The author argues for a middle ground between theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches after criticizing each. The theory-light approach’s only theoretical commitment is the facilitation hypothesis:
Phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus.
The author goes on:
We already have some good, scientifically plausible candidates for abilities other than verbal report that are facilitated by consciousness. Here I will briefly review three such candidates.
The candidates given are trace conditioning, rapid reversal learning, and cross-modal learning, described further in the article, and in the last section of the paper, the author looks at studies on these abilities in bees.
These three examples are enough to illustrate the “theory‐light” strategy. Without committing to any particular theory of consciousness, we can investigate, in humans, the question of which cognitive abilities are facilitated by conscious perception. If we have only one such ability, and find that one ability in the target non‐human species, a critic will say: that could be done without consciousness, even if it happens to involve consciousness in humans. So we need a cluster of correlated abilities, not just one, in order to build up a case that is harder for the critic to resist. The larger and more diverse the cluster, the stronger the case will be.
Once we have constructed, on the basis of evidence from humans, a tentative, defeasible hypothesis about the cluster of consciousness‐linked abilities, the next step in the theory‐light approach is to look for the cluster in the target species of nonhuman animal. Some elements of the cluster will, inevitably, be absent. We will not find verbal report. What we might find is a substantial fraction of the cluster. For example, we might find that bees can do trace conditioning of the right kind, reversal learning of the right kind, and cross‐modal learning of the right kind. I say “of the right kind” in each case as an acknowledgement that more work is still needed here to pin down the precise type of each ability that is linked to consciousness in humans.
This will still not be enough to convince a reasonable critic, who will say: I’m afraid I can seriously envisage all of those abilities occurring without conscious experience, even though they are all facilitated by conscious experience in humans. You’ve shown the abilities are present, but you haven’t shown their facilitation by consciousness. This is a fair criticism, but we can overcome it. The next step in the theory‐light approach should be to investigate protocols with the potential to cause unconscious perception in the animal: backward masking, the attentional blink, flash‐suppression, distracting tasks, and so on. For brevity, I will refer to this whole family of procedures as “masking”. We need to find out whether the identified cluster of putatively consciousness‐linked abilities is selectively switched on and off under masking in the same way it is in humans.
For example, in humans, presenting a tone subliminally appears to switch off trace conditioning while leaving delay conditioning in place. We can ask: is the same true of our target species of animal? Do we see a similar pattern of sensitivity to masking? When the stimulus is masked, does this selectively switch on and off the entire cluster of consciousness‐linked abilities?
This seems similar to no-report paradigms. The indicator of consciousness seems to be improved performance on a task under conditions which would involve conscious processing in humans over conditions which would involve only unconscious processing in humans. I think no-report paradigms instead use reflexive behaviours correlated with conscious perception, but this correlation could just be due to cause common to both the reflex and conscious perception, not because one causes the other. On the other hand, if conscious perception facilitates some ability, it causes the expression of that ability.
New paper from the Foundations of Animal Sentience project just published that seems relevant:
The search for invertebrate consciousness by Jonathan Birch.
The author argues for a middle ground between theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches after criticizing each. The theory-light approach’s only theoretical commitment is the facilitation hypothesis:
The author goes on:
The candidates given are trace conditioning, rapid reversal learning, and cross-modal learning, described further in the article, and in the last section of the paper, the author looks at studies on these abilities in bees.
This seems similar to no-report paradigms. The indicator of consciousness seems to be improved performance on a task under conditions which would involve conscious processing in humans over conditions which would involve only unconscious processing in humans. I think no-report paradigms instead use reflexive behaviours correlated with conscious perception, but this correlation could just be due to cause common to both the reflex and conscious perception, not because one causes the other. On the other hand, if conscious perception facilitates some ability, it causes the expression of that ability.