Consciousness as a graded and an all-or-none phenomenon: A conceptual analysis

Abstract

The issue whether consciousness is a graded or an all-or-none phenomenon has been and continues to be a debate. Both contradictory accounts are supported by solid evidence. Starting from a level of processing framework allowing for states of partial awareness, here we further elaborate our view that visual experience, as it is most often investigated in the literature, is both graded and all-or-none. Low-level visual experience is graded, whereas high-level visual experience is all-or-none. We then present a conceptual analysis starting from the notion that consciousness is a general concept. We specify a number of different subconcepts present in the literature on consciousness, and outline how each of them may be seen as either graded, all-or-none, or both. We argue that such specifications are necessary to lead to a detailed and integrated understanding of how consciousness should be conceived of as graded and all-or-none.

A Multi‐Factor Account of Degrees of Awareness

“…On the one hand, the so‐called partial awareness hypothesis (PAH; see Kouider et al., ; and section for a detailed discussion) is particularly apt for accounting for certain kinds of degraded conscious experiences of stimuli that are typically processed at higher levels of the perceptual hierarchy. On the other hand, another recent attempt that we shall call the levels of processing view (LPV; see Windey, Gevers, & Cleeremans, ; Windey, Vermeiren, Atas, & Cleeremans, ; Windey & Cleeremans, ; and section for a detailed discussion), claims that graded conscious experiences are characteristic of stimuli processed at lower levels, while dichotomous experiences are characteristic of stimuli processed at higher levels.…”

“…Finally, let us return to the Levels of Processing View (LPV) proposed by Windey and colleagues to reconcile contradictory experimental findings that under certain conditions report dichotomous, whereas under other conditions report graded consciousness (Windey et al., , ; Windey & Cleeremans, ; see section ). The key observation behind this reconciliation is that although experiments demonstrating graded consciousness use stimuli that are typically processed at lower levels of the perceptual hierarchy (like, e.g., oriented edges, see Overgaard et al., ), the experiments that find evidence for the dichotomous nature of consciousness use stimuli that are typically processed at a higher level (like e.g., number words, see Sergent & Dehaene, ).…”

“…Given these observations, the proposal, then, is that conscious percepts, instead of being either graded or dichotomous, are sometimes graded and sometimes dichotomous, depending on the level of processing characteristic of the actual stimulus. That is, stimuli processed at low levels always give rise to graded experiences, whereas stimuli processed at high levels always give rise to dichotomous experiences (Windey et al., , ; Windey & Cleeremans, ).…”

Exploring the visual (un)conscious

“…Here two opposing theoretical camps have proposed that attaining visual consciousness depends on the one hand on fairly rapid yet graded, incremental accretions of cognitive contents (Bachmann, 2000(Bachmann, , 2013Mangan, 2001;Nieuwenhuis & de Kleijn, 2011;Overgaard, Rote, Mouridsen, & Ramsøy, 2006), or on the other hand on their punctuated, bifurcating transition from preconscious to conscious states of processing (Fisch et al, 2009;Sekar, Findley, Poeppel, & Llinás, 2013;Sergent & Dehaene, 2004). The contribution of Windey and Cleeremans (2015) addresses this issue head on, and arrives at the reasonable conclusion, as in many similar cases of either/or theoretical propositions, that visual experience can be characterized as gradual at early or low, sensory levels of conscious processing and as increasingly dichotomous as one proceeds to higher cognitive levels. Moreover, their contention is that such a hybrid approach can resolve some of the interesting and controversial issues (e.g.…”

Naïve realism about unconscious perception

“…First, there are good reasons to think that consciousness of low-level features is graded (see Windey and Cleeremans 2015). If this is correct, the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is so blurry that it becomes unfeasible to sort out the exact threshold of consciousness.…”