Online research in philosophy

Rosenthal makes assertions about what can and cannot happen without being conscious. Although his distinctions are informative, they do not substitute for data. We have little precise information that differentiates the immediate feeling of awareness, such as that possible for Korsakoff patients, from the later episodic memory of conscious experience. Appeals to introspection are useful starting points, but they are clearly are not to be trusted in this context. Rosenthal also asks why conscious thinking would be more efficacious than thinking that is not conscious. The answer is that the whole armamentarium of planning becomes available to conscious thought, together with episodic memory and the linguistic mediation that goes along with it.

Argues for a category of “cognitive feelings”, which are representationally significant, but are not part of the content of the states they accompany. The feeling of pastness in episodic memory, of familiarity (missing in Capgras syndrome), and of motivation (that accompanies desire) are examples. The feeling of presence that accompanies normal visual states is due to such a cognitive feeling; the “two visual systems” are partially responsible for this feeling.

One diagnosis of what is wrong with the Knowledge Argument rests on the Ability Hypothesis. This couples an ability analysis of knowing what an experience is like together with a denial that phenomenal propositions exist. I argue against both components. I consider three arguments against the existence of phenomenal propositions and find them wanting. Nevertheless I deny that knowing phenomenal propositions is part of knowing what an experience is like. I provide a hybrid account of knowing what an experience is like which is the coherent expression of a single idea: knowing what an experience is like is knowing what it would be like to have the phenomenal content of the experience as the content of an experience one is currently having. I explain how my conclusions indicate that the focus of discussion should be on the alleged explanatory gap between phenomenal facts and physical facts and not on the Knowledge Argument. The latter is a poor expression of the difficulty Physicalists face.

A. Koriat distinguishes between feeling-based and inferentially based feeling-of-knowing judgments. The former are attributable to partial information that is activated in implicit memory but not fully articulated. They are not, however, attributable to direct access to the target-an hypothesis that Koriat specifically repudiates. While there is considerable merit in the distinction that Koriat draws, and his emphasis on the possibility that people base at least some of their metacognitive judgments on implicit information seems well founded, it is argued that his rejection of the direct access view is premature. There may be a state-a true noetic state-in which people actually know the answer before they are able to express it. A case is made for further consideration of the scientific merits of the direct-access view of the noetic feelings people experience in imminent tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states.

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” – Luis Buñuel..

In Koriat's paper ''The Feeling of Knowing: Some Metatheoretical Implications for Consciousness and Control,'' he asserts that the feeling of knowing straddles the implicit and explicit, and that these conscious feelings enter into a conscious control process that is necessary for controlled behavior. This assertion allows him to make many speculations on the nature of consciousness itself. We agree that feelings of knowing are produced through a monitoring of one's knowledge, and that this monitoring can affect the control of behavior such as whether or not to search memory for an answer. Further, we believe that monitoring of performance with a strategy can also affect cognition control and strategy selection; however, we also believe that frequently this monitoring and control occurs without conscious awareness. Feeling of knowing has received an inordinate amount of attention because it lies behind the highly recognizable tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon that represents one of the rare cases of conscious monitoring. There are other feelings of knowing which are much more common and are not accompanied by conscious awareness. These are evident in the early selection of a strategy for answering a problem. In our view, the research on feeling of knowing will not resolve the question of whether consciousness is merely epiphenomenal.

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action.