Requirements for Conscious Representations
Requirements for Conscious Representations
This chapter argues that brain systems must meet several 'hard' requirements to qualify as conscious, while other requirements are 'soft' in that they are important for sustaining normal, daily-life awareness but not strictly necessary for having the most basic form of conscious experience. The hard requirements include, first, the ability to interpret (or reconstruct) sensory inputs as having particular qualities or content, within a rich repertoire of modalities or (sub)modalities, such as visual motion, shape, depth and color. Second, this process of attributing sensory “feel” or meaning to inputs occurs in a dynamic or stable state, depending on the constancy of variables governing the sensory flux. Projection of interpreted sensory inputs into an external, perspectival space (vision) or body map (somatosensation) is seen as a relatively basic process, but patient studies indicate that core consciousness does not strictly depend on this ability, as applies as well to normal requirements on the grouping of similar features and binding of different submodalities into objects. Also the “unity” of consciousness and self-awareness are not classified as an essential feature but rather as a constantly maintained “illusion” of the healthy brain empowered by proper multimodal and motor alignment.
Keywords: Binding problem, Interpretation, Multimodal integration, Perceptual stability, First-person perspective, Phenomenal content, Projection, Self awareness, Space, Unity of consciousness
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
