speaker: Prof. dr. Axel Cleeremans

Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group and the Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences

Université Libre de Bruxelles, BE

abstract

Over the past thirty years or so, cognitive neuroscience has made spectacular progress understanding the biological mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness science, as this field is now sometimes called, was not only inexistent thirty years ago, but its very name seemed like an oxymoron: how can there be a *science* of consciousness? And yet, despite this skepticism, we are now equipped with sophisticated behavioural paradigms, with an array of techniques that make it possible to see the brain in action, and with an ever growing collection of theories and speculations about the putative biological mechanisms through which information processing becomes conscious. This is all good and fine, even promising, but we also seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or at least to have forgotten it in the crib: consciousness is not just mechanisms, it’s what it feels like. In other words, while we know thousands of informative studies about access-consciousness, we have little in the way of phenomenal consciousness. But that — what it feels like — is truly what “consciousness” is about. Understanding why it feels like something to be me and nothing (panpsychists notwithstanding) for a stone to be a stone is what the field has always been after. However, while it is relatively easy to study access-consciousness through the contrastive approach applied to reports, it is much less clear how the study phenomenology, its structure, its function, and its evolution. Here, I ask what difference feeling things make and what function phenomenology might play. I argue that subjective experience has intrinsic value and plays a functional role in everything that we do. I illustrate these ideas with recent empirical evidence suggesting a close link between phenomenal consciousness and affective processing.

Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC)