cognitive complexity of FOKs.
FOKs can be defined empirically as “reportable experiences that are verifiable, and which are reported with high certainty, but with very little descriptive detail.”
In the case of a clearly visible coffee cup, we have both high confidence and the ability to experience numerous details. In contrast, FOKs often show high confidence and accuracy with no subjective experience of details. The range of FOKs is very large indeed.
[Excerpted from Part I – Conscious Experiences in “On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity.”]
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
