The Richness of Experience and the Collapse of Consciousness Studies
Many people have looked foolish by claiming a scientific question insoluble that was not so. Yet I wonder if the following question will prove ultimately intractible: Is conscious experience rich or thin?
To say that consciousness is rich is to say that our phenomenology or stream of experience contains many things at once, in different modalities -- that as I sit here typing for example, I consciously experience not just what I'm attending to most focally, but also much else in a peripheral way: the sound of traffic in the background and of click of the keys on the keyboard, the feeling of my fingers typing and of my feet in my shoes and of my back against the seat, a whole broad visual field fuzzy outside the focal region, and possibly also feelings, images, inner speech, and the like. To say that consciousness is thin is to say that most of what we don't attend to we don't experience. The feeling of my feet in my shoes and the sound of traffic in the backgroud are not actually experienced by me, not even in a peripheral way, when I'm not thinking about such matters.
Philosophers' and ordinary folks' intuitions on this question appear to be divided; and I also got mixed results when I gave people random beepers set at long intervals and asked them to go about their ordinary day, noticing when the beep went off whether they had (for example) tactile experience in their left foot in the last undisturbed moment before the beep.
The refrigerator light illusion frustrates any attempt to address this question through concurrent introspection: Thinking about whether you have conscious experience of your feet in your shoes will normally create that experience whether it was there before the question occurred to you or not.
So it seems that the question must be studied retrospectively (as I attempted with the help of the beeper). But any retrospective study will raise the issue of memory error. Change blindness studies, for example, suggest that we retain very little memory of what we're not attending to, even over the tiniest intervals. Experience could be massively rich but all that detail might be instantly forgotten. (Why, after all, would we retain it?) Some people may still recall a general impression of richness; but evidently others do not. Who's to say which of them is right? Furthermore, someone might mistakenly report sensory details as experienced that were not experienced, but only called to mind as a result of the beep, details brought into awareness as a result of the person's focus a moment later, though not experienced at the targeted time -- a kind of retrospective refrigerator light error. I worry that such introspective difficulties are intractable.
So could we do without introspective report? Could we just look at the brain, for example? No, not that either. We have no good theory right now of what makes a brain state conscious; and we never will have a good theory until we know, broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones; and we will never know, not even broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones until we figure out whether that hum of traffic processed ever so lightly in the auditory cortex is consciously experienced.
So is the question simply intractible? If so, that could lead to the collapse of consciousness studies. The question is so central and important to our understanding of consciousness that it's not clear how much progress we can make on any general account of consciousness without resolving it.