The relationship between consciousness, understanding, and rationality

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to explore the relationship between consciousness and understanding. To do so, I first briefly review recent work on the nature of both understanding and consciousness within philosophy and psychology. Building off of this work, I then defend the thesis that if one is conscious of a given content then one also understands that content. I argue that this conclusion can be drawn from (1) the fact that understanding is associated with rational intention formation and (2) the fact that conscious access appears to involve the selective routing/broadcasting of representational content to neural systems that integrate information in order to select cognitive/behavioral intentions in conjunction with goals. Based on these premises I illustrate how a disruption to the rationality of a representation’s influence on intention formation (when it becomes consciously accessible) would also remove any evidence that a person was conscious of the content of that representation. I therefore suggest that conscious content (and associated phenomenology) may be determined by the rational, content-appropriate influences an accessed representation has on intention formation (i.e., the influences associated with understanding). I conclude by offering replies to several potential objections to this thesis.

Keywords:

• Consciousness
• phenomenology
• rationality
• representation
• understanding

Notes

1. Other philosophers have also previously considered types of understanding that appear more closely related to UT, such as understanding the meaning of linguistic utterances (e.g., Davidson, 1983; Dummett, 1998). However, to my knowledge, at present there are no published discussions of the relationship between these theories and the RC account, and the extent to which they agree or disagree with one another remains unexamined. As will become clear below, my focus on the RC account here is due to the clearly specified relation that it proposes between representational content, intention formation, and understanding, and how this relation overlaps with specific theories consciousness.

2. The account suggests that the wider the range is of possible goals/beliefs for which one could form rational intentions, the greater one’s understanding should be understood to be. However, there is no sharp cut-off point where understanding appears/disappears in any binary sense.

Individuals with orbitofrontal cortex damage may be an interesting example of how these requirements for true belief and rational use can come apart. These individuals are capable of verbally reporting (and justifying) what a rational action would be in a given situation; however, they do not choose the rational action when actually in the situation themselves (Wallis, 2007). According to the RC account, they might be said to believe something true, and even be justified in that belief, yet they would not understand the content of that belief (or at least understand it to a very minimal degree). This is because the only relevant rational responses they can reliably generate from the true belief they possess appear to be those associated with verbal reports.

3. It is neutral with regard to the correct account of how such representations acquire that content.

4. This type of representation is surely “multi-layered” in that it contains both perceptual and conceptual elements.

5. Within the computational “predictive coding” models of mind mentioned earlier in the paper, consciousness has also been associated with the set of representations that are used in “active inference” (Hohwy, 2014). In active inference, the brain’s internal model of the world is held fixed (i.e., it is temporarily not allowed to be updated due to new sensory input), and actions are selected which the model predicts will minimize the error between the model’s expectations and future sensory input. Hohwy (2014) suggests that this process should require the type of “global broadcasting” described above in order to simulate various possible actions and expected outcomes within frontal-parietal networks before an optimal action can be selected.

6. To be clear, none of the different theories of access consciousness reviewed above would claim that the “dispositional” form of understanding under discussion is sufficient for consciousness. This is because dispositional understanding does not require that a neural representation become activated in any sense (i.e., it only depends on the effects that representation would have if it were both activated and selectively made accessible). All the theories I have reviewed hold that a neural representation needs to be both activated and selectively “routed” in some way to become conscious. It is the nature of this selective routing that differs somewhat between theories. Prinz’s view holds that an active representation only needs to be attentionally selected by parietal cortex, and that this attentional selection makes content available for working memory maintenance. However, not everything that is conscious will be encoded or maintained. In contrast, standard global workspace models hold that top-down amplification from prefrontal cortex (associated with working memory maintenance) is also required for consciousness. However, both of these views share the claim relevant to this paper, which is that consciousness depends on an active representation being selectively routed so as to have specific, content-appropriate effects on action selection and other goal-directed cognitive processes (including what to maintain/manipulate in working memory).

7. Certain considerations would be different if one instead adopted a functional theory of content (e.g., Block, 1986; Greenberg & Harman, 2005). According to this type of theory, a representation’s content (i.e., what it refers to) is determined by its cognitive role. This role would include the causal effects a representation has on cognition and action when it is activated/broadcast. Thus, if one adopted such a theory, a change in a representation’s causal effects on deliberative cognition would change the content of the representation itself. This would imply that a given representation could not fail to have content-appropriate influences on intention formation when it was made conscious (because if it did it would not be a state with that content). A person could therefore never form content-inappropriate intentions. So, while assuming a causal theory of content within the context of this paper can allow that content to remain separate from consciousness and understanding, a functional theory of content would imply that a representation’s content is itself also intimately linked to both understanding and conscious experience of that content.

8. Assume also that these representations are true, and that they are currently playing a belief-like role—that is to say, my other beliefs do not include the belief that they are hallucinatory, and thus I accept their perceptual content as true.

9. On global workspace models, these sorts of unconscious influences can be explained as a result of the limited downstream effects an active representation has (e.g., on the motor planning system) in the absence of top-down amplification and global broadcasting (see Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, 2006). These limited downstream effects are insufficient to allow the representation to be maintained or manipulated within controlled, multi-step deliberation processes. They are also insufficient to integrate a representation with other conscious content and allow for the resolution of conflict between competing control processes (Morsella, Godwin, Jantz, Krieger, & Gazzaley, in press). For example, a person would need to be conscious of a pile of money at the far end of a pit of hot coals in order for that representation to drive the decision to walk across the hot coals and inhibit the automatic response to avoid the pain required to do so.

10. A thoughtful reviewer also pointed out a distinct, but related argument for this same conclusion. Specifically, one might further argue that the reason a conscious representation always exerts a content-appropriate influence is that the function of selectively broadcasting representational content to the frontal-parietal network in the brain is specifically to enable rational intention-formation qua that content. Given that this were its function, it would therefore be implausible for this to fail to happen in non-pathological cases (i.e., when it failed, this would constitute a functional failure, and hence would be pathological).

11. A somewhat similar type of response can also apply to cases of hallucinations and delusions, as well as to cases of confabulation, which involve the unconscious generation of plausible (but false) explanations of events (that the person appears to believe). In these cases, although the person may be unaware of the processes that lead to their inaccurate percepts or beliefs, it remains true that they have conscious access to, and appear to understand, the content of these false percepts or beliefs when they are generated or represented. For example, they will still talk and act in ways that are content-appropriate for the meaning of those representations. Thus, according to the RC account, they still understand the meaning of all the representational content they are conscious of, even if some of that representational content may inaccurately describe the world.

12. This same idea can even be applied to recent brain imaging results that suggest certain fully paralyzed patients in vegetative states (that make no voluntary movements whatsoever) may still be conscious (Monti et al., 2010; Owen & Coleman, 2008). This evidence comes from the fact that the brain activation patterns of these patients appears to indicate that they can appropriately activate sequential, goal-directed cognitive routines in order to answer questions. For example, they might be told to imagine playing tennis if their answer to a question is “yes” and to imagine walking around their house if their answer is “no,” and the associated brain activation patterns suggest that they can do this successfully and accurately. Therefore, even this non-behavioral evidence of consciousness requires the sort of rational intention-formation process associated with understanding.

13. This connection between consciousness, understanding, and rationality may not hold if one instead adopted a competing theory of consciousness that did not appeal to the notion of “access” (e.g., higher-order representation theories). Thus, this insight about access-related theories of consciousness may also be relevant to debates between defenders of access-related and non-access-related theories of consciousness.