There has been a lot of action on the overflow front lately! It started with papers by Ned Block and Dennett and Cohen in Trends in Cognitive Science (Block’s paper criticized, among others, my recent paper on this stuff). These articles spawned a response by me here and here, which I still stand by.
But now, having read the response from Kouider (which echoes his response given at his CUNY Cogsci talk) as well as the response from Overgaard and Block’s response to both of them in addition to Lamme’s response to Cohen and Dennett and their response in turn, it seems a couple points should be emphasized.
First is that there is a conceptual question about what it means to say that something is accessible but not accessed. One might think that you cannot know that something is accessible without it actually being accessed. Block and others respond that something is accessible when, roughly, it is globally broadcast. But then we might wonder why we ought to think that being globally broadcast is equivalent to being accessible. Aren’t their mental contents/states that are globally broadcast but which are not accessible? David Rosenthal has pressed this kind of question in conversation and I am not exactly sure what the neuropsychological answer is in this case. Is there any serious neuropsychological reason to think that global broadcasting is equivalent to being accessible?
Second one might worry about the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ implications of Block’s argument. If we can show that there is consciousness that is not accessed then it seems a short step to consciousness that is inaccessible in principle. And if it is true that there is a principled connection between the two then though it would be strictly speaking true that Block’s argument did not rely on inaccessible consciousness it would none the less still be appropriate to give a reductio of his argued for view in terms of absurdities in the view it leads to.
Finally, it does seem as though there is a principled connection between the two notions. Block argues that it is inappropriate to argue against the claim that there is inaccessible consciousness because he only requires that some consciousness not be accessed not inaccessible. But if one thinks just of a particular moment in consciousness leaving aside the next moment it is of course true that some consciousness is inaccessible. It is inaccessible at that moment. Block’s view is that at any given moment in your daily conscious experience there is, necessarily, some parts of your conscious experience that are inaccessible at that moment.
Given these considerations I don’t think that the appeal to the distinction between not accessed and inaccessible helps make Block’s case.
According to the hypothesis Kouider et al. put forward, what is in consciousness before the cue are generic representations plus specific representations that are too sparse to provide the information necessary to explain partial report superiority. However, on their hypothesis one would expect a substantial error rate concerning the uncued items. However, Kouider et al. found the error rate to be small: their own evidence counts against them.
It really is not clear to me why Block thinks that one would expect a substantial error rate concerning the uncued items. He seems to be thinking that the no-overflow view is committed to only generic phenomenology before the cue but this is clearly not the case. It is compatible with the no overflow view that there is some specific phenomenology before the cue (just not all of the items as per overflow).
But even if one is not moved by this there is an obvious problem with the argument. The no overflow position maintains that there is enough information unconsciously processed to do the task. Subjects don’t make a lot of errors because that information was there whether consciously or not.
Given this one might think that we should be agnostic about whether overflow is true or not but this doesn’t seem right to me. The overflow hypothesis is radical in that it postulates a kind of consciousness that cannot in principle be accessed (at that moment) and yet which is also for me in the way that normal accessed consciousness is for me. That is, I experience the unaccessed consciousness as mine without being aware that I do. How this could be so is deeply mysterious and perhaps in principle untestable with any known scientific methods. Barring prejudice in its favor we would need strong evidence indeed to accept such a notion.
Richard, you write:
“The overflow hypothesis is radical in that it postulates a kind of consciousness that cannot in principle be accessed (at that moment) and yet which is also for me in the way that normal accessed consciousness is for me.”
I don’t think this is quite the right way to put it. Your global conscious experience is your ambient phenomenal world which normally *includes*, during any extended present, objects and events that have been parsed, accessed/captured, and “highlighted” by selective attention. So at any given time your global consciousness must be greater than its parts that you access/perceive. This aspect of consciousness, perception, and cognition is explicitly described in the retinoid model of consciousness. For example, see *Space, Self, and the Theater of Consciousness*, here:
https://people.umass.edu/trehub/YCCOG828%20copy.pdf
Arnold, I don’t see what is supposed to be different in the way you put things…
Richard: “According to one view your global conscious experience just is your ambient phenomenal world which is exhausted by what you have accessed.”
This is not Block’s view (nor my view). The point is that during any phenomenal episode your ambient phenomenal world/global conscious experience is NOT exhausted by what you have accessed. For example, see this recent study in the Journal *Vision*:
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Everyone knows what is interesting: Salient locations which should be fixated
Christopher Michael Masciocchi 1,
Stefan Mihalas 2,
Derrick Parkhurst 3 and
Ernst Niebur 4
– Author Affiliations
1Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
2Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
3Thirty Sixth Span Internet Technologies, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
4Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Abstract
Most natural scenes are too complex to be perceived instantaneously in their entirety. Observers therefore have to select parts of them and process these parts sequentially. We study how this selection and prioritization process is performed by humans at two different levels. One is the overt attention mechanism of saccadic eye movements in a free-viewing paradigm. The second is a conscious decision process in which we asked observers which points in a scene they considered the most interesting. We find in a very large participant population (more than one thousand) that observers largely agree on which points they consider interesting. Their selections are also correlated with the eye movement pattern of different subjects. Both are correlated with predictions of a purely bottom–up saliency map model. Thus, bottom–up saliency influences cognitive processes as far removed from the sensory periphery as in the conscious choice of what an observer considers interesting.