What are conscious representations?

In a previous post, we discussed the concept of “unconscious representations.” Now, we’ll delve into the related topic of “conscious representations.” This is a complex matter because it’s not typical to describe a mental or neural representation as “conscious.” Instead, consciousness is usually seen as a property of an entire organism. For instance, we might say, “John was in a coma for four years but then regained consciousness,” or ponder whether our pet cats and dogs possess consciousness like humans do. In the first—”organismic”—sense, consciousness denotes a specific physiological state in which a person is awake, can move, speak, report on their subjective experiences, and so on. These contrast to other physiological states in which the person lacks these abilities, such as when they are asleep, knocked on the ground after a blow to the head, under the influence of a tranquilizing drug, in a coma, and so on. The second sense refers to consciousness as an overarching quality of those experiences that can be subjectively reported. It involves a personal, subjective quality, like being aware of the redness of a rose, the sharpness of a pin, or the loudness of an ambulance passing by. In the literature, this is sometimes called “phenomenal consciousness.”

Our focus here is not on consciousness as a general organismic state or phenomenal property of experience but on consciousness as a property of the mental representations that a person entertains or is active in their minds at a given moment. When discussing consciousness as a property of representations, we will take for granted the understanding of consciousness in the organismic sense, for only an alert and awake person can entertain conscious mental representations. We will also take for granted that every conscious representation has a phenomenal or subjective “feel,” so that there is something that “it is like” to hold a belief, experience a pain, see a painting, and so forth (that is in in addition to the usual perceptual and affective phenomenology, there is also a cognitive phenomenology). So, what does it mean for a mental representation to be conscious?

A mental representation is conscious if a person can report on its content when the representation is active at a given time. To illustrate, consider a person saying to themselves: “I believe that the President is responsible for the price of gas.” This is a standard sentential belief expressed in propositional form. The global belief-like representation, which may be a cluster of lower-level (and likely unconscious as defined in the previous post alluded to before) phonological, linguistic, imagistic, and other representations, is conscious because the person is aware of its content when it is active. Similarly, if a stranger were to ask them: “Who do you think is responsible for how expensive gas is?” The person can respond: “I think the President is responsible.” This is because the questioner activated the conscious representation with the relevant content, “the President is responsible for the price of gas,” as the most plausible response; the person checked for its content and reported on their belief. The same analysis applies to other non-propositional conscious representations, like perceptual or interoceptive representations (e.g., representations about the state of the body). Thus, people can report seeing a red rose right now, that they are currently tired, have a headache, and the like.

Philosophers sometimes fret about distinguishing the types of content applicable to belief-like states and those more applicable to perceptual, interoceptive, or affective experiences. In the first case, it is clear that the only way a person can report the content of a propositional belief is by commanding the underlying concepts constituting the sentential belief. Thus, in our previous example, a person cannot report on the content of the conscious representation in question without having knowledge of the concepts “President,” “Responsibility,” “Price,” and “Gas.” Thus, we say that that particular conscious representation has conceptual content. Now, when it comes to a particular perceptual experience, this constraint is not necessary. Yes, we can say that a person who sees a red rose can report on the experience by using their knowledge of the concept of “Red.” But this is not a necessity. A person can encounter a rose, a shade of red or pink that they have never seen before, and still report on their experience using a demonstrative “this shade of red.”

While some philosophers who love concepts and even think that without concepts, we wouldn’t have any experiences would still see this report as relying on a special type of “demonstrative” concept, a better solution is simply to say that perceptual, interoceptive, or affective representations are conscious representations with non-conceptual content. People can tell you that they are sad or have a stomach ache; this does not imply that they wouldn’t be able to report or have these experiences without commanding the concepts of “Sadness” or “Stomach Ache.” Instead, as in the usual “German word for,” phenomenon, people can experience all kinds of feelings they don’t have concepts (or linguistic labels in this case, which are not the same) for. The same goes for the manifold perceptual experiences that people can have conscious representations of, which very much exceeds whatever visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile toolkit of concepts we may command.

Note that the property of being “conscious” bifurcates into two variants when applied to representations, only one of which is our main concern here. We can say that a representation is conscious when activated at a given moment. Thus, if a sighted person stands before a big green wall, their visual system will produce a conscious representation of one big green patch. This is an occurrent conscious representation of greenness. However, conscious representations of (all different shades of green) can also be dispositional. That is, they are not conscious right now but have the potential to become conscious when the occasion is suitable. For instance, given the constitution of the human visual system, sighted people have the ability to experience all kinds of representations of greenness, from the wall mentioned above to the leaves of a tree or the color of the Boston Celtics uniforms. In this way, the entire range of activation states of the visual system or the range of possible conscious beliefs expressible in linguistic format form a (possibly open-ended) set of potentially active conscious representations a person could have.

We do not want to use the term “conscious” for representations that could be conscious but are currently not. Instead, we will refer to potentially conscious representations as “p-conscious” (for potentially-conscious). Representations can be p-conscious either because, while not currently active, a person has the general capacity to experience them as conscious representations or because they are activated but not in such an intense way that they can report on their content. In the first, passively dispositional sense, any one person’s brain has the dispositional capacity to activate a virtual infinity of conscious representations of (among other things) perceptual, imagistic, linguistic, interoceptive format, and phenomenal “feel.” In the second, weakly activated sense, we can say that a p-conscious representation is “pre-conscious” because it could become conscious if its activation level increases or the person’s focus is diverted in the right direction. For instance, at this very moment, all kinds of weakly activated pre-conscious representations (e.g., of how your elbow feels against your chair) could become conscious if you divert your attention to them.

The “ocurrent” conscious representations currently active for any given person and the ones that could potentially be active share a cluster of properties in common, and that is their ability to be explicitly entertained by the person and be globally accessible to their cognitive system (including those that command language, speech, and action) allowing the person to report on their currently conscious representational states and to take them into account in modulating their action. Thus, the idea of conscious representation is explicitly and tightly tied to an operational criterion: No conscious representation without the ability to report (typically but not necessarily using words) the representation’s content, even if that content is minimal or non-coneptual (e.g., “that tree’s leaves are a shade of green”). This capacity to report on the content of a currently active conscious representation is sometimes called “access-consciousness.” Overall, the basic idea is that all conscious representations should enjoy access consciousness.

Note that in this way, conscious representation is directly tied to the criterion of “tellability,” which has been connected to the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge, at least since Polanyi (1958). That is when Polanyi noted that “we know more than we can tell,” he was, in principle, saying that knowledge consists of more than conscious representations since these just cover the stuff we can tell about. In the same way, the distinction between Declarative and Non-Declarative culture (Lizardo, 2017) also rides on a reportability criterion: Declarative Culture is that aspect of personal culture that people could report on (in an interview, survey, or focus group). Declarative Culture must be composed of p-conscious (in its internalized but not yet active form) or occurently conscious representations (when people report on their currently active beliefs, experiences, ideological commitments, and the like).

References

Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge, towards a post critical epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of.

What is an unconscious representation?

In contemporary cognitive neuroscience, we often encounter the term “unconscious representations” (e.g., Shea & Frith, 2016). These are not just representations that could be conscious but just so happen to be unconscious; they are a distinct type of cognitive representation, where their status as unconscious is inherent to the kind of representations they happen to be. That is, being unconscious is part of the representational format in question.

This conception of unconsciousness differs from a type of established folk model inherited from Freud’s early twentieth-century armchair psychology. Here, the unconscious is just a place (e.g., “in the mind”) where representations go (by implication, consciousness is also a mind place, just a place different from the unconscious place). According to this picture, representations are unconscious as long as they are in that place (e.g., the unconscious), usually banished there by some speculative mental process (itself unconscious!) called “repression.” Because being unconscious is a contingent and not inherent aspect of those representations, they could lose it by being “brought back” to consciousness via some therapeutic intervention. This type of “folk Freudianism” is a deleterious brain cramp that needs to be abandoned if the aim is to understand how contemporary cognitive neuroscientists understand unconscious representations. Even when cleansed of its Freudian associations, as in more recent talk of the “cognitive unconscious” (Reber, 1993) or the “unconscious mind” (Bargh & Morsella, 2008), the idea of the unconscious as a “place” (or “brain system”) where representations reside is misleading and should be jettisoned. Instead, we should speak of unconsciousness as an inherent property of some representations in the brain.

Let’s reiterate. The unconscious is not a place where previously conscious representations go. Instead, it is a fundamental property of the vehicles in which some representations (crucial for various cognitive functions) are instantiated in the brain. These representations are inherently unconscious. They cannot be “brought” “into” consciousness (a seductive remnant of the unconscious-as-place conceptual metaphor) by any conceivable procedure. However, cognitive scientists and linguists can generate public representations (e.g., instantiated in some kind of linguistic theory or neuroscientific computational model) that redescribe these unconscious representations to establish their content (e.g., what they are designed to represent) and function (their role in the cognitive economy of the agent). These public representations, clearly phenomenally accessible to all as conscious agents, are convenient representational redescriptions (RRs) of the content of what are inherently unconscious representations.

For instance, psycholinguists sometimes try to reconstruct the underlying unconscious representations we use to parse the linguistic input’s syntactic and phonetic structure during language comprehension by transforming them (or, more accurately, their best guesses as to which these are) into all forms of public representations, like the ubiquitous sentence tree diagrams of generative linguistics or the pictorial diagrams of cognitive grammar (Jackendoff, 1987; Langacker, 2008). These public representations are not intended to be the exact or literal analogs of the unconscious representations people employ to parse the syntactic structure of a sentence. For one, they are in a different format (digital or paper and pencil diagrams) distinct from the target unconscious representations, which exist as (perhaps structurally similar) activation and connection patterns in neuronal assemblies. However, public representations of unconscious representation used in cognitive-scientific theorizing are designed to preserve the representational content of the underlying unconscious representations (the what of what is being represented) across distinct vehicles. So, both a sentence tree grammar and the underlying unconscious representations that enable us to parse the syntactic structure of a sentence represent the same content (e.g., the target sentence’s synaptic structure).

If unconscious representations are inherently unconscious, how do we even know they exist? Perhaps all the diagrams produced by linguists and cognitive scientists are just made up, referring to nothing since we cannot observe unconscious representations. There are two responses to this worry.

First, the idea of unconscious neural representations as “unobservable posits” is greatly exaggerated because unobservability (unlike unconsciousness!) happens to be not an inherent but merely a contingent property of unconscious brain representations. This is because the unobservability of any entity, including unconscious representations, is a two-place relational property, always relative to our historically fluid capacities (and limitations) as scientific observers. This means that just like in other scientific fields like high-energy physics, molecular biology, or astronomy, previously unobservable entities can cross the threshold of observability after some kind of technological advancement occurs in our observational instruments. Some contemporary cognitive neuroscientists argue that this is precisely what has happened to unconscious brain representations, which are now, given advances in fMRI technology, as observable as apples, tables, and chairs (Thomson & Piccinini, 2018).

Second, even if we treat unconscious representations as classic unobservables, we still can still have a solid warrant for their existence based on their (presumably explanatorily successful) role in our best cognitive theories and models. For instance, the only way to rationally reconstruct how cognitive neuroscientists proceed as scientists is thus via our old friend abduction (inference to the best explanation). Like every other scientist, cognitive neuroscientists proceed from observing an initially puzzling phenomenon to trying to understand the generative mechanisms that produce that phenomenon and, thus, solve the puzzle.

In the case of unconscious representations, the observed phenomenon is usually some kind of initially puzzling human ability or capacity no one doubts exists—like the ability to parse the phonetic structure of words or the syntactic structure of sentences or engage in fine-grained motor control. Unconscious representations then come in as proper parts of the underlying cognitive mechanisms posited by the neuroscientific theory, whose operations account for the phenomenon in question, thus solving the puzzle of how people “can do that” (Craver, 1998). Cognitive scientists thus posit the existence of unconscious representations as part of this underlying mechanism because they provide the best explanation, thus accounting for the puzzle of people’s ability to exercise the target capacity. Inference to the best explanation thus justifies both the act of the positing and the reality of the (for the sake of argument “unobservable”) unconscious representations featuring in our most explanatory successful models of how people can exercise a given capacity (Boyd, 1983).

To sum up, unconscious representations, like those accounting for your capacity to parse the phonetic structure of every word in this paragraph as you read it, are a completely uncontroversial part of the scientific ontology of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. They feature centrally in almost every mechanistic model of every cognitive capacity and ability we have, providing a solid scientific account of some of the essential functions of the mind. Their status as “unobservable” has been overstated since now we have routine access to them as observable entities and even the processes in which they participate.

References

Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The Unconscious Mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 3(1), 73–79.

Boyd, R. N. (1983). On the Current Status of the Issue of Scientific Realism. In C. G. Hempel, H. Putnam, & W. K. Essler (Eds.), Methodology, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Stegmüller on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, June 3rd, 1983 (pp. 45–90). Springer Netherlands.

Craver, C. F. (1998). Neural Mechanisms: On the Structure, Function, and Development of Theories in Neurobiology [University of Pittsburgh]. https://philpapers.org/rec/CRANMO-2

Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.

Shea, N., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for “Type Zero” cognition. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1), niw005.

Thomson, E., & Piccinini, G. (2018). Neural representations observed. Minds and Machines, 28(1), 191–235.