Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies

Abstract

When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can think of it either from a functional standpoint or from a physical standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people's mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking difference between two kinds of states-those that involve phenomenal consciousness and those that do not. Specifically, it appears that ascriptions of states that involve phenomenal consciousness show a special sort of sensitivity to purely physical factors.

“The Group Knobe Effect”: evidence that people intuitively attribute agency and responsibility to groups

“…Functionalism is preferred by most collectivists today since it enables one to argue for collectivism without having to make unpalatable dualistic or emergentist ontological commitments. But it is debatable whether folk metaphysics of agency and of the mind is really functionalist (see Knobe and Prinz 2008).…”

Attributions of Consciousness

“…As shown in Figure 2, Huebner found that while participants tended to treat the human and the robot similarly with regard to the nonphenomenal states (they were generally willing to attribute belief to both the human and the robot), they tended to treat the human and the robot dissimilarly with regard to the phenomenal states (they were generally willing to attribute both pain and happiness to the human, but not the robot). Huebner notes that at first glance, his results might appear to support the view advanced by Knobe and Prinz (2008), in that they "seem to confirm that commonsense psychology does draw a distinction between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states-and this distinction seems to be dependent on the structural properties of an entity in a way that ascriptions of non-phenomenal states are not" (138-139). He goes on to argue that to move from his results to such a conclusion is to move far too quickly, however.…”

“…Results of Study 2 in Knobe and Prinz (2008), showing the mean response for each sentence in descending order (1= "sounds weird" and 7="sounds natural").…”

“…At present, the strongest case for the claim that lay people tend to employ the concept of phenomenal consciousness comes from the work of Knobe and Prinz (2008) Going the other direction, it is worth noting that Huebner found that participants' judgments about pain and happiness for the cyborg cases were less clear, with judgments about pain for these cases being essentially at chance. He argues that these results "sit far less comfortably with the claim that the commonsense understanding of the mind includes a concept of phenomenal consciousness" (Huebner, 2010, 139 It is unclear what positive conclusion should be drawn from Arico's results, however.…”

“…As with the case made by Knobe and Prinz (2008) for an affirmative answer to the question of whether lay people tend to have the concept of phenomenal consciousness, the case for a negative answer presented by Sytsma and Machery (2010) has met with resistance. The most common response has been to argue that the phrase "seeing red" is polysemous, and that in Sytsma and Machery's study lay people tended to understand it in an informational sense (the entity is responsive to the distinction between red things and non-red things) while philosophers tended to understand it in a phenomenal sense (the entity has the appropriate phenomenally conscious mental state).…”