Lecture 3: The Appeal to Pretheoretical Measures

This lecture explores the question of how far we can get with contested cases by applying our pretheoretical measures for ascribing consciousness, such as verbal report and voluntary behavioural control.

Obligatory Reading: Shea, N. & Bayne, T. 2010. The vegetative state and the science of consciousness, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61: 459-69 only (Sections 1-3).
Additional Reading:
(a) Tye, M. 2016. Tense Bees and Shell-shocked Crabs (OUP), chapter 5.
(b) Bayne, T., Seth, A. & Massimini, M. 2020. Are there islands of awareness? Trends in Neurosciences, 43(1): 6-16.

The course is organized by the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies / https://hardproblem.ru/ and Philosophy Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University / http://philos.msu.ru/

Lecturer: Prof. Timothy Bayne (Professor of Philosophy, Monash University (Melbourne)) / https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/timothy-bayne

Music: D-pulse, album “Dancing Qualia” / https://music.apple.com/ru/album/dancing-qualia/1478739578?l=en

Timeline:

0:07 - Recap of the previous lectures
1:04 - The content of this lecture
03:21 - Contested cases. Disorders of consciousness
10:01 - Earlier thoughts on the question of consciousness of post-comatose patients
13:34 - Reasons to take the question of consciousness in “non-responsive patients” seriously
16:51 - Landmark study of VS/UWS patients by Adrian Owen. Command following paradigm
20:02 - A variant of command-following paradigm: establishing a primitive communication channel
22:05 - “Passive paradigms”
26:35 - Neural interpretation of command-following paradigm
27:57 - Non-selectivity objection
32:52 - The projectability objection
34:57 - Intentional interpretation of command-following paradigm
37:23 - Intentional agency objection
38:38 - Intentionally produced imagery objecton
48:45 - Link between command-following and consciousness
56:21 - General issues about "non-responsive" and minimal-conscious patients, and scientific problem of other minds in general

Видео Lecture 3: The Appeal to Pretheoretical Measures канала Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies