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Consciousness, Disorders of Edelman GM (1987) Neural Darwinism, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York, NY: Basic Books. Edelman GM (1989) The Remembered Present A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York, NY: Basic Books. Edelman GM and Tononi G (2000) A Universe of Consciousness. How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York, NY: Basic Books. Plum F (1991) Coma and related global disturbances of the human conscious state. Cerebral Cortex 9: 359425. New York, NY: Plenum Press. Plum F and Posner JB (1982) Stupor and Coma, 3rd edn. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wilkinson IMS (1999) Essential Neurology, Chap. 11 Unconsciousness, pp. 171186. London, UK: Blackwell Science.

that may produce transient coma, vegetative state, akinetic mutism, or conditions resembling hyperkinetic mutism also implicate brainstem and thalamic structures. These include the brainstem arousal systems important for sleep and wake cycling and related brainstem and thalamic substructures that play a part in the complex, largescale integration of many cerebral networks. The contribution of these deep brain structures may lie in the selective facilitation of activity patterns that allow widely separated brain regions to briefly communicate Further Reading
Crick F (1964) The Astonishing Hyphothesis. The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Consciousness, Function of
Thomas W Polger, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
CONTENTS
Introduction Questions about the function of consciousness

Intermediate article

Consciousness and functional kinds

To inquire about the function of consciousness is to ask what consciousness does, what it enables us to do that we might not be capable of otherwise, or why some creatures came to be conscious.

INTRODUCTION
Consciousness is perhaps the most salient feature of human mental life. The experience of tasting a red wine differs from the experience of tasting coffee, and from that of reading the label on a wine bottle. Whatever else can be said about these differences, they are manifested in us by different conscious experiences. And this seems to be good for us: different experiences are evidently important in our abilities to discriminate among foods, to avoid injury, to identify potential mates, and so on. But upon reflection it is less obvious what, if anything, consciousness does, what it allows us to do that we might not be capable of otherwise, or why some creatures like human beings have come to be conscious. For it seems that conscious

experience is not necessary for the ability to distinguish objects in the world, or avoid injury, or seek a mate. Even if the experience of pain, for example, is important to the way that humans detect and avoid noxious elements in the external environment, it seems that we or other creatures could avoid hazards without the experience of pain, or any conscious experience at all. There is little doubt that mindless mechanical devices can be constructed to detect heat, classify wavelengths of reflected light, or distinguish chemical substances. We do not feel compelled to say that such devices feel pain, see colors, or taste wines. And we need not think only of mechanical devices and the automata of science fiction, for there is ample evidence that biological creatures can evolve fairly sophisticated sensory and motor capacities without having conscious experiences. The natural world is rife with creatures (microorganisms, molluscs, insects, and so on) that interact with their environments effectively, at least some of which may lack conscious experiences altogether.

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QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The question of the function of consciousness does not have an obvious answer. We are faced not with a single question but with a handful of more or less related inquiries about what consciousness (as a matter of fact) does for human beings, about what if anything consciousness enables us to do that we could not (possibly) do otherwise, and about what capacities consciousness allows that would explain why it should be favored by natural selection: why it would evolve. The question of the function of consciousness is ambiguous, and the ambiguity owes as much to the idea of function as it does to any special considerations having to do with consciousness. Questions about the functions of mechanical artifacts and biological organs meet many of the same problems. (See Consciousness, Philosophical Issues about)

What Does Conscious Experience Do?

We might ask what abilities consciousness in fact mediates in human beings. In this case we are treating consciousness as a mechanism with certain effects, and we are inquiring about those effects in the same way that we might ask about the function of a carburetor or a heart. Carburetors regulate and mix air and fuel in some combustion engines. Hearts pump blood. Conscious experience allows us to discriminate and identify objects in the environment, to avoid hazards, and so forth. This was the answer that made it at first seem obvious what the function of consciousness is. Such explanations tell us what the `causal role functions' of carburetors, hearts, and sensations are. A causal role function of a trait or mechanism is an effect of that trait or mechanism that figures in an explanation of the overall capacities of the system of which it is a part. To explain the capacities of a system in terms of the causal role functions of its parts is to provide a `functional analysis' of the system (Cummins, 1975). A special subset of causal role functions are those that can be characterized in terms of a computational device, such as a Turing machine.

Is Conscious Experience Necessary?

Even if we have a good explanation for what consciousness happens to do for us, we may still ask what it is that conscious experiences (likewise, carburetors or hearts) allow that could not be accomplished without them. This is not a question only about how human beings and cars are put together

and what they are now capable of. It is also a question about how they might have been put together differently and what capacities they would have had under those circumstances. Could there be a car that does not have a carburetor? Certainly. Most automobiles these days use fuel injectors to mix air and fuel, rather than carburetors. Could there be a creature that does not have a heart? Mechanical devices are regularly used to circulate the blood of patients in the operating room. There is no reason to deny that some creature, however unlikely, could circulate its own blood without engaging a heart. So it may be with consciousness. The thesis that consciousness, though it may be crucial to our distinctively human way of interacting with the world, is not necessary for any of our capacities is called `conscious inessentialism' (Flanagan, 1992). There are interesting empirical phenomena that have seemed, at least to some, to support conscious inessentialism. Consider, for example, Bejamin Libet's (1985) experiments on the timing of conscious intentions to produce behavior. Libet's results purport to show that the muscular action potential that initiates movement occurs temporally prior to conscious awareness of an intention to move. These results have been interpreted as showing that consciousness does not play a role or at least not the role traditionally envisioned in the initiation of behavior. Daniel Dennett (e.g. 1991) has made much of the Libet experiments. Blindsight is another phenomenon that has seemed, to some, to support some version of conscious inessentialism (e.g. Block, 1995). Lawrence Weiskrantz (1986) aroused the interest of many philosophers with his studies of patients with neural injuries who report no conscious visual experience in parts of their visual fields. Nevertheless, some of these patients perform much better than chance when they are forced to `guess' about stimuli presented to the blind field. It seems that blindsight patients have residual information processing capacities despite lacking visual consciousness in the area of the scotoma, apparently supporting conscious inessentialism. This sort of phenomenon has led theorists to emphasize the importance of nonconscious visual processing (e.g. Milner and Goodale, 1995). But Weiskranz's results can also weigh against conscious inessentialism. After all, the tasks that blindsight patients perform better than chance however remarkable that may be are performed unerringly by normal subjects; and blindsight patients never initiate action based on the stimuli presented to the blind field (Van Gulick, 1985). These considerations

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suggest that consciousness does play an important role. (See Blindsight) If conscious inessentialism is true, then there could be creatures that negotiate the world just as human beings do, but that nevertheless lack consciousness. Despite lacking conscious experience, such creatures (called `zombies') make the same bodily movements as we do: they avoid fire, behave discriminately towards various wavelengths of light and chemical substances, etc. Sometimes it is claimed that conscious inessentialism entails that consciousness is epiphenomenal that consciousness does not have any causal powers at all. (See Zombies; Epiphenomenalism) But this is a mistake: from the fact that a carburetor is inessential to the operation of a car (because it could be replaced by a fuel injector) it does not follow that carburetors have no effects in those cars where they are found. Carburetors mix air and fuel in some cars; fuel injectors mix air and fuel in other cars. Neither a carburetor nor a fuel injector is necessary to the operation of automobiles in general; but carburetors and fuel injectors are not thereby epiphenomenal. (And just as there are reasons for generally preferring fuel injectors over carburetors, visual or painful experience may be better or worse ways of engaging with the world.)

Why Did Conscious Experience Arise?

In asking about the function of consciousness we might want to know not what conscious experiences enable us to do currently, but rather why we have come to be conscious at all. That is, we might be asking about the teleology of consciousness, about the purpose that it serves. If we understand teleology in terms of evolutionary history, then we are asking what the etiological function of consciousness is. The etiological function of a trait is the effect that the trait had in the ancestors of a creature that provided an adaptive advantage to creatures of that kind, so that evolutionary pressures favored creatures with the trait. The etiological or `selected effect' function of a trait explains why the trait came to be present or maintained in creatures of a kind, why it was naturally selected (Millikan, 1989; Neander, 1991). (See Evolutionary Psychology: Theoretical Foundations) Consider again the possibility of conscious inessentialism. If conscious inessentialism is false if consciousness is necessary for some human capacities (e.g. detecting wavelengths, avoiding injury) then it is easy to answer the question of why we are conscious: we are conscious because it is adaptively advantageous (e.g. to detect wavelengths or avoid

injury). That is to say, consciousness evolved; the evolutionary history of conscious experience is just the same as that of the capacities that conscious experiences mediate. That history need not be obvious or simple; it may not even be knowable by us: we do not assume that we will know the evolutionary history of every (or perhaps any) biological trait. Further, we should not assume that every trait has adaptive value. Some traits are the result of chance alone though assuming that particularly complex traits are products of evolution by natural selection may be a reasonable methodological stance (Brandon, 1990; Grantham and Nichols, 1999). Of course the contingencies of organism and environment are such that discrimination of wavelengths and chemicals, avoidance of flames, and so on are not themselves compulsory. But insofar as we could explain why a creature should avoid injury, we would be able to explain why it experiences pain. The research program known as evolutionary psychology proceeds on the assumption that most or all psychological traits are adaptations by natural selection that are required for capacities that would have conferred an advantage on hominids living in the late Pleistocene era (Barkow et al., 1992). On the other hand, if conscious inessentialism is true then the question of why consciousness has come to be is somewhat different. In that case we would need to explain not only why the capacity to avoid injury came to be enabled but also why, in some creatures, conscious experience mediates avoidance of injury. The answer might be that the presence of consciousness is a result of mere chance. That would perhaps be disappointing, but it would not undermine our belief that consciousness in fact has important effects in our lives. In particular, it would not force us to adopt epiphenomenalism. Just as an automobile might be built with a carburetor or a fuel injector, so creatures might evolve conscious experiences or some other mechanisms. Perhaps some forms of conscious experience have interesting evolutionary histories while others arose only by chance. We need not take consciousness to be a single phenomenon in order to meaningfully ask about its function.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND FUNCTIONAL KINDS

One might believe that whatever mixes air and fuel is a carburetor. That is to say, one might adopt a sort of metaphysical functionalism regarding carburetors. On this view, carburetors are functional kinds that are constituted by their capacity to mix

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air and fuel; thus fuel injectors are carburetors. Likewise one could think of hearts as blood pumps, and one could think of whatever mediates injury avoidance as pain experience. One must then regard the thesis of conscious inessentialism (likewise, carburetor inessentialism) as incoherent. According to a functionalist it would not even make sense to talk about something that did all the things (causal role functions) that pain does in human beings but that does not ipso facto have pain experiences. Two popular variations of functionalism about consciousness take conscious mental states to be a subset of representational states (e.g. Dretske, 1995) or to be meta-representations of first-order mental states the higher-order thought theory championed by David Rosenthal (e.g. 1986). (See Functionalism) The theory that consciousness is a functional kind is closely aligned with the view that all the facts about consciousness can be explained by reference to its functional role or roles (e.g. its causal role functions). One reason for holding such a view is general commitment to functionalist explanations, at least with respect to psychology; a widely-held theory is that all properties are causal role functional properties, and thus all explanations are functional explanations (Shoemaker, 1984). But in that case, if we cannot secure functional explanation of consciousness then we will be obliged to abandon the belief that consciousness is a physical phenomenon at all (Chalmers, 1996). References
Barkow J, Cosmides L and Tooby J (eds) (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Block N (1995) On a confusion about the function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18: 227247. Brandon R (1990) Adaptation and Environment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chalmers D (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Cummins R (1975) Functional analysis. The Journal of Philosophy 72: 741765. Dennett D (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Dretske F (1995) Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flanagan O (1992) Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grantham T and Nichols S (1999) Evolutionary psychology: Ultimate explanations and Panglossian predictions. In: Hardcastle V (ed.) (1999) Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays, pp. 4766. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Libet B (1985) Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 529566. Millikan R (1989) In defense of proper functions. Philosophy of Science 56: 288302. [Reprinted in: Allen C, Bekoff M and Lauder G (eds) (1998) Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] Milner B and Goodale MA (1995) The Visual Brain in Action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Neander K (1991) Functions as selected effects: the Conceptual analyst's defense. Philosophy of Science 58: 168184. [Reprinted in: Allen C, Bekoff M, and Lauder G (eds) (1998) Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] Rosenthal D (1986) Two concepts of consciousness. Philosophical Studies 49: 329359. Shoemaker S (1984) Identity, Cause, and Mind. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Van Gulick R (1985) What difference does consciousness make? Philosophical Topics 17: 211230. Weiskrantz L (1986) Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading
Allen C, Bekoff M and Lauder G (eds) (1998) Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Amundson R and Lauder G (1994) Function without purpose: the uses of causal role function in evolutionary biology. Biology and Philosophy 9: 443469. [Reprinted in Allen et al. (1998).] Cowey A and Stoerig P (1991) The neurobiology of blindsight. Trends in Neuroscience 29: 6580. Cummins R (1983) The Nature of Psychological Explanation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Reprinted in Allen et al. (1998).] Davies M and Humphreys GW (1993) Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Fetzer J (ed.) (2002) Evolving Consciousness. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Flanagan O (2000) Dreaming Souls. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Flanagan O and Polger T (1995) Zombies and the function of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(4): 313321. Guzeldere G, Flanagan O and Hardcastle V (1999) The nature and function of consciousness: Lessons from blindsight. In: Gazzaniga M (ed.) The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd edn, pp. 12771284. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hardcastle V (ed.) (1999) Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ito M, Miyashita Y and Rolls ET (eds) (1997) Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lycan W (1987) Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Consciousness, Function of Polger T and Flanagan O (1999) Natural answers to natural questions. In: Hardcastle (1999, pp. 221247). Polger T and Flanagan O (2002) Consciousness, adaptation, and epiphenomenalism. In: Fetzer (2002). Sober E (1985) Panglossian functionalism and the philosophy of mind. Synthese 64: 165193. Tye M (1996) The function of consciousness. Nous 30(3): 287305. Weiskrantz L (1997) Consciousness Lost and Found: A Neuropsychological Exploration. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Lycan W (1996) Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mack A and Rock I (1998) Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcel A and Bisiach E (eds) (1988) Consciousness in Contemporary Science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Polger T (2000) Zombies explained. In: Ross D, Brook A and Thompson D (eds) Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Consciousness, Machine
CONTENTS
Introduction History Philosophical issues about machine consciousness

Introductory article

Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Influence of cognitive science on issues about machine consciousness

The widespread use of computers and robots within research programs in cognitive psychology has stimulated interest in the possibility of machine consciousness. As a result, many unsettled issues in the philosophy of mind and theory of knowledge have been reformulated in terms of, and in turn raised questions about, machine-oriented modeling.

INTRODUCTION
Consciousness is one of the most perplexing topics in the study of mind. There are many controversies surrounding its exact nature and relationship with the physical. For centuries, philosophers and others have argued about whether a machine could be conscious, partly so as to reach a better understanding of human and animal minds. During the second half of the twentieth century, with the development of the digital computer, the topic of machine consciousness became intertwined with questions about artificial intelligence (AI). Many tasks that once seemed to require human conscious intelligence are now performed by computers. Machines with various kinds of programs and related robotic capabilities have been used to help explain some of the more baffling

aspects of human mentality. (See Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of) Such approaches face a variety of problems. What counts as an example of consciousness? Some argue that consciousness is primarily a private (subjective) phenomenon. Nevertheless, attempts to construct machine models that would objectify it continue. Even when such models seem flawed or limited, an understanding of their shortcomings can provide fresh perspectives and stimulate lively debate on thinking, perception, awareness, purposive behavior, and the relationship between the mind and the body. (See Mind Body Problem)

HISTORY
Could a machine be conscious? This question was being asked at least as long ago as the seventeenth century. Machines then (as now) were generally assumed to consist wholly of matter. To ask whether we might someday be able to build a conscious machine was one way of asking whether consciousness (animal or human) was made out of matter. The view that it was was called materialism.