Definici�n: Atributo general de la conciencia, relacionado con la atenci�n, por el cual ella act�a como un instrumento de control de todos los circuitos cerebrales relacionados con el entorno y del propio interior �ntimo.
In recent years, the idea of the self as a federation of somewhat autonomous agencies has become popular, and for good reason. Nagel (1971) made a good case on the basis of split-brain data, and Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) and Gazzaniga (1985) have added additional considerations that have some plausibilty. And Dennett has a chapter about the self at the end of the book that gives similar arguments.
What about monitoring consciousness? No doubt there was a time when people were less introspective than some of us are now. But is there any evidence that there was a time when people genetically like us had no capacity to think or express the thought that one's leg hurts. To be able to think this thought involves being able to think that one's leg hurts, and that is a higher order thought of the sort that is a plausible candidate for monitoring consciousness (Rosenthal, 1986). Here for the first time we do enter the realm of actual empirical questions, but without some very powerful evidence for such a view, there is no reason to give it any credence. Dennett gives us not the slightest hint of the kind of weird evidence that we would need to begin to take this claim seriously, and so it would be a disservice to so interpret him.
So far, on all the consciousness I have mentioned, Dennett's thesis turns out to be false. But there is a trend: Of the concepts I considered, the first two made the thesis silly, even of animals. In the case of monitoring consciousness, there is a real empirical issue in the case of many types of mammals, and so it isn't completely silly to wonder about whether people have it.
Perhaps you are wondering why I am being so terminologically liberal, counting P-consciousness, A-consciousness, monitoring consciousness and self-consciousness all as types of consciousness. Oddly, I find that many critics wonder why I would count [phenomenal] consciousness as consciousness, whereas many others wonder why I would count [access] or [monitoring] or [self] consciousness as consciousness. In fact two reviewers of this paper complained about my terminological liberalism, but for incompatible reasons. One reviewer said: "While what he uses ["P-consciousness"] to refer to--the "what it is like" aspect of mentality--seems to me interesting and important, I suspect that the discussion of it under the heading "consciousness" is a source of confusion...he is right to distinguish access-consciousness (which is what I think deserves the name "consciousness") from this." Another reviewer said: "I really still can't see why access is called...access-consciousness? Why isn't access just...a purely information processing (functionalist) analysis?" This is not a merely verbal disagreement. In my view, all of us, despite our explicit verbal preferences, have some tendency to use `conscious' and related words in both ways, and our failure to see this causes a good deal of difficulty in thinking about "consciousness".
14.ene.1999
Pulsar tecla de vuelta
Glosario de Carlos von der Becke.