Special Issue: "Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness"

Contents

Target Paper

Alva Noë & Evan Thompson
Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?  abstract

Commentaries

Bernard J. Baars
A Stew of Confusion
Tim Bayne
Phenomenal Holism, Internalism, and the NCC
Walter J. Freeman
Commentary on Essay by Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Situated Reductionism, or How To Be an Internalist and an Externalist at the Same Time
John Haynes & Geraint Rees
Causal Or Representational Holism?
Jakob Hohwy & Chris Frith
NCCs: Room for Improvement but on the Right Track
Anthony I. Jack & Jesse J. Prinz
Searching for a Scientific Experience
Brian McLaughlin & Gary Bartlett
Have Noë and  Thompson Cast Doubt On the NCC Programme?
Thomas Metzinger
Appearance Is Not Knowledge: The Incoherent Straw Man, Content–Content Confusions and Mindless Conscious Subjects
Erik Myin
Quining Kinds of Content: The Primacy of Experience
Jean-Michel Roy
Is There a Content Matching Doctrine?
John R. Searle
Comments on Noë & Thompson, ‘Are There NCCs?’
Robert Van Gulick
Neural Correlates and the Diversity of Content

Response

Alva Noë & Evan Thompson
Sorting Out The Neural Basis of Consciousness: Authors’ Reply to Commentators

TEN YEAR CUMULATIVE INDEX

Ten Year Index of Authors
Ten Year Index of Titles

ABSTRACTS

Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?

In the past decade, the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness (or NCC) has become a focal point for scientific research on consciousness (Metzinger, 2000a). A growing number of investigators believe that the first step toward a science of consciousness is to discover the neural correlates of consciousness. Indeed, Francis Crick has gone so far as to proclaim that ‘we … need to discover the neural correlates of consciousness.… For this task the primate visual system seems especially attractive.… No longer need one spend time attempting … to endure the tedium of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. Consciousness is now largely a scientific problem’ (Crick, 1996, p. 486). Yet the question of what it means to be a neural correlate of consciousness is actually far from straightforward, for it involves fundamental empirical, methodological, and philosophical issues about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain. Even if one assumes, as we do, that states of consciousness causally depend on states of the brain, one can nevertheless wonder in what sense there is, or could be, such a thing as a neural correlate of consciousness.

Our focus in this paper is one particular way of thinking about the neural correlates of visual consciousness that has become widespread among philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists alike. According to this way of thinking, which we call the matching-content doctrine, the first task of the neuroscience of consciousness is to uncover the neural representational systems whose contents systematically match the contents of consciousness. We believe there are good empirical and philosophical reasons for being suspicious of this matching- content notion of neural correlates of consciousness. There is no reason to think that the neural states that have been shown experimentally to be correlated with conscious visual experiences match those experiences in content; therefore, the experiments to date do not support the matching-content doctrine. In addition, we argue below that there is reason to doubt that neural representational systems, at least as standardly conceived in much of the NCC literature, could match visual experiences in content, and therefore that the matching-content doctrine ought to be rejected. If we are right, then neuroscientists and philosophers ought to pursue a different approach to understanding the brain basis of consciousness from that of the matching-content doctrine.

Alva Noë, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-2390, USA. Email: noe@socrates.berkeley.edu

Evan Thompson, Philosophy Department, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: evant@yorku.ca

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