De Brigard on Consciousness

As many of you will know, there has been a surge of recent work in experimental philosophy on intuitions about consciousness. But most of this work uses various sorts of indirect methods. Researchers proceed, e.g., by asking whether a given entity can 'feel pain' or 'experience joy,' and if subjects say yes, it is assumed that they regard this entity as being capable of phenomenal consciousness. 

In a new paper (forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies), Felipe De Brigard uses a quite different approach. Subjects are presented with a vignette and then asked directly whether the character in this vignette is 'conscious' of a particular event. 

In De Brigard's first study, all subjects were given the following vignette:

It is a fact that a baby's cry will wake her mother more readily than any other noise of equivalent pitch or volume. In other words, if a mother is completely asleep, she'd be more likely to be awakened by her baby crying than by any other sound of similar intensity. 

All subjects were then asked whether it was correct to say that the cry woke the sleeping mother because she was conscious of it. 

But there was a catch. Subjects in one condition were asked both whether she was conscious of it and whether she was attending to it; subjects in the other condition were asked both whether she was conscious of it and whether she could hear it. 

This change in the framing of the question led to a quite radical change in people's intuitions. In the condition where subjects were asked about attention and consciousness, only 33% said that the mother was conscious, whereas in the condition where subjects were asked about hearing and consciousness, 70% said that the mother was conscious. 

It appears, then, that people may not have a univocal understanding of what the word 'conscious' means. Instead, they appear to map this word onto different concepts depending on the other words they encounter in the conversational context. 

Comments

[William Brady]

Hi Josh,

I think it's very interesting that asking if she "attended" to it and asking if she could "hear" it produced the framing effects Felipe reported.

I have a question just to be clear: I'm interpreting your report to mean that in each conditions two questions were asked: (1) Did she hear / was she attending and then (2) was she conscious.

If that's correct, then in the condition where subjects were less likely to say that the mother was conscious (the "attention" condition), did subjects also report similarly that she was NOT attending to the cry? And similarly, in the condition where subjects were more likely to say that the mother was conscious (the "hear" condition) did they also report that she DID hear the cry?

I wonder if this information might matter for determining which word or concept is doing the work in producing the framing effect (might it not be "conscious" but rather "attending" or "hear" that is producing something interesting?)

Thanks!

[Justin Sytsma]

Felipe,

Very interesting paper – I enjoyed it a great deal.

I haven’t read Mole’s article yet, but it sounds like his concern with the crying baby case reflects his running “conscious” / “unconscious” together with “conscious of”: It is a problem if the sleeping mother *attends to* to the cry (and so according to Mole commonsense would take her to be *conscious of* the cry) because she is *unconscious* (that is, she is sleeping). It isn’t clear to me that this is really a problem, however: It seems that I can be unconscious and yet conscious of some things (the car alarm that infiltrates my dream, for example).

With regard to the studies, while I clearly distinguish between these two senses of “conscious” (aware of something versus a state of wakefulness), I would hesitate to say that the mother was conscious of the cry because it sounds strange to say that an unconscious person is conscious of something. But, I don’t think that this indicates much.

Beyond that pragmatic reluctance to use “conscious of,” however, I’m not sure how I would answer the three questions you ask. Part of my problem is that what I would want to say, is something more like “the cry wakes the sleeping mother because she is sensitive to it”; being sensitive to the cry means that she is more likely to hear it, notice it, attend to it, become conscious of it, and so on, in comparison to other sounds. In this case, all of those seem to run together for me, and because they run together for me I’m split between choosing both (answer 1) or the individual term that I would be most likely to choose in isolation (answer 2 or 3). (In isolation, I would be most inclined to say “the mother heard the cry,” followed by “the mother noticed the cry,” followed by “the mother attended to the cry,” followed by “the mother was conscious of the cry.”) The issue is that while I take these phrases to be subtly different, the differences aren’t especially relevant to this case: It seems that the mother being sensitive to the cry means that when she hears it she will notice it, be conscious of it, and attend to it. When one is not so sensitive to a cry, however, these come apart. Thus, when I work at a coffee shop I often get used to babies crying and will hear them without really noticing them, being conscious of them, or attending to them; at other times, though, I’ll notice them or be conscious of them without attending to them (I’m attending to my work, but distracted by the cries).

Because of the above, small details in the wording of the options in the three studies jump out at me. I wonder if it would change the answer if you changed “is attending” to “is attending to it”? By just saying “is attending” alone, this suggests to me a reading more like “is sensitive” or that the mother is in some way waiting for the cry, even though she is asleep. (In study three, you use the “is attending to it” locution. Is one of these a typo?) Similarly, what if you removed the “can” in the second study? Isn’t what matters here is whether she *does* hear it?

[William Brady]

Whoops! Sorry I didn't see the paper link. Never mind my question
B

[Felipe De Brigard]

Hi, Justin:
Thanks for the comments! Sure, I think the wording is a pretty sensitive matter. However, I don't think things change that much from one to another. When I ran the pilot for this paper, I used Mole's wording, which was more contrived. Still, the results were pretty much the same as those I got with my wording. This was strange, as I was originally trying to replicate Mole's effect. I never did though, not even using his words.
Your comment about the use of "sensitive" is right on target. Notice that the claim I am trying to put forth is that there may not be a commonsensical view about the precise relation between consciousness and attention. All I want to suggest is that, at most, our folk psychology allows us to interpret both behaviors (waking up vs sleeping through) as being importantly different, but that does not mean that our folk-psychological terms square nicely and unequivocally with such discriminatory capacities. In other words, people seem to agree that there must be some underlying mechanism that should explain the differential response to the same stimulus, and this is probably due to our capacity to deploy the tools of folk psychology. However, those tools only go so far, as folk psychology does not give us the linguistic finesse to figure out exactly which terms should be used to refer to the mechanisms we are talking about. Certain terms seem to do the trick, and certain explanations seemed more satisfactory than others; in your case, for instance, "sensitive" seems to work, but I also had people suggesting that it was instinctive, that the mother's behavior was due to innate sense, etc. My claim is that if we want to advance robust answers to these sorts of difficult cases, we are going to be better off operationalizing our terminology, for the commonsense terms with which we are moved to couch our explanations are vague and highly context dependent.

[Justin Sytsma]

Absolutely, Felipe! I should have said explicitly that I agree with the conclusion of your paper and was mainly just thinking out-loud about the specific results you found.

Did you think about using "aware of" instead of "conscious of"? I tend to think of these as synonymous in perceptual situations, but nonetheless suspect that it would change the results.

[Felipe De Brigard]

Actually, the use of "aware" was one of the motivations for writing this paper. I read Mole's piece a while ago, when my brother was visiting. He's not a philosopher, and I don't think he's interested in this issues at all. One day, however, while having dinner, I happened to mention something regarding the crying baby case and I asked him if he thought the mother was "aware" of it. "What do you mean, like paying attention?" This last part of the conversation occurred in Spanish (actually, most of the conversation occurred in Spanish, except the little bit about Mole, for I tend to think my philosophy in Spanglish). So it occurred to me: we don't have a word of "aware" in Spanish. In fact, the translation of "being aware of" is context dependent; it could be translated for "attending to" or "conscious of", depending on the context. I can't articulate when to apply one and when the other, but the idea that there was a similar phenomenon going on in English was one of the motivations for writing this piece. Oh, and that being said, yes, I thought about using "aware" but I didn't. What do you think it would happen?

[Justin Sytsma]

My guess is that attention+awareness would look more like attention+noticing (study 3) than attention+consciousness (study 1).

The more I think about this case, however, the more something seems off in general. (Not so much with your work, but with the set-up in Mole and the referee comment that he is responding to.) Rereading the second section of your paper, I'm even more confused as to why this case is a problem for Mole; I’m starting to suspect that "attend to" is being used in two senses in the example and that that generates the sense that there is a problem here.

To begin with, it isn’t clear to me why the mother’s being more readily woken up by her baby crying than other sounds matters in the first place. What is different about this case than a case of somebody just being woken up by an alarm? In the latter case, I guess we would just want to say that although the person had been sleeping, she heard / attended to / was conscious of the alarm. So it seems that the issue isn’t attending to / being conscious of the sound itself (the cry, the alarm) but being more likely to be woken up by a given sound (the cry). But, that disposition (or sensitivity as I called it above) isn’t itself to attend to the cry; that is, quoting your paper, the mother’s sensitivity to her baby’s cry *is not* “accounted for… in terms of the mother attending to the cry while she is unconscious” (3). She is sensitive to sounds of that type before the cry and the sensitivity manifests as her being more likely to attend to the cry when it happens. So, I guess that what is going on is that we might think that the commonsense take on this case is that prior to the cry the mother is *attending* in the sense that she is in some way on alert for a cry; but this sense of attending doesn’t seem to be the one at issue – this isn’t to “pay attention to something” and being on alert for X certainly doesn’t suggest that you are conscious of X.

How then should a subject understand the statements that they are selecting from in your first study? Specifically, should “the cry wakes the sleeping mother because” be read as “the cry, as opposed to other sounds like it, wakes the mother because”? If so, then the question seems to be asking for an explanation of the mother’s sensitivity to her baby’s cries and her being conscious of the cry doesn’t explain that, pushing the subject to read “attending” as something like “on alert for that type of sound.” That would explain why answer (2) did so well on the first study, but renders the results irrelevant to Mole’s claim.

[Felipe De Brigard]

The issue with the notion of attention is, once again, very murky. It may be possible that the vagueness of the vocabulary lends itself to a possible reading of the data according to which the sense of 'attention' that people are tokening while reading the vignettes is different from the sense of 'attention' relevant to the discussion about the relation between attention and consciousness. That is perfectly plausible. So much that there is some literature looking at 'inward' versus 'outward' attention, hinting at the idea that the former rather than the later is the kind of attention most relevant for the mechanisms of consciousness. Is this a commonsensical distinction? Do I hear a paper entitled "Two conceptions of attention"?