<ul><li>We assume that consciousness is limited to re-represented mental contents under the focus of attention.</li><li>This confuses meta-consciousness with consciousness.</li><li>Conscious processes that lack re-representation and truly unconscious processes are different. However, both are equally unreportable to self and others.</li><li>A mental process is not unconscious just because we’re unable to report it.</li></ul>

Confusion in Consciousness 

Consider your breathing right now- the air flow and the movement of your breathing organs.<ul><li>Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them?</li><li>Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along?</li></ul>By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?

An Example of consciousness 

<ul><li>“Consciousness” is often used in the literature as if it implied more than just the qualities of experience.</li><li>The key distinction between conscious and unconscious thought is that “Conscious thought is thought with attention.”</li><li>If a thought escapes attention, then it is unconscious.</li></ul>However,<ul><li>Is the mere lack of attention enough to assert that a mental process lacks the qualities of experience?</li><li>Couldn’t a process that escapes the focus of attention still feel like something?</li></ul>

Conscious and Unconscious thoughts

<ul><li>It’s debated in neuroscience whether babies are born conscious or whether they develop consciousness at some point (generally said to be five months of age)</li><li>It is hard to think that a newborn feels nothing. Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, their environment, presence of their parents etc.</li><li>This means they are conscious since birth, but are unable to report it due to lack of a meta-cognition process. </li><li>What we see as rise of consciousness may merely be the rise of metacognition.</li></ul>

Consciousness in babies

<ul><li>Both conscious and meta-conscious entail the qualities of experience, however, meta-conscious processes also entail what is called re-representation.</li><li>Re-representation of consciousness is in which one interprets, describes or otherwise characterizes the state of one’s mind.</li><li>Attention plays an important role is in re-representation; that is, the conscious knowledge of an experience which helps in introspection.</li></ul>

Conscious and Meta-conscious

<ul><li>Consciousness may never arise because it may always be there to begin with. For all we know, what arises is merely a metacognitive configuration of preexisting consciousness.</li><li>Consciousness may be fundamental in nature—an inherent aspect of every mental process, not a property generated by arrangement of structures in the brain (brain physiology).</li><li>Reducing consciousness to brain physiology may have little to do with consciousness proper, but with mechanisms of metacognition instead.</li></ul>

Summary of consciousness

<ul><li>Attention plays an important role in re-representation; that is, the conscious knowledge of an experience and introspection.</li><li>Subjects cannot report—not even to themselves—experiences that aren’t re-represented.</li><li>However, conscious experience does occur even without re-representation: For example, Dreams lack re-representation, even if they are experienced in consciousness.</li><li>This gap between reportability and consciousness has led to “no-report paradigms” in neuroscience.</li></ul>

Conscious and Unconscious thoughts

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Essay V