Before Consciousness by Zdravko Radman

Before Consciousness by Zdravko Radman

Author:Zdravko Radman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Consciousness, unconscious, non-conscious, mentality, mind, habit, automaticity, motor behaviour, skill, flow, choke, cognition, perception, memory, decision making, awareness, volition, brain, pure consciousness, conscious processing, higher-order awareness, judgment, analogy, hallucination, inner speech, predictive processing, neurology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, intention
ISBN: 9781845409357
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-04-24T00:00:00+00:00


Prenoetic Effects on Perception and Judgment Shaun Gallagher

We feel things differently according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter, and above all things differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. (James, 1890, 1, p. 232)

The notion of a prenoetic effect attempts to capture the idea of certain embodied processes that happen non-consciously but that nonetheless have an effect on one’s conscious experience of the world. Some of these processes can be described in terms of neuronal processes. Some of them related to non-conscious aspects of movement and action may be captured in descriptions of body schematic processes (Gallagher, 2005; see Cushing et al., this volume). Others are less determinate and may involve constraints or affordances provided in certain environments. I’ll argue that the concept of prenoetic effect fits well with enactivist accounts of experience, and does not fit well with representationalist accounts.

I’ll start by providing some examples of prenoetic (specifically affective, non-conscious) processes that shape perception and judgment. I’ll then try to clarify how prenoetic effects relate to brain function and how all of this fits with, and indeed enriches the enactivist model.

1. Some Examples of Prenoetic Effects

Prenoetic effects include affective processes (in the broadest sense); not only emotional processes, but processes that are associated with autonomic and endocrine systems - things like hunger, fatigue, changes in homeostasis. We can start with a simple example from William James (1890) - that an apple appears larger and more intensely red when the perceiver is hungry than when satiated. Hunger can also affect our perception of food-related words, allowing us to pick them out faster compared to other non-food related words (Radel and Clément-Guillotin, 2012). A study by Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) shows that hunger distorts cognitive processes. The study shows that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges. Whether the judge is hungry or satiated may play an important role.

The percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session [e.g. between breakfast and lunch] and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a [food] break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions. (Dansiger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso, 2011, p. 6889)

Such an effect is extraneous to the legal process, but not extraneous to the jurist’s embodied cognition. The embodied affect (hunger) has an effect on the jurist’s judgments, on on the weighing of evidence, and so forth, and doesn’t appear out of nowhere just when the judicial decision is made. It is rather something that has been emerging in the background, with the judge unaware of it.

Fatigue too can have an effect on perception. In a set of well-known experiments, Proffitt has shown that subjects estimate the grade of an incline to be steeper when wearing a heavy backpack or when fatigued, in comparison to wearing none or when rested (Proffitt et al.



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