The Functional Contributions of Consciousness

Most existing research programs are occupied with the difficult question of what consciousness is, overlooking what the more interesting and fruitful research question: what does consciousness do? My dissertation develops a philosophical method for identifying the functional capacities that conscious experience contributes to information processing systems.

My strategy involves systematically consolidating and interpreting a range of psychological and neuroscientific research in order to compare conscious and unconscious processing in different psychological domains, namely, vision, emotion, and social cognition. I also defend the principle of functional pluralism: given that conscious experiences presumably form a relatively diverse class in the natural world, we should expect them to facilitate a diverse range of functions in different psychological domains. My pluralist account implies that we will be able to amass a collection of functional markers that can guide future ascriptions of experience to all sorts of natural and artificial systems. Understanding consciousness’ functional profile should also ultimately help us answer the general but elusive question of what consciousness is as a feature of psychological systems.

After laying out the general framework and critically evaluating prominent theories of consciousness in the first chapter, I begin the process of identifying FCCs in particular psychological domains. In my second chapter, I identify some candidate functional markers of consciousness in the functionally-complex domain of visual perception, including the processing of semantic information inherent in more informationally-complex visual stimuli, increased spatiotemporal precision, and representational integration over larger spatiotemporal intervals. My third chapter discusses the domain of emotional processing, where I argue that experience facilitates the inhibition of, the conceptualization of, and flexible response to emotionally valenced representational content. In my fourth chapter, I review a range of bias-intervention strategies that explicitly draw on the functional resources of conscious experience. In my final chapter, I draw some conclusions about the nature of consciousness based on my functional analysis. I introduce what I call a Local Workspace Theory, argue that consciousness is at least in part characterized by a high degree of representational complexity afforded by the structural mechanisms that realize it and reflected in the psychological functions that it facilitates.