On the basis of the former considerations he presents, Schooler argues that in many capacities we actually find a difference between being in a certain state and noticing that one is in a state (meta-awareness). So he moves onto his second claim, the claim that his conceptual distinction is empirically supported (see p. here). According to Schooler, there are two forms of dissociations, temporal dissociations one the one hand and translation dissociations (misinterpretations) on the other. Let me begin with temporal dissociations. Examples of temporal dissociations are mind-wandering vs. noticing one’s mind-wandering, but also mindless behaviors, suppressed thoughts, and unwanted emotions. Schooler mostly uses mind-wandering, however, characterized as situations, in which we “lose track of the contents of our own minds” (Schooler this collection, p. 9). This is the starting point for the introduction of Schooler’s new “framework for scientifically investigating first-person experiences” (Schooler this collection, p. 9).
I find this focus on mind-wandering a little puzzling, because I am not sure why this is an example supporting the general claim that the content of individual states changes in the specific intentional states. Why is it an individual intentional state that changes? Mind-wandering (at least intuitively) seems to be a complex process, and involves a number of states. In mind-wandering the issue is creature consciousness, not the experience or phenomenal character of an individual state, i.e., state-consciousness. Mind-wandering is about a train of thoughts, often accompanied by emotions, and autobiographical memories. In mind-wandering, we mostly think about issues related to our own life. For example we consider our “to-do” lists for today, what to have for dinner, our relationship to people close to us, telephone calls we need to make, and even our next lecture. At least the phenomenal character we experience during mind-wandering seems to include these the associated sensory states—broadly construed to include feelings of emotions, images, moods—which have a distinctive “phenomenal character” or “what it’s likeness”. But the stream of consciousness also contains episodes of conscious thought.[18] If we use this standard understanding of mind-wandering, it would rather be a bundle of thoughts, associations, or states, in other words a number of many more or less related thoughts, emotions, or other states and processes, not all of them necessarily fully specified in terms of content. And if so, it is not necessarily the content of individual states that changes—we seem to have multiple options for characterizing what changes once we are aware that we are mind-wandering. An alternative interpretation would be that the network of associated elements might change, or even the kind of associations involved. For a conceptual analysis, whether one should include these autobiographic sensory states in the phenomenon itself or just say the “train of thoughts in mind-wandering” causes them, is unclear. But it will determine how we analyze the experience of mind-wandering and the meta-awareness of mind-wandering, and its implications for theories of consciousness. There is also evidence that it has different functions and might itself be a heterogenic phenomenon (Northoff 2014, especially chap. 26; Metzinger 2013). For example, it is not clear whether mind-wandering is the same as day-dreaming, and if not, what the differences are.
Moreover, it is controversial whether thoughts even have a phenomenal character, and if so, how to analyze it (Bayne & Montague 2011). The orthodox view is that conscious thoughts themselves do not have a distinctive “phenomenal character”. They are either considered conscious without phenomenal character, or it is conceded that conscious thoughts might possess phenomenal character, but only in virtue of the sensory states with which they are associated (for example Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson 2007; Carruthers 2005; Nelkin 1989; Tye 1995). However, recently, a number of author introduced views according to which conscious thoughts themselves possess a “distinctive” phenomenology, but the phenomenal character differs from sensory states (Siewert 1998; Pitt 2004; Robinson 2005; Prinz 2004).
So there are a lot of further issues to consider, for a project like Schooler’s; we need to analyze the experience of mind-wandering and contrast it with meta-awareness or reflective experience in mind-wandering. However, Schooler gives some other examples for temporal dissociations, which can more obviously be explained in terms of individual states we do not notice or misinterpret. He doesn’t go into detail, but has mentioned mindless behaviors, suppressed thoughts, and unwanted emotions. The idea seems to be that we are not aware of an individual unwanted emotion, or a thought that causes behavior. However, these case could also be explained as processes rather than individual states. Mindless behavior is in many cases caused by a bundle of connected states, unwanted emotions relate to other internal states (which make them unwanted), and suppressed thoughts are suppressed due to other internal states.
Nonetheless, if Schooler means by “state” the “general state of mind”[19] rather than individual states, his examples become more convincing. But this seems inconsistent. Schooler takes inspiration from Dennett, who is interested in beliefs subjects have about phenomenal experience of individual states. Schooler switches between talk of phenomenal experience of individual states, and talk about the stream of consciousness the subject experiences. This is evident in the way he introduces the core distinction, namely in terms of the phenomenal experience of a state. At other times he talks about states of which I am aware, and sometimes about “what is going on in one’s mind”, which I take to refer to the stream of consciousness, or more precisely the sequence or combination of contents of individual states, rather than a classification of the experience of just one state. So the pressing question is really: what kind of reflection is “taking stock” exactly? How should we characterize what we do when we “take stock” and reach meta-awareness? In the following section I present more detailed suggestions for a taxonomy of different kinds of reflection. For now let me just say that one possible view would be that the content of these states (or the states) are accessed by other states, and maybe (unconsciously) evaluated. In that case, we should talk about complex processes rather than re-accessed individual states. Such a view would also be compatible with certain higher-order theories of consciousness.
Later in the paper, Schooler discusses examples of misrepresentation, in his terminology “translational dissociations”: emotions, or cases in which it is less controversial whether a phenomenal character is involved than in case of thoughts. He gives two examples of such misrepresentations: emotions of anxiety, which are not reported, and reported disgust for homosexuality. In his first example we find a correlation with the inconsistent behavioral measures of heart rate and galvanic skin response, as indicators of existing unreported anxiety. In his second example we have a correlation with penile tumescence (an erection). In both cases we know the bodily aspects of the emotion well (or the caused bodily changes associated with the feeling on an emotion), and thus, so the argument goes, have evidence for the occurrence of the emotion. But in both cases there is also a discrepancy between the subject’s reports (assuming the subject is honest) and its potential reportability. Schooler interprets the behavioral facts as indication of the real emotion the subjects experiences, but in the first case fails to acknowledge, and in the second misinterprets.
I am not so sure. First, the theory of emotion one feels committed to certainly plays a central role. Schooler seems to presuppose that unconscious emotions are not possible. Furthermore, it seems to me that both cases are open to a different interpretation, in fact the same interpretation I suggested for mind-wandering. Both unreported (or unreportable?), emotions of anxiety and reported disgust for homosexuality are complex cases. It might very well be that we do not have an individual content of a state that differs, but we rather simply struggle with a number of different but conflicting emotions, the reported one simply being in conflict with others. In both cases we have rather complex scenarios. And if one defends a multi-component account of emotions, it might very well be that the components of these emotions differ—it could be an element in a network that realizes the state, instead of the content of an individual state. This might seem like a minor point, but I think it is important. It undermines a central second part of the strategy, namely the empirical support for the theoretical distinction. Schooler needs more than a theoretical distinction (his first claim); he needs to show that this very distinction is helpful for understanding certain aspects of consciousness, mind-wandering, and other cases (his second claim; see p. here). Otherwise the conclusion he draws, the new methodological approach to studying consciousness, would not follow or would lose its plausibility. So undermining Schooler’s second claim by showing that in the case of his examples related to emotions (as well as in case of mind-wandering) this evidence is not as clear as one might think, results in a problem for his view.
But there is another important issue here. The empirical evidence seems to be relevant to the stream of consciousness rather than to the experience versus meta-awareness of individual intentional states. The formulation of the main claims suggests that state consciousness is the issue. However, in other sections Schooler refers to the stream of consciousness (See quote above, p. here). If this is correct, Schooler’s empirical project, or more precisely the evidence he has gathered, is about a central aspect of creature consciousness. Philosophers distinguish creature consciousness from mental-state consciousness: the first is about a subject that is conscious (either in general or of something in particular), whereas state-consciousess is about conscious states of a creature that it is conscious. Though Schooler’s project (especially claim (1)) is formulated in terms of state consciousness, the empirical support targets a different kind of consciousness. This also undermines Schooler’s second claim by showing that the meaning of consciousness differs in claims (1) and (2). But, as I pointed out in section 1, the stream of consciousness claim would be compatible with a more functional interpretation of claim (1) as well. There is a way to revise claim (1) in a way that avoids this problem.
Using mostly the empirical evidence of mind-wandering, Schooler then suggest a bundle of criteria we might use for the third-person evaluation of what is actually going on in somebody’s mind; in my analysis of his main argument this is the third step (see p. here). These behavioral criteria include behavioral measures (eye-movements, reading comprehension, sustained attention to response) and neurocognitive criteria (ERP, fMRI, behavioral, neuroscientific, fMRI and others). His list is in the spirit of a cognitive account, and similar to others (Seth et al. 2005; Seth et al. 2008). For protagonists of non-cognitive accounts there seems to be room for attack. But, as I have mentioned, this is not my project (see p. here). In this commentary, I prefer to focus on conceptual issues within cognitive accounts, rather than the debate between cognitive vs. noncognitive accounts (See p. here). As long as one commits to such a cognitive account, Schooler’s list of criteria turns out to be very useful for our evaluation of the meta-components we need for a fined-grained understanding of reflection and re-representation. And this is the case independently of the worries I presented regarding his first two claims. However, I think there is a problem looming: Schooler is challenging both the reliability of first-person reports and the view that conscious states are accessible states. With a position that is in such sharp tension with our commonsense understanding, he needs to motivate this radical move: he needs to provide an answer to why we have this deep pre-theoretic entrenchment of the first-person accessibility of our own conscious states (Cohen & Dennett 2011).