consciousness and the causal paradox

7/29/2019 Consciousness and the Causal Paradox

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Velmans, Max (1996) Consciousness and the "Causal Paradox". Behavioral and Brain

Sciences, 19 (3): 538-542. Copyright Cambridge University Press

(Reply to continuing commentaries on Velmans, M (1991) Is human information processing

conscious? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14, 651-669)

CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE "CAUSAL PARADOX"

Max Velmans

Department of Psychology

Goldsmiths

University of London

Lewisham Way

London

SE14 6NW

England

Email:[email protected]

URL: http://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/velmans/

KEYWORDS: psychological complementarity, causality, consciousness, first person, third

person, causal paradox, mind, conscious process, perspectival switching, mixed perspective

explanations

ABSTRACT. Viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be necessary

for complex, novel human activitybut viewed from a third-person perspective

consciousness appears to play no role in the activity of brains, producing a "causal paradox".

To resolve this paradox one needs to distinguish consciousness of processing from

consciousness accompanying processing or causing processing. Accounts of

consciousness/brain causal interactions switch between first- and third-person perspectives.

However, epistemically, the differences between first- and third-person access are

fundamental. First- and third-person accounts are complementary and mutually irreducible.

In psychological theorising over the last twenty years consciousness has been thought to

play an important role in every major phase of human information processing ranging from

input (the analysis of novel or complex stimuli, selective attention), storage (working

memory, learning), transformation (thinking, problem solving, planning, creativity), and

output (speech, writing, novel or complex adaptive adjustments to the enviroment). In my

analysis of this literature (Velmans 1991a,b, 1993) I concluded that viewed from a first-

person perspective consciousness does play a role in these different forms of processing.

That is, if one examines one's own psychological functioning, conscious appears necessary

for the analysis of novel or complex stimuli, choosing what to attend to or do, and most

forms of learning and memory. It also seems necessary for most novel or complex cognitive
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/velmans/http://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/velmans/http://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/velmans/mailto:[email protected]


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transformations and outputhow, after all, could one plan, be creative, give a lecture or

write a paper if one were not conscious?

However if one examines human information processingfrom a third-person perspective,

that is from the perspective of an external observer, then consciousness does not appear to

be necessary for any form of processing. The operation of minds and brains seems to beexplainable entirely in functional or physical terms which make no reference to

consciousness (see also Gray, 1995; Velmans, 1995a). For example, once the processing

within a system required to perform a given function is sufficiently well-specified in

procedural terms one does not have to add consciousness to make the system work. In

principle, the same function operating to the same specification could be performed by a

non-conscious machine. Likewise if one inspects the operation of the brain from the

outside, no subjective experience can be observed. Nor does one need to appeal to the

existence of subjective experience to account for the observable neural activity.

This produces a paradox, which I have called the "causal paradox" (Velmans 1991b, p716):How can it be that from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be necessary

for most forms of complex or novel processing whereas from a third-person perspective it

does not appear to be necessary for any form of processing?

Commentators on my target article attempted to address this paradox in different,

conflicting ways. Some argued that consciousness does not exist, or is a confused concept

that has no bearing on a scientific understanding of the mind (Stanovich, 1991; Sloman,

1991; Rey, 1991); some argued that how things appear from a first-person perspective does

not matter for science, in which case, for scientific purposes, the causal paradox can be

ignored (e.g. Hardcastle, 1991); others tried to finesse the issue by redefining consciousnessin information processing terms, for example, as being synonymous with focal attention, the

contents of short-term working memory, and so on (e.g. Baars, 1991; Block, 1991; Bowers,

1991; Glicksohn, 1993; Wilson, 1991). By contrast, Rakover seeks to establish a causal role

for consciousness through his two, "parallel" stories, the "mental-pool" and "cognitive-pool"

thought experiments. To place his analysis within the debate as a whole I must first

summarise some aspects of my own position.

In Velmans (1991a,b, 1993) I assumed:

1. That the existence of consciousness (in ourselves) is undeniable.

2. That how things appear from a first-person perspective matters a great deal for our

everyday lives, and also provides useful information for science, particularly psychology

(reports of experienced events enter into uncountable numbers of psychology

experiments).

3. That redefining consciousness to be a form of human information processing ignores its

central, phenomenal properties, the "qualia" of first-person experience; consequently such

redefinitions finesse the paradox of consciousness/brain causal interaction

without addressing it (the difficulty of incorporating the phenomenal properties of

consciousness within functional descriptions of the mind, is widely acknowledged).


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Once one accepts that consciousness and its contents (viewed from a first-person

perspective) provide valuable psychological data one can get on with the business of

working out how given conscious states relate to given forms of processing in minds or

brains (viewed from a third-person perspective) in a way that does not prejudge either the

ontological nature of consciousness, or its causal status. This involves a detailed

examination of (a) how given conscious states relate to their causes or correlates (specified,

say, in information processing or neural terms) and (b) how the first-person information

(about what is going on) provided by conscious states relates to information available to

external observers.

Note that (a) is quite different from (b); (a) has to do with examining where and how

consciousness "fits into" the causal sequence of events taking place in the mind/brain; (b)

has to do with the fact that conscious states are always about something, that is they

provide information to those who have them (about the world, about themselves, and so

on), which may or may not be similar to the information available to external observers

(about the same things). When discussing the senses in which a process may be said to be"conscious" it is useful to bear these distinctions in mind (as we will see below).

My review of the literature (in Velmans 1991a) ranged over all the main phases of human

information processing, from information encoding, storage, retrieval, and transformation

to output. In the light of many claims that have been made in the literature that "conscious

processing" is necessary for any tasks that are novel or complex, not just viewed from a

first-person perspective, but from a third-person perspective, I considered whether a given

process could occur without consciousness (if so, consciousness could not be necessary for

its operation). If a given process is accompanied by consciousness, I asked Where in its

causal sequence does consciousness appear?

(If consciousness appears subsequently tothe operation of the process it cannot enter into that process.) I also examined how the

informationpresent to consciousness relates to the processing it accompanies (for example,

whether conscious information reveals anything about the nature of accompanying

processing).

I will not repeat that review here. But, to get a quick sense of how a more detailed analysis

of the role of consciousness in "conscious processing" can produce surprising results, try

silently reading the sentence "The dustmen said that they would refuse to collect the

refuse." Reading, including silent reading of a sentence at the focus of attention is widely

thought of as a "conscious process" in cognitive science. It is generally thought thatsentences, being complex, novel stimuli are beyond the capacity of preconscious processing

(Underwood, 1991; Baars & McGovern, 1996). Note though, that once the silently read

sentence appears in consciousness in the form of phonemic imagery the stress pattern on

the word "refuse" depends on where it appears in the sentence. On its first occurrence it is

(silently) pronounced refuse and on its second occurrence as refusestress patterns

appropriate to its initial use as a verb and its subsequent use as a noun. Reading is

undoubtedly a complex process involving visual pattern recognition, semantic analysis,

syntactic analysis, the relating of input to general knowledge of the world, and in the case of

silent reading the translation of the visual input (the printed text) into the phonemic

imagery which characterises "inner speech" or "verbal thoughts." But once the word

"refuse" appears in consciousness, a stress pattern appropriate to its use as a verb or a noun


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has already been assigned. If so, not just visual pattern recognition, but all the semantic and

syntactic analysis required to determine the appropriate function of the word within the

context of the sentence as a whole must have taken placepreconsciously. In short, while

reading a sentence at the focus of attention is "conscious" in the sense that it results in

conscious phonemic imagery, the processing itself ispreconscious (see Velmans 1991a, p657

for a more detailed analysis of such cases).

For reasons such as this I concluded that the conventional categorization of processes into

"conscious" vs. "non-conscious" (or conscious vs. unconscious) is too crude to capture the

intricacies of how consciousness relates to human information processing. One has to

specify the sense in which a process is "conscious." A process might for example be

"conscious"

(a) in the sense that one is conscious ofthe process

(b) in the sense that the operation of the process is accompaniedby consciousness ofits results

(c) in the sense that consciousness enters into or causally influences the process (Ibid, p666).

Under normal circumstances reading is conscious in sense (b) but not in sense (a). That is,

one is conscious of the results of the processing, but not conscious of the processing itself.

Consequently the details of such processing can only be inferred from psychological

research. However, other psychological processes have conscious manifestations which do

provide some information about the processes themselves. For example, the verbal

thoughts which appear in consciousness when one is trying to solve a problem relate notonly to the problem but also reveal something about the processes involved in arriving at a

solution. Problem solving may therefore be said to be conscious in both senses (a) and (b)

(consequently introspection may provide a useful adjunct to inferences from psychological

research).

But note that a process may resultin a conscious experience (which may or may not reveal

something about the antecedent process) without the conscious experience having a causal

influence on that process. That is, a process may be conscious in sense (a) and sense (b)

without being conscious in sense (c). The phonemic imagery resulting from silent reading for

examplefollows sentence analysis and cannot therefore enter into it.

It also has to be borne in mind that processing which results in conscious experience is likely

to be functionally different to processing that operates without any accompanying

consciousness. For example, processing at the focus of attention generally results in

conscious experiences whereas processing outside the focus of attention does not. Of

course, one cannot conclude from this that the functional differences between attentive

and non-attentive processing are due to consciousness. Rather, consciousness appears to be

a late-arising product of focal-attentive processing (as in the case of silent reading discussed

above) (see detailed discussion Velmans, 1991a, p665, Velmans, 1991b, p709).


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These subtleties have been largely ignored in the many commentaries on my target article

and in the cognitive literature at large. Rakover is no exception. But they are central to any

serious discussion of whether or not consciousness enters into human information

processing or merely results from or accompanies it. This, in turn, is central to a resolution

of the "causal paradox."

It might of course be that once consciousness emerges as a late-arising product of focal-

attentive processing that it has some causal role. As Rakover notes, the appearance of given

conscious states is ordered in time and it is reasonable to expect that for any given

conscious state there will generally be prior and subsequent states (both unconscious and

conscious). While given conscious states cannot influence prior states, they might in

principle influence subsequent ones (see also Mandler, 1991). This is the main point of

Rakover's "mental-pool" thought experiment. That is, he agrees with me that the initial

processing of input information is carried out unconsciously, and that some unconscious

states can produce conscious states. But he goes on to suggest that these conscious states,

in turn, can produce unconscious statesin which case there are "effective interactions"amongst these. Consequently he writes, "in contradiction to Velmans, the thought

experiment proposes that consciousness takes place in many chains of mental events and

therefore plays an important role in the explanation of behavior."

As it happens, this is not "in contradiction to Velmans." I agree with Rakover that

consciousness plays an important role in the explanation of behaviour in situations of the

kind described by his "mental-pool" experiment. As he points out, "the mental-pool

experiment is based on ... first-person or phenomenological generalized observations and

their inferred phenomenological conclusions"and, as I have argued, "Viewed from a first-

person perspective, consciousness is centralto the determination of human action"(Velmans 1991a, p667). However, to address the "causal paradox" one has to consider how

such first-person accounts relate to third-person accounts of neural activity or human

information processing.

Rakover goes on to give such an account in his third-person IPA (information processing

approach) or "cognitive-pool" thought experiment. This provides a "parallel conclusion"

about what is going on. Information moves from being unattended (in long-term memory)

to being attended (in short-term memory) and back again, and there are effective

interactions amongst these. Again, I agree with Rakover that an account (along these lines)

can be given of what is going on that is, broadly speaking, "parallel" to the first-personphenomenological account. In the terminology adopted in my own papers, I have suggested

that such first- and third-person accounts are "complementary" (cf. Velmans 1991a, section

9.3, 1991b, section R9, 1993, section R6).

Given these similarities in our positions, what is reallyat stake here? In his summary of my

own papers Rakover states that "Velmans (1991a,b) proposed that consciousness plays a

minor explanatory role in the information processing approach, and that unconscious

mechanisms process stimuli, responses and intervene between them" (his abstract).

However, my actual conclusion was notthat consciousness plays a minorexplanatory role in

the information processing approach. Viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness

plays a central rolebut if one views what is going on in the brain solely in third-person,


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information processing terms, consciousness appears to play no role whatsoever(the causal

paradox)!

Rakover's 'contrasting' position is that "consciousness plays an important role in the

explanation of behavior" (his abstract). In order for this position to differ from my own, this

would have to be an important role in information processing accounts of behaviour. But theonly arguments he gives for this important role derive from his "mental-pool" thought

experiment, which views what is going on from a first-person phenomenological point of

view! While such first-person "mental-pool" accounts may have "parallel", third-person

"cognitive-pool" accounts, it does not follow from this that consciousness has an important

role in human information processing.1

This wouldfinesse (or fudge) the issue.

In this regard, consider Rakover's argument that once consciousness arises it could

influence subsequent events. In silent reading (discussed above), once a sentence appears in

consciousness in a visual or phonemic form, this experience might influence subsequent

states and activities such as the interpretation of subsequent sentences or the performanceof some consequent overt action. Note though, that in Rakover's own account, every time

an experience appears in consciousness, "parallel" information arrives in short-term

memory as a result of attentive processing. This information, presumably encoded in some

neurophysiological form, could be described from a third-person perspective without

reference to its conscious accompanimentsas could the effect of such short-term

encodings on subsequent neural or overt action. That is, if matters are viewed solely from a

third-person perspective, such neural correlates of consciousness would always replace

consciousness itself in functional accounts of the brainreturning us to the "causal

paradox" outlined above.

My own conclusion, given the evidence and the many lacunae surrounding this issue, was

that first-person and third-person accounts remain complementaryand mutually

irreducible (Velmans 1991a, p667). This combined "complementarity" and "irreducibility"

derives from the fact that these are accounts of observations derived from different forms

of access to the events described. For example in the situations described by the mental-

pool and cognitive-pool thought experiments a subject has first-person access to the

sequencing in time of his own conscious and unconscious states. But the subject does not

have access to the detailed operation of his own focal-attentive processing, nor to the

embodiment of that processing in neurophysiological hardware. An external observer, by

contrast has third-person access (in principle) to the subject's brain, and through a study ofinput-output relations, to intervening information processing. But the external observer

does not have access to the succession of conscious and unconscious states in the subject.

1As Leibniz (1686) pointed out, the apparent existence of "parallel" series of mental and physical events could

be simply explained by some pre-established harmony. Rather than there being any causal, mind/body

interaction, these might be like two perfectly alignedclocks, each keeping time exactly with the othergivingthe illusion of causal interaction ("Parallelism"). While a "pre-establishedharmony" (established by God)haslittle current favour, the point that parallel events do not entail causal interaction still holds good (correlation

does not entail causation).


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Once one accepts that there are two fundamental forms of access to mental life (first- and

third-person) the paradoxical nature of consciousness/brain interaction can, to some extent,

be understood (cf. Velmans, 1991b, section R9.2, 1993, section R5). While for any individual

there is just one mental life (ontological monism)2, accounts of what appears in

consciousness, or of information/brain processing, view that mental life from two

fundamentally different perspectives (epistemological dualism). Such accounts can be first-

person, third-person, or both. Accounts which are purely first-person or purely third-person

do not speak of consciousness/brain causal interactions. For example the "mental-pool"

thought experiment describes what is going purely from a first-person perspective in terms

of conscious phenomemology; the cognitive-pool thought experiment attempts to describe

what is going on purely in third-person information processing terms.

Accounts which do speak of consciousness/brain interaction are really mixed-

perspective explanations, which employperspectival switching. In psychophysics, for

example, causal explanations typically start with stimuli (in the world or the brain) observed

from a third-person perspective by the experimenter, and switch to resulting experiences,reported from the first-person perspective of the subject. Accounts of the effects of

conscious experiences on subsequent brain or body states typically start with the first-

person experiences of the subject and then switch to the resulting brain or body changes

(observed by the experimenter) (cf. Sheikh, et al., 1996). Mixed-perspective explanations

can sometimes be unscrambled so that they become pure first- or third-person accounts;

for example, in some future neurophysiology one might be able to replace a report of what

is experienced with an account of the neural correlates of what is experienced in

psychophysics experiments. However, there might be no point to such a third-person

reduction. If the aim of the experiment is to chart the way in which physical changes are

translated into experienced events, the mixed-perspective account remains the relevantone. That is to say, a mixed-perspective causal explanation may be entirely

appropriate depending on the uses to which it is put.

Epistemically, the differences between first- and third-person access are a fundamental

given of the human condition. That is, we only have access to our own conscious

experiences and access to other minds, brains or things only in terms of what can be viewed

or inferred from the outside. In order to develop a more complete picture of how

consciousness as such relates to minds or brains viewed from the outside one needs to

relate first- to third-person descriptions (of experiences and brain/information processing

respectively) without confounding these accounts. That is, it makes sense to speak of brainstates causing conscious experiences or the reverse, only if one acknowledges that one is

2 Elsewhere I have suggested that this one mental life may be thought of as a special kind of information

developing over time. At the interface of consciousness with the brain (at the interface of consciousness with

its neural correlates) this information takes the form of representations (of the external world or of oneself)

which are accessible from first- and third-person perspectives, although the format in which that information

appears depends on the perspective from which it is viewed. That is, accessed from a first-person perspective

this information gives structure to phenomenal experience; accessed from a third-person perspective, the

same information will appear to be encoded (within the neural correlates) in some neurophysiological form

(Velmans, 1991b, section R9.3, 1993, section R3.3, R5, Velmans, 1995b). A similar position has recently been

put by Chalmers (1995).


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switching perspectives. Conversely, it does not make sense to claim that states of

consciousness really are aspects of information processing, nor that states of consciousness

play a (major or minor) role in pure, third-person information processing accounts of the

brain. As I have argued in Velmans (1991a) information processing models that claim to

incorporate consciousness within their workings are ultimately reductionist. They collapse

the subject's first-person perspective into the external observer's third-person perspective,

a collapse which a complementarity principle would not allow (Ibid, p667).

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