0.20 An outline of consciousness

The internet encyclopedia of philosophy has a good entry on higher order theories of consciousness. Here Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Entry by Paula Droege. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/consc-hi/ 7/2/14 they reference a theory of Rosenthals:

• According to Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory (1986, 1997, 2005), a mental state is conscious when there is a higher-order thought about it. I am conscious of the pain in my knee when I have a thought to the effect that I am in that very pain state.

• ... A third important feature of higher-order thoughts on Rosenthal’s account is that they are assertoric and occurrent. The higher-order thought must assert, rather than hope, fear or speculate that I am in a particular mental state. Moreover, the higher-order thought must occur at roughly the same time as the mental state it represents. The content of the higher-order thought should be, for example: “I am now feeling pain,” not “I might have felt pain yesterday” or “Perhaps I will feel pain in a few minutes.” Rosenthal (1997) has argued that higher-order thoughts must be occurrent in order to distinguish between non-conscious and conscious states. If the mere disposition to produce a higher-order thought were sufficient for a mental state to be conscious, it seems that all one’s mental states would always be conscious.

Of course if someone has a thought about the pain they are experiencing the pain is going to be more conscious. It obviously depends on the situation if the thought makes the pain worse or less. I suppose a thought could make the pain less, but it would also make you more conscious and more aware of this lessened, (but more conscious) pain.

A model is proposed in the below image (B. Timmermans, et all), this is in the abstract of their paper:

• Metacognition is usually construed as a conscious, intentional process whereby people reflect upon their own mental activity. Here, we instead suggest that metacognition is but an instance of a largerclass of representational re-description processes that we assume occur unconsciously and automatically. From this perspective, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to anticipate theconsequences of action or activity on itself, on the world and on other people through three predictive loops: an inner loop, a perception–action loop and a self–other (social cognition) loop, whichtogether form a tangled hierarchy.

My interpretation is explained a little differently from their explanation, but is still similar to theirs. The inner loop of the first order network is about the brain learning about the world, first there is stimuli and then brain thinks about the stimuli. When the brain thinks about the stimuli it forms meta-cognitions and has a secondary response from its initial response.