Suchergebnisse

In our work we have drawn attention to an aspect of conscious experience that we have labeled chromatic illumination, which consists of conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We have also characterized the prototypical causal role of chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states, and we have detailed the specific kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that would need to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause of one's subsequent cognition and behavior. In this paper we answer two residual questions. The first is a "How possible?" question, asking whether such a supervenience scenario is really a coherent conceptual possibility, given that it posits a putative conscious feature of conscious experience that allegedly plays a conscious causal role that supposedly constitutes conscious appreciation of information not being consciously represented. The second is a "How plausible?" question, asking whether the details of such a physical-to-mental supervenience scenario can be spelled out in a way that makes actually plausible the claim that chromatic illumination actually gets physically implemented this way in the human brain. We argue that the supervenient causal efficacy of chromatically illuminated conscious experience is not only a genuine conceptual possibility, but also very plausibly can really occur in humans.

We argue that introspection reveals a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience that hitherto has been largely unappreciated in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science: conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We call this phenomenon chromatic illumination. We begin with a phenomenological case study, involving an experience of joke-understanding in which the conscious aspect of chromatic illumination is especially vivid. Then we offer an account of the prototypical causal role of conscious intentional states (mental states that consciously represent their intentional contents), and we offer a contrasting account of the somewhat different prototypical causal role of conscious chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states. Finally, we describe the specific kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that needs to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause that exerts both kinds of prototypical, content-appropriate, reasons-guidance vis-a-vis one's cognition and behavior.