matthiasmichel.bsky.social
Assistant professor at MIT, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Philosophy of science and cognitive science of consciousness.
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I just heard a terrific talk by @marlenecohen.bsky.social about this preprint (MT/PFC comparison) - very relevant!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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I think of it as a spectrum of views that range from the obvious to the absurd. Its proponents typically describe a handful of examples that support views on the obvious end and then claim to have established one of the views on the absurd end.
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>2 seconds in blindsight monkeys: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC.... This one also found unconscious maintenance for 2 seconds: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18443770/. There might be silent / unconscious working memory too. So it would sound plausible that the information might be maintained.
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Yes lots to discuss! I wrote about my worries with tying this particular experiment to theories of consciousness here: elusiveself.wordpress.com/2023/09/09/i...
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I knew the Hogendoorn paper but didn’t know yours! Thanks for sending. The call for commentaries should come out fairly soon and that’d be a great topic.
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I mean, my own paper would be great 😇 www.nature.com/articles/s41..., but this is a shameless plug, so likely a better (and fantastic) paper is this one here: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/201...
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Good question, we don’t talk about this particular phenomenon (we mostly focus on postdiction) but I think that might be relevant. Any paper on this you’d recommend?
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Apparently they made sure to specify 'the use of a calculator is not allowed'.
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Yes but those could be driven unconsciously. We’re not saying all perception / cognition is slow. That’d be wrong for the reason you mention.
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It is not ‘simply’ an assertion in the sense that we provide evidence and arguments for it. But it is indeed important.
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The question is: is conscious vision slow because consciousness itself is slow, or because the kind of vision that's conscious is slow. Super interesting question. But whatever the answer, our point still applies: somehow conscious vision can afford to wait all this time, which tells us something.
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Very good point. I don't think most of them manipulate consciousness—they mostly manipulate what's represented. At the same time, in cases of postdictive fusion the two features must be represented (unconsciously), since they're both necessary for the final (fused) percept.
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There’s much more in the paper! Steve and I look forward to your thoughts in the peer commentary that will come with the article (the call for commentaries will come out soon). You can find the paper here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... and preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps....
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As a bonus, one nice feature of our view is that it provides a principled explanation for why vision for online action-guidance occurs unconsciously (following Milner & Goodale). Vision for action must be fast, but conscious vision is slow.
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We propose that visual consciousness evolved to solve this 'reality monitoring' problem. Following the reality monitoring theory of consciousness, consciousness results from representations being tagged as reliable or unreliable reflections of the environment. (philpapers.org/rec/MICTPR-2)
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But this shift creates a new computational problem: how do animals differentiate internal simulations from external reality? To benefit from internal simulation, organisms need a reliable way to know when sensory signals reflect the outside world—and when they're purely internal.
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This huge expansion in sensory horizon enabled slower, flexible visual cognition—planning escape routes, monitoring predator movements, and simulating different outcomes. These tasks benefit from slower, conscious visual processing.
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Fast reactions to visual stimuli are unlikely to be driven by conscious vision. This is not what conscious vision is for. Instead, conscious vision might have evolved following the massive increase in visual horizon that followed the water-to-land transition (exceptions are discussed in the paper).
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Light doesn’t travel well underwater. Following MacIver, this severely restricts the visual horizons of aquatic animals—typically to just a few body lengths for ecologically relevant objects. This restricted sensory horizon imposes fast reactions to visual stimuli like predators and preys.
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Suppose instead that you can see very far, with an extended visual horizon. You can now take time to think about what you see and plan ahead. You can afford to rely on slow, conscious vision. And this, in turn, tells us something about the evolution of visual consciousness.
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To illustrate, suppose you’re driving on a foggy road at night. You can’t see very far at all. This means that you’ll have to react very fast to whatever enters your ‘sensory bubble’, or ‘sensory horizon’. Those reactions will have to be driven by unconscious vision. Conscious vision is too slow.
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The idea that conscious vision is slow is something I’ve argued for in the past (with Adrien Doerig: doi.org/10.1111/mila...). But the real ‘aha moment’ came when Steve suggested that we might connect this to Malcolm MacIver’s notion of ‘sensory horizon’. This was the missing piece of the puzzle.
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By applying the same reasoning to ‘long-lasting postdictive effects’, we suggest that conscious vision is surprisingly slow. It sometimes takes up to 400ms for you to consciously experience a visual event! This rules out a role for conscious vision in fast reactions to visual stimuli.