Philosophy

An assessment of consciousness in nonverbal animals requires a framework for research that extends testing methods beyond subjective report. This chapter proposes a working definition of consciousness in terms of temporal representation that provides the critical link between internal phenomenology and external behavior and neural structure. Our claim is that consciousness represents the present moment as distinct from the past and the future in order to flexibly respond to stimuli. We discuss behavioral and neural evidence that indicates the capacity for both flexible response and temporal representation, and we illustrate these capacities in fish, a taxonomic group that challenges human intuitions about consciousness.

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright a b s t r a c t Consciousness has a peculiar affinity for presence; conscious states represent their contents as now. To understand how conscious states come to represent time in this way, we need a distinction between a mental state that represents now and one that simply occurs now. A teleofunctional theory accounts for the distinction in terms of the development and function of explicit temporal representation. The capacity to represent a situation explicitly as 'now' and compare it with past situations in order to prepare for the future involves the separation of goals from the particular action required to attain them. That is, when a creature is able to consider alternative paths of action, it becomes necessary to conceive of alternate future times as distinct from the present moment. The developmental , functional approach of a teleofunctional theory is promising in its ability to integrate research from diverse empirical fields for support of its claims.

Does neuroscience show that free will is an illusion? No, it shows that unconscious mental states are causally effective in action. Because free will includes initiation by both conscious and unconscious states, the self as free agent should be characterized in terms of more than her conscious deliberations to range over unconscious beliefs, memories and feelings. Further, the ways social relations influence action and the ways actions influence the social environment are relevant to a full account of free will. Given this broader perspective, it is clear that recent neuroscientific studies only show that the conscious feeling of volition does not play the agential role it seems to play. Consciousness is nonetheless causally effective in planning and monitoring actions to ensure they conform to goals. This causal process unfolds over a span of time and encompasses a wide array of factors.

Philosophical theories of memory rarely distinguish between importantly different sorts of memory: procedural, semantic and episodic. I argue for a temporal representation theory to explain the unique characteristic of episodic memory as the only form of conscious memory. A careful distinction between implicit and explicit representation shows how the past figures in memory. In procedural and semantic memory, the influence of the past is implicit by which I mean that the past experience is used but not represented in the skill or knowledge. Episodic memory, in contrast, depends on representing a past experience as past. On a temporal representation theory of consciousness, a conscious state represents the present moment, and in the case of episodic memory, it includes a representation of past experience. The embedded account of the ‘feeling of pastness’ takes past experience to be part of the explicit content of a conscious state. An episodic memory is a representation of the present that includes a representation of the past. Whereas a higher-order theory of consciousness can give no reason why only episodic memories are conscious, a temporal theory explains why episodic memories are both higher-order and conscious. Finally, I consider the essential role of episodic memory in the formation of a temporally extended self. The demands of a social environment motivate development of an ability to track the mental states of others and oneself over time. By incorporating past experience (and future experience) into the present, episodic memory extends experience in time to form the sense of self. Through a careful examination of the function of temporal representation, we can see why the past is not consciously represented in procedural and semantic memory and the value of consciously representing the past in episodic memory.

A puzzling feature of confabulation is its selectivity: only some people confabulate in response to illness, and only some people resist correction of their inventions. So-called two-factor theories of delusion account for the latter sort of selectivity in terms of the failure of a belief evaluator. The first factor in delusion is a dysfunction in perceptual or cognitive processing and includes such cases as amnesia, feelings of unfamiliarity toward loved ones, or auditory hallucinations. Since first factor deficits do not always cause delusions, a second factor is postulated to explain the failure of delusional patients to revise the faulty beliefs produced by first-factor deficits. For some reason – endorsement and explanationist theories differ – delusional patients maintain false beliefs in the face of counter-evidence. I suggest that a Darwinian view of the mind can supplement two-factor theories of confabulation delusion by articulating the function of self-consciousness. If we suppose self-consciousness utilizes memories in order to maintain a sense of the self in time, then confabulation is an adaptive response to the absence of memories in order to maintain this function. Delusion differs from the everyday sort of confabulation that many of us experience in that delusions are accompanied by a second deficit in the capacity to reevaluate beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. By considering functions and failures of mental capacities, the debate between endorsement and explanationist accounts of delusion can be resolved.

Felt emotional states are at the very heart of many concerns about animal welfare. However, some scholars express doubt that animals are able to have such experiences, and there is much debate about what types of evidence can be used to draw inferences regarding such feelings in animals. The objective of this review is to critically examine inferences regarding felt negative emotions in animals based on various types of experimental and observational evidence resulting from behavioral studies. This review takes three types of approach: the assessment of spontaneous responses to a noxious stimulus, changes in these responses following a drug treatment, and assessments of the animal's motivation to avoid the stimulus. In each case we provide examples from previous experiments and suggest refinements that overcome certain limitations to each approach. We suggest that studies using learned, flexible, context-dependent responses, and tasks involving discrimination and generalization of affective states induced by drugs may be especially useful. Although the various types of evidence can be used in combination to draw tentative inferences, conclusions regarding felt emotions still fall short of definitive. As an approach forward, we propose adopting an Affective Stance that posits specific felt emotions and tests the predictions that arise from this posit that are not predicted by other approaches to this issue.

Since the introduction of new technologies, the deluge of neuroscientific data has been overwhelming. On one hand this new information has produced remarkable breakthroughs in our understanding of brain function and development as well as lifesaving treatments for trauma and disease. On the other hand, the lure and reward for explanations of mental phenomena in terms of simple, manipulable brain processes has led to questionable research methodologies and unsubstantiated claims. A more fundamental issue is raised by the attempt to explain consciousness by means of information, as proposed by the Information Integration Theory (IIT). While the models produced by this massive computation of data will no doubt improve our understanding of brain function and capacity, a strict information processing approach cannot address the problem of meaning. A solution to this problem demands an evolutionary, developmental, and dynamic account of an organism in its environment. Data analysis will play a role in this inclusive explanatory program, but explanation is insufficient by data alone.

In his target article, Key reviews the neuroanatomy of human pain and uses what is known about human pain to argue that fish cannot experience pain. Below we provide three reasons why the conclusions reached by Key are unsupported. These consider (i) why it is not sufficient to conclude that only human neural structures can process conscious pain, (ii) why an understanding of pain in humans and non-human animals needs to be based within a framework of consciousness, and (iii) evidence that fish treated with noxious stimuli lose the ability to perform normal behaviours, a behavioral proxy that Key proposed would provide good evidence for an animal to feel pain, already exists.

Trace conditioning involves the pairing of a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), followed by a short interval with a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Recently, trace conditioning has been proposed as a test for animal consciousness due to its correlation in humans with subjective report of the CS-UCS connection. We argue that the distractor task in the Clark and Squire (1998) study on trace conditioning has been overlooked. Attentional inhibition played a crucial role in disrupting trace conditioning and awareness of the CS-UCS contingency in the human participants of that study. These results may be understood within the framework of the Temporal Representation Theory that asserts consciousness serves the function of selecting information into a representation of the present moment. While neither sufficient nor necessary, attentional processes are the primary means to select stimuli for consciousness. Consciousness and attention are both needed by an animal capable of flexible behavioral response. Consciousness keeps track of the current situation; attention amplifies task-relevant stimuli and inhibits irrelevant stimuli. In light of these joint functions, we hypothesize that the failure to trace condition under distraction in an organism known to successfully trace condition otherwise can be one of several tests that indicates animal consciousness. Successful trace conditioning is widespread and by itself does not indicate consciousness.

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic view attributes consciousness broadly to any behavior that involves sensory responsiveness. Yet human experience and observation of diverse species suggest that the most plausible case is that consciousness functions between these poles. In exploring the middle ground, we discuss the pros and cons of “high level” approaches such as the dual systems approach. According to this model, System 1 can be thought of as unconscious; processing is fast, automatic, associative, heuristic, parallel, contextual, and likely to be conserved across species. Consciousness is associated with System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, rule-based, serial, ...

Introduction As fundamental as progress is for Firmin, it remains more an assumption of his text than a proven result, more a motivating ideal than a scientific fact, putting Firmin's faith in progress into tension with his own exhortation that science must free itself from all prejudices. Because Firmin's science was shaped by what can only be described as a positivist philosophy or a philosophy of progress, Firmin's book belongs not only to the history of the study of race but to the history of the philosophy of race as well. With The Equality of Human Races, Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin offered the world its first sustained, philosophical, book-length response to scientific European racism. Unfortunately, the volume, first published in Paris in 1885, quickly disappeared and was out of print even in Haiti until 1968. With the publication of the English translation in 2000 (following an additional reprint of the original French in Haiti in 1985), we in the Anglop...

In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life scientists, including medical doctors and researchers, think about race. I begin with descriptions of how life scientists tend to think about race and descriptions of typical approaches to bioethics. I then describe three different approaches to race: biological race, race as social construction, and race as cultural driver of history. Taking into account the historical and contemporary interplay of these three approaches, I suggest an alternative framework for thinking about race focused on how the idea of race functions socially. Finally, using assisted reproductive technologies as an example, I discuss how bioethicists and scientists might work together using this framework to improve not only their own but broader perspectives on race.