The Cartesian Theater

Psy391D - Class 6

(This page last updated 4 October, 2004.)

Fundamental distinction involving awareness
- Unconscious mechanisms analyze perceptual input and prepare experience.
- Prepared experience presented to conscious mechanisms.
Example: Baars' Global Workspace Theory
- Consciousness illuminates representations in working memory.
- Makes them available to many other subsystems.
- As other subsystems produce outputs, they can be put into awareness.
- Consciousness as general communication medium for many mental processes.

Who is in the audience?
Why should one part of the mind go to so much effort to produce a show in the theater?
Once the show is finished, another part of the mind has to re-interpret it.
When is the theater just a place for a homunculus?
- Simply puts off difficult explanations to another level.
How can experiences be revised?
- Revision necessary to explain some experimental results.
  - Libet's brain stimulation experiment
  - Metacontrast masking
- Dennett offers two alternatives
  - Orwellian
  - Stalinesque
  - Both are difficult to accept.
"Cartesian Theater"
- Dennett's way of pointing out that theater models try to maintain one aspect of dualism.
- Even though they are materialist theories, they still have a sharp border between what is in awareness and what is not.

No theater of experience.
Sensory events are not re-enacted to be experienced.
Multiple systems working independently.
Cannot assign specific time to an experience, because different parts of it will occur at different times in different brain regions.

Theater Theories and the Multiple Drafts Theory provide very different explanations for perceptual filling in.

Next class: Perceptual Experience