A recently published article in "Frontiers in Psychology" (word to the wise) by Oakley & Halligan argues that consciousness is an epiphenomenal by-product of an unconscious process called the "internal narrative". If this sounds familiar it may be because it is similar to the 1970s imagery debate. that is. do mental images such as visual mental images have psychological reality and admit transformation and operations comparable to real world pictures (e.g.., the Shepard mental rotation studies, the Kosslyn distance estimation on images research, etc.) or are mental images epiphenomenal by-products of abstract cognitive processes as argued by Zenon Pylyshyn and other supporters of a Chomskyan style cognitive architecture (i.e., rule and symbol systems with cognitively impenetrable modules). John Anderson's 1978 paper pointing out that there was no principled way to determine which position was correct pretty much settled the argument but proponents of the analog view of mental images (Shepard, etc.) or the epiphenomenal view of mental images (Pylyshyn) would continue to skirmish over the decades. As far as I know, Anderson's conclusions still holds. I say all this as a prologue to identifying the sources for the Oakley & Halligan paper just to prime the reader toward a particular conclusion. ;-)
I became aware of Oakley & Halligan paper because a newspaper article about it popped up in my news feed. The UK newspaper the Daily Mail has an article that presents Oakley & Halligan's speculations as conclusive science (or is this just my interpretation?); see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5114511/What-consciousness-not-drives-human-mind.html The original article can be accessed here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full It is likely your students may hear or read about this paper or, worse, some textbook author may take it seriously and include it in their text, so it may be worth one's time to examine it. If students raise questions about the article in class remember to tell them that as a theory, as an explanation of a phenomenon, it suffers from the faults of all theories: it is limited by its reliance on results collected to date and may be falsified by future results, there may be alternative explanations that account for the results equally well but lead to fundamentally different conclusions, and, finally, all theories have a shelf life because they are limited, flawed, tentative, likely to be falsified by new data, and replaced by theory that better explains the phenomenon of interest. So, tell students to not over-invest in any one theory if for no other reason than the sunk cost effect. Happy Post-Birdday! And "Hi!" to the Canadians and Tipsters from Parts Unknown. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=51760 or send a blank email to leave-51760-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
