Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: A Meta-Causal Approach

Abstract

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness (PRSC), arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account (MCA) because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation (e.g., A’s-causing-B causes C). The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness.

A Behavioral Approach to Treatment and Assessment of People with Disorders of Consciousness: The Response-contingent Stimulation Strategy

“…If during the C phase, the patient shows a decline in responding as compared to the B phases, one might interpret such decline (i.e., response differentiation) as a sign of discrimination between B and C conditions and presumably a sign of awareness of the instrumental role or absence of role of responding for stimulation access in the two conditions [13,49,52,[66][67][68]84,85,[91][92][93][94]. In psychological terms, such discrimination and awareness could be taken to indicate a learning process and to suggest a patient's nonreflective (pre-reflective) state of basic consciousness or of minimal self-awareness (i.e., awareness of changes occurring in the immediate environment) [66,67,71,[95][96][97]. In essence, patients able to successfully discriminate the C phase from the B phases and differentiate their behavior accordingly could be considered to be in a condition compatible with the minimally conscious state [49,50,91,[98][99][100][101].…”