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To cite this article: Benjamin Libet (2000) Conscious and Unconscious Mental Activity: Commentary by Benjamin Libet
(San Francisco), Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 2:1, 21-24,
DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2000.10773277
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2000.10773277
21
Conscious and Unconscious Mental Activity: Commentary by Benjamin Libet (San Francisco)
Awareness
On the question of the fundamental nature of conscious experience Crick and Koch (1998) make the
good "assumption that all the different aspects of consciousness (for example, pain, visual awareness, selfconsciousness, and so on) employ a basic common
mechanism or perhaps a few such mechanisms." But
they do not follow through on this important point.
Libet has proposed that subjective awareness
should be regarded as the fundamental feature of consciousness. The various "forms" or aspects of consciousness are accountable in the different contents
added to the single phenomenon of awareness (e.g.,
Libet, Pearl, et al., 1991; Libet, 1993a). For example,
Crick and Koch "emphasize that it is qualia that are
at the root of the problem." (The hard problem, of
course, refers to the designation by Chalmers [1995]
for the question of how it is that conscious subjective
experience can emerge from the activities of neurons,
even if the neuronal correlates of consciousness were
to be fully discovered.) Qualia are usually taken to
mean the experiences of pain, colors, and other special
qualities of conscious sensations that cannot be described simply by the correlative neuronal activities.
But the hard problem must include all phenomena of
subjective experience, that is, of awareness of anything. It is simpler to think of pain, visual awareness,
and even self-consciousness as specific contents of
awareness. The fundamental hard problem is how to
explain the appearance of subjective awareness per
se. Neuronal correlates of the specific content of an
awareness may differ from those for awareness itself.
There is some direct experimental evidence for
this view (Libet, Pearl, et al. 1991). The subjects were
patients with permanently implanted stimulating electrodes in the ventrobasal (somatosensory) thalamus,
for the self-treatment of intractable pain. As had been
Benjamin Libet is Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology,
University of California, San Francisco, CA.
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virtually impossible to study this, since there is no
assurance that the animal understands our question,
and it cannot give an introspective report (except, perhaps, in the case of a primate, like the gorilla Koko,
who has been taught to communicate by sign language). The purposefulness or complexity of a response cannot be used as valid evidence for conscious
awareness. Indeed human individuals can unconsciously perform purposeful and successful behaviors
even with highly complex mental operations (more
on this below). An introspective report of an actual
experience of conscious awareness is necessary evidence for such events.
Crick and Koch resort to evidence on the visual
system of the macaque monkey to bolster or support
theoretical proposals to explain the neuronal nature
of consciousness and unconscious mental processes.
These proposals include those by Jackendoff, Marr,
Stevens, Freud, and by Crick and Koch themselves.
But experimental studies on monkeys do not, in general, provide valid evidence on the issue of conscious
awareness. Evidence from such studies may be simply
forms of detection which may be unconscious, not
conscious awareness.
Benjamin Libet
provided a proper basis for a working hypothesis, for
which Freud merited commendation. But as Karl Popper has pointed out (see Popper and Eccles, 1977) this
must be followed by a properly designed experimental
test, in which it is possible for the hypothesis to be
falsified. Otherwise, one can propose anything without
fear of ever being contradicted.
In discussing locations of the brain that may mediate a conscious visual experience, Crick and Koch
note that they have excluded the primary visual cortex,
VI, as an area able to produce conscious events. This
was based on a postulate that only those visual areas
that project to frontal brain regions can participate in
producing visual awareness; the primary area VI does
not project directly to the frontal cortex. But Pollen
(1999) has further analyzed this postulate and proposes that the requirement of a direct projection to
frontal executive space may be obviated by the existence of networks of recursive loops. Within such a
framewor k Pollen proposes that VI could play a role
in conscious vision.
Some direct experimental evidence for unconscious mental function is provided by the studies of
Libet and colleagues. They produced strong evidence
for a requirement of cerebral responses lasting for up
to about 500 msec for sensory awareness to appear
(see reviews by Libet [1993a,bD. But many activities
and responses normally appear with much shorter delays, even as little as 50 to 100 msec. These activities
include responses to signals while driving a car, responses in sports like tennis, baseball, etc. This implies
that such activities are initiated and executed unconsciously, before conscious awareness of the signal
could appear.
A similar period of cerebral activities was found
for the appearance of the conscious wish or urge to
perform a voluntary act. Specific electrical activity in
the brain (the "readiness potential") was shown to
begin the voluntary process unconsciously, about 400
msec before the conscious decision to act appeared
(Libet, 1985). This has important implications for the
issue of guilt, if urges to act are unconsciously initiated
urges (Libet, 1999).
A distinguishing difference, in duration of cerebral activity, was demonstrated for unconscious detection vs. conscious awareness of a sensory signal
(Libet, Pearl, et al. 1991). This led to a "time-on"
theory for the transition between unconscious detection and conscious awareness of a sensory signal. Simply by sufficiently increasing the duration ("timeon") of cortical activations, an unconscious mental
process (detection) could acquire conscious awareness
23
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Benjamin Libet
Department of Physiology
University of California, San Francisco
513 Pamassus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94143-0444