The Mechanisms Underlying Conscious Awareness

|The unconscious |All the thoughts,ideas, and feelings of which we are not and normally cannot become aware. |

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal

This article was published in 1987, therefore the information Kihlstrom gives us is now either accepted or outdated. Cognitive science was still considered a new field in the 80’s and many of the concepts were largely unexplored. The unconscious mind's existence was still widely debated on during the paper's time period. Since the publication date, much more research has been done on the unconscious and monumental discoveries have been made. More focus has been given to the field of cognitive science and more accreditation to the study of the unconscious. This paper was one of many in the era that attempted to revolutionize the way we thought of, well, thought.

For many years the question of whether or not the unconscious mind really exists, and if it does then what does it consist of has baffled many theorist’s minds and has made many philosophers question themselves. There have been debates on whether the conscious mind is influenced by other parts of the mind. These parts are indented within the unconscious, which has processes such as personal habits, intuition and being oblivious to certain things in life. While we are completely aware of what is happening I the conscious mind, we have absolutely no idea of what information is stored in the unconscious mind. It is believed that the unconscious mind comprises various significant and disturbing material, which is required to be kept out of awareness as they may be too menacing to completely acknowledge and be mindful of. There are been some critics that have completely disbelieved the existence of the unconscious mind. Many psychological scientists today believe that the unconscious mind is the shadow of a “real” conscious mind. However, through extensive research, evidence has been found that the unconscious is not visibly complex, controlling, or action-orientated.

The phenomenon of blindsight has far reaching implications regarding consciousness, awareness and the "I" function. These studies demonstrate that receiving and interpreting visual inputs is independent of our awareness of that input. Does this imply that there is a separate mechanism of "consciousness" which can be disengaged from our senses? Marcel proposes that this loss of visual consciousness results from the

Psychodynamics is an umbrella term, specifically an approach to psychology which highlights personality through unconscious psychological processes. The underlying cause of psychodynamics is to understand why many people act in ways that may not make sense as well as to identify the relationship between unconscious motivation and conscious motivation. The psychodynamic approach is made up of different theories and therapies founded by various psychologists which focus closely on an individual’s unconscious drives, and see how these drives relate to one’s personality. The most prominent psychologists who have contributed to the psychodynamic approach include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, and Karen Horney. Unlike the behavior approach to psychology which leans towards understanding the science behind behavior and how external factors help stimulate these behaviors, psychodynamics attempts to look into one’s mind and observe how they see the world from their unique point of view. The psychodynamic approach is the most influential approach in the field of psychology because it emphasizes how unconscious forces impact an individual’s present behavior, unlike other approaches to psychology which focus on one’s past behaviors influencing their present behavior.

There are many facts that are unknown about the mind. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to understand how it works. We have learned that the mind has a number of different levels of processing. Before Sigmund Freud “nearly all the previous research and theorizing of psychologists had dealt with conscious, such as perception, memory, judgment, and learning“ (Hunt185). Freud brought forth a number of theories that dealt with “the unconscious and its crucial role in human behavior”(Hunt 185). The unconscious is a storage area for information that is not being used. It is also the home of “powerful primitive drives and forbidden wishes that constantly generated pressure on the conscious mind”(Hunt

What is involved in the claim that one directly perceives an object? The notion of direct perception that I propose to

Our perception, or the way we interpret neutral sensory stimuli, can have a drastic effect on how see things. Dunning and Balcetis (2013) give many examples of this, such as a perceiver’s desire predicting what they interpret from an ambiguous stimulus, or participants estimating desirable objects closer than undesirable objects. This idea has important implications for the way we interact with other people. The way these participants arrived at their conclusions is an example of an unconscious process. A conscious process is one that is slow and effortful, but gives us more power to make accurate decisions. An unconscious process

Unlike subjective perception, objective awareness is the ability to experience reality without the intrusion of egocentric needs, expectations, or preconceptions. This perception is one where awareness and reason remain clear and unobstructed, where emotions are experienced then let go, where the interconnectedness of the one with the many and with the environment is obvious.

Friedrich, Henik & Tzelgov, 1991. An amount of findings have provided supporting evidence that the stimuli can be processed outside of conscious awareness (Merikle, Smilek & Eastwood, 2001). Studies by Jalal and Amir (2014) and Henik and Tzelgov (1991) have shown an insight into the automatic processes believed to occur during priming that do not rely upon conscious perception. Merikle et al 2001 suggest that regardless of whether objective or subjective measures of assessing have been used there is evidence perception occurs without conscious awareness.They also argue not only is perception without awareness possible but that qualitative differences in processing and performances is also possible with or without awareness

Have you ever had a vision about an event and it later comes true? Have you ever been able to read another individual’s thoughts? If so, you may possess extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perception is the “ability to obtain information about the world around you without using the normal five senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell” (Extrasensory Perception [APA], n.d.). There are many theories on extrasensory perception, including that “all humans have some degree of extrasensory perception and that we involuntarily experience extrasensory perception on several occasions” (Extrasensory Perception [APA], n.d.). In other words, many individuals believe that all humans have the potential for extrasensory perception, but some

Whether a scientific theory of consciousness could be provided requires the theory to account for properties of sensations. Place thinks some philosophers struggle to accept a scientific theory by falling for the phenomenological fallacy. Some have posited descriptions of experience lye within the mental cinema (pg. 49). Place characterized the fallacy of thinking that when we perceive something green we are perceiving something green in the mind as ‘the phenomenological fallacy’. He writes, if we assume, for example, that when a subject reports a green after-image he is asserting the occurrence inside himself of an object which is literally green, it is clear that we have on our hands an entity for which there is no place in the world of physics. He proposes the descriptions of green after-images are descriptions of a sort of normal response in contexts involving green light.

The scientists did not, however, go over if recognition without awareness is associated with other perceptual patterns. Or if it could be applied to real life. Another critque was that no one mentioned how the divided attention group was distracted from the experiment.