Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

Below is a promo from Sounds True for the new book from Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness (links to Sounds True page for the book - here is an Amazon link). There is also a CD available with 20 of the meditations from the book (There are CEUs available as well - 3.5).

Join this innovative teacher to explore more than 20 meditations including:

• Awareness Yoga—a foundational practice in moving awareness

• Embodied Presence—a practice for deeply feeling unity and acceptance

• Unhook, Drop, Open, See, Include, Know, Let Be—a way to shift levels of mind that culminates in living from open-hearted awareness  

“The goal of these meditations is not to transcend the human condition,” explains Loch Kelly, “but to discover how to live a fully intimate human life.” Shift into Freedom gives you the tools to navigate your life with clarity and unconditional love.

Interestingly, I spoke with Loch when he was beginning work on this book. More than a year later he contacted me again about doing some editing, but by then I was very busy with my editing work at the University of Arizona Cancer Center.

Recently, I heard from Loch again - the book was done and hitting the market. He had Sounds True send me a review copy, which I am reading right now. I will be posting my review in the coming weeks. I must that, so far, I am finding this an excellent book, and one I will be using with some therapy clients.

This is the email Sounds True sent out (with a brief bio from the Sounds True website):

Loch Kelly, MDiv, LCSW, is a teacher, consultant, and leader in the field of meditation and psychotherapy who was asked to teach by Mingyur Rinpoche and Adyashanti. The founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute, he is an emerging voice in modernizing meditation, social engagement, and collaborating with neuroscientists to study how awareness training can enhance compassion and well-being.

Dear Sounds True friends,

I am delighted to share my new book and audio meditation program with you, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness. I’m grateful to all of my teachers, students, and friends for their support in helping me bring this book and audio into form, and to Adyashanti for his inspiring foreword.

I was fortunate to stumble upon meditation early in my life after a series of losses. Meditation was a great help to me because it revealed the inner foundation of a naturally spacious and loving awareness. My heart’s curiosity then led me to graduate school and to India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, where I met many renowned meditation teachers who generously shared their lives and practices with me. The particular approach I was drawn to is one where we discover the solution to suffering by directly shifting into our awake nature that is already here. Then through the practice of “small glimpses, many times,” we can experience freedom from fear, shame, and worry, and live an embodied, open-hearted life. My life’s work and love has been to discover the essence of these advanced practices and bring them to you in contemporary and accessible form.

The book and audio provide a how-to guide for awakening. I have been refining these unique teachings and practices for many years, and have had wonderful results in sharing them with students.

This book presents a distinct and clear definition of awakening. My goal is to bring the process of awakening into the mainstream of our culture in the same way that mindfulness meditation is now embraced, studied, and valued by Western medicine and psychology. Shift Into Freedom offers unique and helpful pointers from developmental psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and comparative contemplative traditions.

The audio program is a powerful series of short guided meditations, pointers, and “glimpses” designed to help you recognize and live from open-hearted awareness. While these practices are written in the book, I highly recommend that you listen to the audio. The audio meditations will make it easier to experience what is being pointed to within you. Experiencing the glimpses is what will transform you.

Awakening can be understood and learned—often through much unlearning and letting go. I am convinced that awakening is the next stage of our human development. You are more capable of discovering this potential than you may believe. Our mutual awakening is essential for our planet today.

I hope you enjoy this heartfelt offering!

With Love and Gratitude,

Open-Hearted Awareness Institute
New York City

This nondual way of “small glimpses, many times” takes basic mindfulness to the next level by introducing us to effortless mindfulness and heart mindfulness.
September 2015

Listen to my Insights at the Edge Podcast »

There has actually been evidence for a few years now that meditation and some forms of interpersonal relational experience can increase (or stop the decrease in) telomere length. "A telomere is the region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromatid, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighbouring chromosomes" (Wikipedia) - the shorter the telomeres, the more "aging" the body has experienced through oxidative stress and other forms of deteriorative processes. Telomere dysfunction or shortening is commonly acquired during the process of tumor development. Other research has found that those with longer telomeres live longer, healthier lives.

I guess this is first time someone has looked at this in terms of breast cancer and meditation.

Meditation, support groups: Clear new evidence for mind-body connection demonstrated in study, researchers show

Date: November 3, 2014
Source: Alberta Health Services

Summary:
For the first time, researchers have shown that practising mindfulness meditation or being involved in a support group has a positive physical impact at the cellular level in breast cancer survivors.

A group working out of Alberta Health Services' Tom Baker Cancer Centre and the University of Calgary Department of Oncology has demonstrated that telomeres -- protein complexes at the end of chromosomes -- maintain their length in breast cancer survivors who practise meditation or are involved in support groups, while they shorten in a comparison group without any intervention.

Although the disease-regulating properties of telomeres aren't fully understood, shortened telomeres are associated with several disease states, as well as cell aging, while longer telomeres are thought to be protective against disease.

"We already know that psychosocial interventions like mindfulness meditation will help you feel better mentally, but now for the first time we have evidence that they can also influence key aspects of your biology," says Dr. Linda E. Carlson, PhD, principal investigator and director of research in the Psychosocial Resources Department at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre.

"It was surprising that we could see any difference in telomere length at all over the three-month period studied," says Dr. Carlson, who is also a U of C professor in the Faculty of Arts and the Cumming School of Medicine, and a member of the Southern Alberta Cancer Institute. "Further research is needed to better quantify these potential health benefits, but this is an exciting discovery that provides encouraging news."

The study was published online in the journal Cancer.

A total of 88 breast cancer survivors who had completed their treatments for at least three months were involved for the duration of the study. The average age was 55 and most participants had ended treatment two years prior. To be eligible, they also had to be experiencing significant levels of emotional distress.

In the Mindfulness-Based Cancer Recovery group, participants attended eight weekly, 90-minute group sessions that provided instruction on mindfulness meditation and gentle Hatha yoga, with the goal of cultivating non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. Participants were also asked to practise meditation and yoga at home for 45 minutes daily.

In the Supportive Expressive Therapy group, participants met for 90 minutes weekly for 12 weeks and were encouraged to talk openly about their concerns and their feelings. The objectives were to build mutual support and to guide women in expressing a wide range of both difficult and positive emotions, rather than suppressing or repressing them.

The participants randomly placed in the control group attended one, six-hour stress management seminar.

All study participants had their blood analysed and telomere length measured before and after the interventions.

Scientists have shown a short-term effect of these interventions on telomere length compared to a control group, but it's not known if the effects are lasting. Dr. Carlson says another avenue for further research is to see if the psychosocial interventions have a positive impact beyond the three months of the study period.

Allison McPherson was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. When she joined the study, she was placed in the mindfulness-based cancer recovery group. Today, she says that experience has been life-changing.

"I was skeptical at first and thought it was a bunch of hocus-pocus," says McPherson, who underwent a full year of chemotherapy and numerous surgeries. "But I now practise mindfulness throughout the day and it's reminded me to become less reactive and kinder toward myself and others."

Study participant Deanne David was also placed in the mindfulness group.

"Being part of this made a huge difference to me," she says. "I think people involved in their own cancer journey would benefit from learning more about mindfulness and connecting with others who are going through the same things."


Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Alberta Health Services. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Linda E. Carlson, Tara L. Beattie, Janine Giese-Davis, Peter Faris, Rie Tamagawa, Laura J. Fick, Erin S. Degelman, Michael Speca. (2014, Nov 3). Mindfulness-based cancer recovery and supportive-expressive therapy maintain telomere length relative to controls in distressed breast cancer survivors. Cancer; DOI: 10.1002/cncr.29063

* * * * *

Mindfulness-based cancer recovery and supportive-expressive therapy maintain telomere length relative to controls in distressed breast cancer survivors

Linda E. Carlson, Tara L. Beattie, Janine Giese-Davis, Peter Faris, Rie Tamagawa, Laura J. Fick, Erin S. Degelman, and Michael Speca

BACKGROUND

Group psychosocial interventions including mindfulness-based cancer recovery (MBCR) and supportive-expressive group therapy (SET) can help breast cancer survivors decrease distress and influence cortisol levels. Although telomere length (TL) has been associated with breast cancer prognosis, the impact of these two interventions on TL has not been studied to date.

METHODS

The objective of the current study was to compare the effects of MBCR and SET with a minimal intervention control condition (a 1-day stress management seminar) on TL in distressed breast cancer survivors in a randomized controlled trial. MBCR focused on training in mindfulness meditation and gentle Hatha yoga whereas SET focused on emotional expression and group support. The primary outcome measure was relative TL, the telomere/single-copy gene ratio, assessed before and after each intervention. Secondary outcomes were self-reported mood and stress symptoms.

RESULTS

Eighty-eight distressed breast cancer survivors with a diagnosis of stage I to III cancer (using the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM staging system) who had completed treatment at least 3 months prior participated. Using analyses of covariance on a per-protocol sample, there were no differences noted between the MBCR and SET groups with regard to the telomere/single-copy gene ratio, but a trend effect was observed between the combined intervention group and controls (F [1,84], 3.82; P = .054; η²  = .043); TL in the intervention group was maintained whereas it was found to decrease for control participants. There were no associations noted between changes in TL and changes in mood or stress scores over time.

CONCLUSIONS

Psychosocial interventions providing stress reduction and emotional support resulted in trends toward TL maintenance in distressed breast cancer survivors, compared with decreases in usual care. 

Alan Lightman - My Own Personal Nothingness

Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman is one of my favorite science authors and has been ever since I read his novel, Einstein's Dreams back in 1993. His most recent book (Jan, 2014) is The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. [He is also the author of A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (2005).]

This cool essay comes from Nautilus magazine, Issue 16, Chapter 4, on the topic of Nothingness.

My Own Personal Nothingness

From a childhood hallucination to the halls of theoretical physics.

By Alan Lightman | Illustration By Gérard DuBois
August 28, 2014

“Nothing will come of nothing.”
(William Shakespeare, King Lear)

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, The Misery of Man Without God)

“The… ‘lumniferous ether’ will prove to be superfluous as the view to be developed here will eliminate [the condition of] absolute rest in space.”
(Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies)

MY MOST VIVID encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at myself from outside my body. I was somewhere in the cosmos. For a brief few moments, I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire planet, as a brief flicker in a vast chasm of time, with an infinite span of time before my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation included infinite space. Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space that stretched on and on and on. I felt myself to be a tiny speck, insignificant in a vast universe that cared nothing about me or any living beings and their little dots of existence, a universe that simply was. And I felt that everything I had experienced in my young life, the joy and the sadness, and everything that I would later experience, meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. It was a realization both liberating and terrifying at once. Then, the moment was over, and I was back in my body.

The strange hallucination lasted only a minute or so. I have never experienced it since. Although Nothingness would seem to exclude awareness along with the exclusion of everything else, awareness was part of that childhood experience, but not the usual awareness I would locate within the three pounds of gray matter in my head. It was a different kind of awareness. I am not religious, and I do not believe in the supernatural. I do not think for a minute that my mind actually left my body. But for a few moments I did experience a profound absence of the familiar surroundings and thoughts we create to anchor our lives. It was a kind of Nothingness.

TO UNDERSTAND anything, as Aristotle argued, we must understand what it is not, and Nothingness is the ultimate opposition to any thing. To understand matter, said the ancient Greeks, we must understand the “void,” or the absence of matter. Indeed, in the fifth century B.C., Leucippus argued that without the void there could be no motion because there would be no empty spaces for matter to move into. According to Buddhism, to understand our ego we must understand the ego-free state of “emptiness,” called śūnyatā. To understand the civilizing effects of society, we must understand the behavior of human beings removed from society, as William Golding so powerfully explored in his novel Lord of the Flies.

Following Aristotle, let me say what Nothingness is not. It is not a unique and absolute condition. Nothingness means different things in different contexts. From the perspective of life, Nothingness might mean death. To a physicist, it might mean the complete absence of matter and energy (an impossibility, as we will see), or even the absence of time and space. To a lover, Nothingness might mean the absence of the beloved. To a parent, it might mean the absence of children. To a painter, the absence of color. To a reader, a world without books. To a person impassioned with empathy, emotional numbness. To a theologian or philosopher like Pascal, Nothingness meant the timeless and spaceless infinity known only by God. When King Lear says to his daughter Cordelia, “Nothing will come of nothing,” he means that she will receive far less of his kingdom than her two fawning sisters unless she can express her boundless love for him. The second “nothing” refers to Cordelia’s silence contrasted with her sisters’ gushing adoration, while the first is her impending one-room shack compared to their opulent palaces.

Although Nothingness may have different meanings in different circumstances, I want to emphasize what is perhaps obvious: All of its meanings involve a comparison to a material thing or condition we know. That is, Nothingness is a relative concept. We cannot conceive of anything that has no relation to the material things, thoughts, and conditions of our existence. Sadness, by itself, has no meaning without reference to joy. Poverty is defined in terms of a minimum income and standard of living. The sensation of a full stomach exists in comparison to that of an empty one. The sensation of Nothingness I experienced as a child was a contrast to feeling centered in my body and in time.

 

The Commute: Alan Lightman en route to his summer home off the coast of Maine. Michael Segal

MY FIRST experience with Nothingness in the material world of science occurred when I was a graduate student in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. In my second year, I took a formidable course with the title of Quantum Field Theory, which explained how all of space is filled up with “energy fields,” usually called just “fields” by physicists. There is a field for gravity and a field for electricity and magnetism, and so on. What we regard as physical “matter” is the excitation of the underlying fields. A key point is that according to the laws of quantum physics, all of these fields are constantly jittering a bit—it is an impossibility for a field to be completely dormant—and the jittering causes subatomic particles like electrons and their antiparticles, called positrons, to appear for a brief moment and then disappear again, even when there is no persistent matter. Physicists call a region of space with the lowest possible amount of energy in it the “vacuum.” But the vacuum cannot be free of fields. The fields necessarily permeate all space. And because they are constantly jittering, they are constantly producing matter and energy, at least for brief periods of time. Thus the “vacuum” in modern physics is not the void of the ancient Greeks. The void does not exist. Every cubic centimeter of space in the universe, no matter how empty it seems, is actually a chaotic circus of fluctuating fields and particles flickering in and out of existence on the subatomic scale. Thus, at the material level, there is no such thing as Nothingness.

Remarkably, the active nature of the “vacuum” has been observed in the lab. The principal example lies in the energies of electrons in hydrogen atoms, which can be measured to high accuracy by the light they emit. According to quantum mechanics, the electric and magnetic field of the vacuum is constantly producing short-lived pairs of electrons and positrons. These ghostlike particles pop out of the vacuum into being, enjoy their lives for about one-billionth of one-billionth of a second, and then disappear again.

In an isolated hydrogen atom, surrounded by seemingly empty space, the proton at the center of the atom draws the fleeting vacuum electrons toward it and repulses the vacuum positrons, causing its electrical charge to be slightly reduced. This reduction of the proton’s charge, in turn, slightly modifies the energy of the orbiting (non vacuum) electrons in a process called the Lamb shift, named after physicist Willis Lamb and first measured in 1947. The measured shift in energy is quite small, only three parts in 100 million. But it agrees very closely with the complex equations of the theory—a fantastic validation of the quantum theory of the vacuum. It is a triumph of the human mind to understand so much about empty space.

The concept of empty space—and Nothingness—played a major role in modern physics even before our understanding of the quantum vacuum. According to findings in the mid 19th century, light is a traveling wave of electromagnetic energy, and it was conventional wisdom that all waves, such as sound waves and water waves, required a material medium to carry them along. Take the air out of a room, and you will not hear someone speaking. Take the water out of a lake, and you cannot make waves. The material medium hypothesized to convey light was a gossamer substance called the “ether.” Because we can see light from distant stars, the ether had to fill up all space. Thus, there was no such thing as empty space. Space was filled with the ether.

In 1887, in one of the most famous experiments in all of physics, two American physicists at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio attempted to measure the motion of the earth through the ether. Their experiment failed. Or rather, they could not detect any effects of the ether. Then, in 1905, the 26-year-old Albert Einstein proposed that the ether did not exist. Instead, he hypothesized that light, unlike all other waves, could propagate through completely empty space. All this was before quantum physics.

That denial of the ether, and hence embrace of a true emptiness, followed from a deeper hypothesis of the young Einstein: There is no condition of absolute rest in the cosmos. Without absolute rest, there cannot be absolute motion. You cannot say that a train is moving at a speed of 50 miles per hour in any absolute sense. You can say only that the train is moving at 50 miles per hour relative to another object, like a train station. Only the relative motion between two objects has any meaning. The reason Einstein did away with the ether is because it would have established a reference frame of absolute rest in the cosmos. With a material ether filling up all space, you could say whether an object is at rest or not, just as you can say whether a boat in a lake is at rest or in motion with respect to the water. So, through the work of Einstein, the idea of material emptiness, or Nothingness, was connected to the rejection of absolute rest in the cosmos. In sum, first there was the ether filling up all space. Then Einstein removed the ether, leaving truly empty space. Then other physicists filled space again with quantum fields. But quantum fields do not restore a reference frame of absolute rest because they are not a static material in space. Einstein’s principle of relativity remained.

One of the pioneers of quantum field theory was the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, a professor at Caltech and a member of my thesis committee. In the late 1940s, Feynman and others developed the theory of how electrons interact with the ghostly particles of the vacuum. Earlier in that decade, as a cocky young scientist, he had worked on the Manhattan Project. By the time I knew him at Caltech, in the early 1970s, Feynman had mellowed a bit but was still ready to overturn received wisdom at the drop of a hat. Every day, he wore white shirts, exclusively white shirts, because he said they were easier to match with different colored pants, and he hated to spend time fussing about his clothes. Feynman also had a strong distaste for philosophy. Although he had quite a wit, he viewed the material world in a highly straightforward manner, without caring to speculate on the purely hypothetical or subjective. He could and did talk for hours about the behavior of the quantum vacuum, but he would not waste a minute on philosophical or theological considerations of Nothingness. My experience with Feynman taught me that a person can be a great scientist without concerning him or herself with questions of “Why,” which fall beyond the scientifically provable.

However, Feynman did understand that the mind can create its own reality. That understanding was revealed in the Commencement address he gave at my graduation from Caltech in 1974. It was a boiling day in late May, outdoors of course, and we graduates were all sweating heavily in our caps and gowns. In his talk, Feynman made the point that before publishing any scientific results, we should think of all the possible ways that we could be wrong. “The first principle” he said, “is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”



IN THE Wachowski Brothers’ landmark film The Matrix (1999), we are well into the drama before we realize that all the reality experienced by the characters—the pedestrians walking the streets, the buildings and restaurants and night clubs, the entire cityscape—is an illusion, a fake movie played in the brains of human beings by a master computer. Actual reality is a devastated and desolate planet, in which human beings are imprisoned, comatose, in leaf-like pods and drained of their life energy to power the machines. I would argue that much of what we call reality in our lives is also an illusion, and that we are much closer to dissolution, and Nothingness, than we usually acknowledge.

Let me explain. A highly unpleasant idea, but one that has been accepted by scientists over the last couple of centuries, is that we human beings, and all living beings, are completely material. That is, we are made of material atoms, and only material atoms. To be precise, the average human being consists of about 7 x 10²⁷ atoms (7,000 trillion trillion atoms)—65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 10 percent hydrogen, 3 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, and traces of 54 other chemical elements. The totality of our tissues and muscles and organs and brain cells is composed of these atoms. And there is nothing else. To a vast cosmic being, each of us would appear to be an assemblage of atoms. To be sure, it is a special assemblage. A rock does not behave like a person. But the mental sensations we experience as consciousness and thought are purely material consequences of the purely material electrical and chemical interactions between neurons, which in turn are simply assemblages of atoms. And when we die, this special assemblage disassembles. The total number of atoms in our body at our last breath remains constant. Each atom could be tagged and tracked as it subsequently mingled with air and water and soil. The material would remain, scattered about. Each of us is a temporary assemblage of atoms, not more and not less. We are all on the verge of material disassemblage and dissolution.

All that having been said, the sensation of consciousness is so powerful and compelling that we endow other human beings—i.e. certain other assemblages of atoms—with a transcendent quality, some nonmaterial and magnificent essence. And as the assemblage of atoms most important to each of us is our own self, we endow ourselves with a transcendent quality—a self, an ego, an “I-ness”—that blooms far larger and more significant than merely a collection of atoms.

Likewise, our human-made institutions. We endow our art and our cultures and our codes of ethics and our laws with a grand and everlasting existence. We give these institutions an authority that extends far beyond ourselves. But in fact, all of these are constructions of our minds. That is, these institutions and codes and their imputed meanings are all consequences of exchanges between neurons, which in turn are simply material atoms. They are all mental constructions. They have no reality other than that which we give them, individually and collectively.

The Buddhists have understood this notion for centuries. It is part of the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and impermanence. The transcendent, nonmaterial, long-lasting qualities that we impart to other human beings and to human institutions are an illusion, like the computer-generated world in The Matrix. It is certainly true that we human beings have achieved what, to our minds, is extraordinary accomplishment. We have scientific theories that can make accurate predictions about the world. We have created paintings and music and literature that we consider beautiful and meaningful. We have entire systems of laws and social codes. But these things have no intrinsic value outside of our minds. And our minds are a collection of atoms, fated to disassemble and dissolve. And in that sense, we and our institutions are always approaching Nothingness.

So where do such sobering thoughts leave us? Given our temporary and self-constructed reality, how should we then live our lives, as individuals and as a society? As I have been approaching my own personal Nothingness, I have mulled these questions over quite a bit, and I have come to some tentative conclusions to guide my own life. Each person must think through these profound questions for him or herself—there are no right answers. I believe that as a society we need to realize we have great power to make our laws and other institutions whatever we wish to make them. There is no external authority. There are no external limitations. The only limitation is our own imagination. So, we should take the time to think expansively about who we are and what we want to be.

As for each of us as individuals, until the day when we can upload our minds to computers, we are confined to our physical body and brain. And, for better or for worse, we are stuck with our personal mental state, which includes our personal pleasures and pains. Whatever concept we have of reality, without a doubt we experience personal pleasure and pain. We feel. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” We might also say, “I feel, therefore I am.” And when I talk about feeling pleasure and pain, I do not mean merely physical pleasure and pain. Like the ancient Epicureans, I mean all forms of pleasure and pain: intellectual, artistic, moral, philosophical, and so on. All of these forms of pleasure and pain we experience, and we cannot avoid experiencing them. They are the reality of our bodies and minds, our internal reality. And here is the point I have reached: I might as well live in such a way as to maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain. Accordingly, I try to eat delicious food, to support my family, to create beautiful things, and to help those less fortunate than myself because those activities bring me pleasure. Likewise, I try to avoid leading a dull life, to avoid personal anarchy, and to avoid hurting others because those activities bring me pain. That is how I should live. A number of thinkers far deeper than I, most notably the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, have come to these same conclusions via very different routes.

What I feel and I know is that I am here now, at this moment in the grand sweep of time. I am not part of the void. I am not a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. Even though I understand that someday my atoms will be scattered in soil and in air, that I will no longer exist, that I will join some kind of Nothingness, I am alive now. I am feeling this moment. I can see my hand on my writing desk. I can feel the warmth of the sun through the window. And looking out, I can see the pine-needled path that goes down to the sea. Now.

~ Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His latest book is The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.

This hypothesis and theory article from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (open access) looks at the awareness (consciousness) of our own agency (our capacity to act in the world) and why conscious vs. unconscious representations of agency is important.

From Wikipedia:

Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

This article, then, examines the difference between involuntary behavior and goal directed action.


Full Citation: 
Carruthers, G. (2014, Jun 23). What makes us conscious of our own agency? And why the conscious versus unconscious representation distinction matters. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:434. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00434

What makes us conscious of our own agency? And why the conscious versus unconscious representation distinction matters

Glenn Carruthers

ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Abstract

Existing accounts of the sense of agency tend to focus on the proximal causal history of the feeling. That is, they explain the sense of agency by describing the cognitive mechanism that causes the sense of agency to be elicited. However, it is possible to elicit an unconscious representation of one’s own agency that plays a different role in a cognitive system. I use the “occasionality problem” to suggest that taking this distinction seriously has potential theoretical pay-offs for this reason. We are faced, then, with a need to distinguish instances of the representation of one’s own agency in which the subject is aware of their sense of own agency from instances in which they are not. This corresponds to a specific instance of what Dennett calls the “Hard Question”: once the representation is elicited, then what happens? In other words, how is a representation of one’s own agency used in a cognitive system when the subject is aware of it? How is this different from when the representation of own agency remains unconscious? This phrasing suggests a Functionalist answer to the Hard Question. I consider two single function hypotheses. First, perhaps the representation of own agency enters into the mechanisms of attention. This seems unlikely as, in general, attention is insufficient for awareness. Second, perhaps, a subject is aware of their sense of agency when it is available for verbal report. However, this seems inconsistent with evidence of a sense of agency in the great apes. Although these two single function views seem like dead ends, multifunction hypotheses such as the global workspace theory remain live options which we should consider. I close by considering a non-functionalist answer to the Hard Question: perhaps it is not a difference in the use to which the representation is put, but a difference in the nature of the representation itself. When it comes to the sense of agency, the Hard Question remains, but there are alternatives open to us.

Introduction

In this paper I argue that we, as a community investigating the sense of agency, are not doing enough to answer what Dennett has called the “Hard Question” of consciousness. Our existing models do a very good job of explaining when a representation of own agency is elicited. I illustrate this with two historically important accounts: the comparator model of Frith et al. and Wegner et al. inference to apparent mental state causation. Following Revonsuo, I consider these to be proximal etiological explanations. Although powerful so far as they go, these accounts, on their own, do not provide us with the explanatory resources to distinguish conscious and unconscious representations of one’s own agency. This is not a problem we can ignore. I use the “occasionality problem” to suggest that there are potential theoretical benefits to taking this distinction more seriously as conscious and unconscious representations of own agency play very different roles in cognition. I conclude by considering how we might approach the Hard Question for the sense of agency. I consider two Functionalist approaches (i) that a representation of own agency is conscious if it is taken as the object of attention; and (ii) that a representation of own agency is conscious if it is available for verbal report. Although such approaches offer clear research agendas, both of these specific approaches seem non-starters on empirical grounds. That said multifunction hypotheses such as the global workspace theory remain viable Functionalist positions. Finally I consider a Vehicle theory approach to the Hard Question. Such an approach also offers some clear research questions, but currently no clear answers. As of now, the Hard Question remains under-considered for the sense of agency even though there exist a variety of questions we can ask to make progress on it if we take either a Functionalist or a Vehicle approach. These are questions we would all do well to consider.

Standard Accounts of the Sense of Agency

Standard explanations of the sense of agency are of a particular type. Revonsuo (2006, pp. 20–22) calls this type of explanation “proximal etiological explanation”. Such explanations have two defining characteristics. First, they enumerate causes of the sense of agency. Second, the explanations are cognitive explanations. The specific causes posited are mental representations and computations. To understand these accounts as explanations of the sense of agency then, is to understand them as a description of what aspects of the mind, i.e., mental representations and computations, cause a subject to experience their own agency. The sense of agency itself is taken to be just another representation in this causal chain.

These traits are shared by prominent accounts of the sense of agency. Consider first the comparator model. This model gets its name from the use of three hypothetical comparisons performed by the motor control system. Each of these comparisons performs specific functions for motor control and motor learning (Wolpert and Ghahramani, 2000). One of these comparisons also elicits the sense of agency. This is the comparison that will concern us here (for the full account and its broader applicability see Frith et al., 2000a). On this model it is hypothesized that performing an action requires the formation of a goal state or motor intention (Pacherie, 2008), which represents where the body needs to move to in order to perform the action. From this, the motor control system formulates a motor command, which specifies how to move the body from where it is to where it needs to be in order to attain the goal. Two copies of the motor command are formed; one is sent to the periphery and elicits the requisite contractions of the effector muscles to perform the movement needed to attempt the action. This movement, of course, affects the sensory organs, allowing the motor control system to represent the movement after it occurs. The second copy of the motor command, sometimes called the “efference copy” or “corollary discharge”, is used by the motor system to form a prediction of what sensory feedback will be received due to the action. This predicted feedback can be used to represent the action as it occurs (Frith et al., 2000a,b; Blakemore et al., 2002).

Now we get to the sense of agency. It is hypothesized that the collection of representations and computations introduced above cause the sense of agency to be elicited. Specifically when feedback from the senses to the motor control system (actual sensory feedback), matches an internally generated prediction of what this feedback will be (predicted sensory feedback), a sense of agency is elicited (Frith et al., 2000a, p. 1784). These two representations matching in this context means that they represent the same action. The comparator model has been considered a promising explanation of the sense of agency and is able to explain some important discoveries (for recent reviews of what and how see Carruthers, 2012).

Wegner et al. have suggested that the sense of agency is elicited by a rather different kind of computation. On their model, the sense of agency is elicited when one infers that one or other of one’s mental states caused the action of one’s body (Wegner and Wheatley, 1999, p. 480; Wegner, 2003, p. 67). If correct, we can provide a proximal etiological explanation of the sense of agency by explaining how this inference is made. To make the inference the subject needs to represent their mental states qua potential causes of action, represent which body in the world is their own (i.e., a sense of embodiment) and represent the action which is occurring or has occurred. Next they must represent that one or other mental state causes the action of their body. This is the role of the inference to apparent mental state causation. According to Wegner et al. this inference is made when three facts about the relationship between the mental state and action are recognized. First, the mental state must be consistent with the action in that it specifies the action that actually occurs. Second, the mental state must seem to occur at an appropriate time before the action occurs, for example a memory of an action won’t be inferred as a cause of that action. Third the thought must appear to be the only possible cause of the action, i.e., if something else, another person or gust of wind, say, could have caused the action then the inference will not be made, or at least not made with a high degree of certainty. Wegner et al. call these the principles of “consistency”, “priority” and “exclusivity” respectively (Wegner and Wheatley, 1999, pp. 482–487; Wegner, 2003, p. 67). Like the comparator model, this account has been considered a promising approach to the sense of agency and it can explain some important discoveries (see Wegner, 2002 for reviews; Carruthers, 2010).

Numerous authors have followed the general approach of these classic hypotheses. Recently, several authors have proposed that the sense of agency is elicited by a process that integrates the output of several such computations (Synofzik et al., 2008, 2009; Moore and Fletcher, 2012; Carruthers, in press). This work is characterized by considerable progress in investigations into the computations that elicit the sense of agency. However, there is a limitation to this approach. Knowing how the representation of agency is elicited doesn’t distinguish between cases where it is elicited but remains unconscious and cases where it is elicited and the subject is aware of it. Unless we are to view the sense of agency as unique amongst all mental representations in that it can only ever be conscious, we must allow for the possibility of a representation of own agency to be elicited and remain unconscious. In the next section I consider the occasionality problem which has been presented as an objection to the comparator model, but which is generalizable to other accounts. I use this as an example to show that taking seriously the distinction between unconscious representations and a conscious sense of agency can have theoretical pay-offs in this area as each of these play different roles in the broader cognitive system. In particular I suggest that if we take this distinction seriously then the occasionality problem doesn’t arise.

The Occasionality Problem and Unconscious Representations of One’s own Agency

It would, I take it, be bizarre if there were no unconscious representations of own agency. But, is there any theoretical benefit for sense of agency research as it it currently done to considering this fact explicitly? In this section I argue that there is. That by considering the different roles conscious and unconscious representations of own agency play, in particular that only the absence conscious representations can be noticed by the subject, we can avoid the “occasionality problem”. In the next section I consider some ways in which we might attempt to explain the difference between conscious and unconscious representations of own agency. The occasionality problem, it should be noted, was originally formulated as an objection to the comparator model, but it applies equally to Wegner et al. account described above. To see the problem we first need to take a step back and consider clinical phenomena that the above models need to explain.

One of the central explananda for the accounts introduced above is thought to be delusions of alien control. This delusion, commonly seen as a symptom of schizophrenia, is a patient’s belief that not they, but rather some other agent, control the patient’s actions. This is expressed in reports such as:

I felt like an automaton, guided by a female spirit who had entered me during it [an arm movement].
I thought you [the experimenter] were varying the movements with your thoughts.
I could feel God guiding me [during an arm movement] (Spence, 2001, p. 165).

There is a growing consensus that explanations focusing on the sense of agency alone cannot explain every feature of this delusion (Synofzik et al., 2008; Carruthers, 2009). In particular, such accounts do not have the resources to explain why patients attribute the action to another specific agent. What such accounts can explain is why patients fail to attribute their actions to themselves. According to the comparator model, in healthy subjects the comparison between actual and predicted sensory feedback causes a sense of agency to be elicited for actions the subject performs. However, it is hypothesized that this computation goes wrong for the patient suffering delusions of alien control. They do not represent a match between predicted and actual sensory feedback when they should and so no sense of agency is elicited. Without this sense, the patient has no experiential basis for a self-attribution of action- they do not feel as though they perform the action- and so actions are not self-attributed. For those interested in the details of why this occurs, there is some experimental evidence that these patients have an underlying deficit in forming or using predicted sensory feedback (Frith and Done, 1989; Blakemore et al., 2000; Carruthers, 2012).

As with the comparator model, Wegner et al. inference to apparent mental state causation is unlikely to explain every feature of this delusion. Like the comparator model it may offer an account of how the sense of agency is lost. According to this view the sense of agency would be lost when one of the principles of priority, exclusivity or consistency is not met. I have argued elsewhere (forthcoming) that on this model it is reasonable to hypothesize that it is the principle of priority which is violated, as there is some evidence that patients suffering from delusions of alien control display abnormalities in the representation of the timing of their actions (Voss et al., 2010).

Now we are in a position to examine the occasionality problem (de Vignemont and Fourneret, 2004; Proust, 2006, p. 89; Synofzik et al., 2008). This problem starts from the observation that those suffering from delusions of alien control only attribute some of their actions to other agents. None of the models above appear to have, on their own, the resources to explain this observation. At the core of this objection is an accusation of a false prediction. A model like the comparator model predicts patients lack a sense of agency for their actions because they cannot represent a match at the comparison between actual and predicted sensory feedback. This does not offer us principled grounds for distinguishing those actions that the patient self-attributes and those that they attribute to others. If the comparison fails then the model should predict that patients lack a sense of agency for all of their actions. This is not the case, so the comparator model appears to be incorrect. This problem arises again when we consider Wegner et al. account. Hypothesizing that these patients fail to represent their own agency for their actions because they misrepresent the timing of their actions (thus violating the principle of priority) again fails to explain why only some actions are misattributed. In essence these accounts suggest that such patients always lack a representation of their own agency, but it seems that this lack only matters to the subject some of the time.

de Vignemont and Fourneret, (2004, p. 9) have suggested that the system which elicits the sense of agency, whether it be the comparator model or something else, fails only occasionally and in a context specific way. If it is true that the comparator or inference to apparent mental state causation face intermittent failures, then the occasionality problem disappears. However, the questions of how and why the mechanism occasionally fails have not been answered and nothing about the actions themselves or features such as their personal significance affect whether or not they are self-attributed (Proust, 2006, p. 89). More importantly there is no evidence independent of reports of the delusion that the comparator model or the representation of the timing of actions fails only occasionally for such patients. Until such evidence is forthcoming it is difficult for this solution to shake the appearance of being ad hoc and it is worth considering other accounts. More so, as I will suggest below, if we consider the different roles conscious and unconscious representations of own agency play in cognition, which we should do anyway, then there is no need to add additional assumptions of this type.

An argument from the occasionality problem against the hypotheses described, like that sketched above, assumes that the result of the process leading to a representation of own agency is a conscious sense of agency. If we drop this assumption the problem needn’t arise. To see why this assumption is being made let us consider the relationship between experiences and delusions. So, what is the evidence that patients suffering delusions of alien control lack a sense of agency? One might be tempted to think that they say so. But, this isn’t typically the case. Rather a deficit in a conscious sense of agency is inferred from the fact that patients attribute their own actions to another agent. This inference is justified by some standard assumptions in the study of delusions. The state of the art in delusions research is strongly influenced by Maher (1988, 1974) hypothesis that delusions are attempts to explain anomalous experience. Now there may be controversy regarding whether this explanatory attempt involves normal or deficient reasoning (Davies et al., 2002; Gerrans, 2002), but both sides agree that the delusion arises from an attempt to make sense of an anomalous experience. This supposition is not universally accepted, of course (Campbell, 2001; Bayne and Pacherie, 2004), but what matters here is that this assumption is needed if we are to justify inferring that patients lack a sense of agency from their acts of other attribution. We can justify this inference if the lack of a sense of agency is the anomalous experience which the delusion of alien control is an attempt to make sense of. So first, why should the absence of a sense of agency be an anomaly that needs to be explained? Well, it would be, if a conscious sense of agency typically accompanied one’s actions. If this is the case, we would expect that its absence would be noticed and felt to be in need of explanation. After all, if one feels one’s body move, but one does not seem to be the agent behind the movement, then one would naturally search for a reason that one moved.

We see this assumption that there is a conscious sense of agency accompanying all actions at play in the argument from the occasionality problem. The general failure of a process like the comparator should mean that the sense of agency that is usually present is not. This is an anomaly to be explained by the patient. The patient should show delusions of alien control for all of their actions, but they do not, therefore the comparator model (or which ever process we are considering) is false, quod erat demonstrandum (QED).

To avoid this conclusion, all we need do is drop the assumption that a conscious sense of agency always accompanies our actions. Instead, we need only hypothesize that a representation of own agency which may or may not be conscious accompanies our actions. In other words, the output of processes like the comparator or inference to apparent mental state causation is a representation of the subject’s agency which is sometimes conscious and sometimes not. An absence of a sense of agency is thus not always an anomaly which the patient need explain. An absence of representation is not a representation of absence, as the saying goes, and it is particularly not a representation of absence to the subject. It is the subject noticing (i.e., representing to themselves) that the sense of agency is absent which is hypothesized to lead to delusions of alien control, not it’s mere absence. This noticing of the absence will occur when the sense of agency is expected and so we might say the absence of a sense of agency is only an anomaly when the subject expects to experience it.

A possible objection to this line of response is to assert, based on introspection, that a conscious sense of agency accompanies all of our actions in the normal case. As such, it is always expected and any absence is an anomaly to be explained. However, introspection gives us poor grounds to assume that there is a ubiquitous sense of agency. What would lead one to assume that there is a conscious sense of agency accompanying every action? We can see where this assumption comes from, and how poorly grounded it is, by an analogy with visual consciousness. A favorite example purporting to show that we are not conscious of as much as we think we are comes from Dennett (1991). This example is so easy to replicate that given minimal resources you can do it yourself right now. All you need is a well shuffled deck of playing cards. Stare at a point on a wall in front of you. It is important that you continue to stare at this point throughout the entire demonstration. Without looking randomly select a card and hold it out to one side at arm’s length. Gradually move it toward the center of your vision. At what point can you see the color and number on the card? The typical finding is that it is only about 2 or 3°1 from the point one is looking at that these features become visible (Dennett, 1991, p. 54). The reason for this is to do with the nature of photoreceptors outside of the fovea on the retina and need not concern us here. What I wish to draw attention to, however, is that on first experiencing this demonstration most people seem surprised (Dennett, 1991, p. 68). Pre-theoretically, we expect to be able to discriminate objects easily when they are presented in our peripheral vision. Dennett suggests, and I agree, that this expectation is based on a folk-theoretical belief that vision presents us with a relatively uniformly clear and colored world in which objects are easily distinguished. But, as this simple demonstration shows, as do other more rigorous experiments, e.g., Brooks et al. (1980), this is at best only true of the foveated world, and even then with some exceptions (Caplovitz et al., 2008).2

Why do we believe this is true of our peripheral vision? We can speculate on many possible reasons for this. One reason might be that things we use as public representations of what we see, e.g., photographs or videos, are somewhat like this. There may be a misbegotten analogy between visual depictions and visual experience. Another more universal proposal comes from Schwitzgebel (2008: p. 255) as well as Dennett (1991: p. 68) who suggests that objects in our peripheral vision appear distinct and colored because they are when we look at them. Whenever one looks to see what object is in one’s periphery one finds it clear, distinct and colored. As such we tend to assume that we always experience those objects as such. This claim provides us with a useful analogy for understanding why accounts like the comparator model and Wegner et al. inference to apparent mental state causation needn’t suppose that a conscious sense of agency accompanies every action.

If a model like one of those above is right, then it would be true that our actions are normally accompanied by a representation of our own agency. However, the subject need not be aware of their own agency. The representation could be unconscious but, because the representation is formed with every action, it is there whenever we go “looking” for it, or more generally when it is expected to occur to the subject, i.e., consciously. Just as objects in our periphery always appear clear, distinct and colored when we go looking for them, our representation of agency is always experienced when we go looking for it, thus meeting our expectations. Just as this may lead us to believe that objects in our periphery always appear clear, distinct and colored, this may lead us to believe we always experience a sense of agency accompanying our actions rather than merely representing it.

Accepting this conclusion then, the comparator model or the inference to apparent mental state causation need not suppose that representing one’s own agency is always a conscious sense of agency. Still, one may wonder, how exactly does this affect the occasionality problem? After all, it would still seem to be the case that these models predict that the unconscious representation of agency would be missing for every action performed by the patient suffering delusions of alien control, so should the model still predict that the patient would show the delusion for every action?

The answer to this is no. However, to see why, we need to return to the purported role of consciousness in the formation of delusions such as delusions of alien control. Recall Maher’s proposal that delusions are attempts to make sense of anomalous experiences. In the case we are interested in here, the delusion of alien control arises because the patient attempts to make sense of the absence of a sense of agency. They expect a sense of agency, but it is not there when they “look”, giving rise to an anomalous experience that must be explained. On this view then, an absent sense of agency is only anomalous when it is expected. A subject would not notice the absence of an unconscious representation. It is only when the representation would otherwise become conscious that its absence would be noticeable. Again the absence of the representation is not the same as the subject representing to themselves that something is absent. The upshot of this is that if we hypothesize that the comparator or inference produces an unconscious representation of agency, which only becomes conscious when it is needed by the subject (say in self-recognition or introspecting to see what experiences one has), we find that the occasionality problem is no problem at all.

It is not so much that the problem is solved as it doesn’t arise in the first place, all because conscious and unconscious representations of own agency play different roles in cognition. Only conscious representations can be expected by the subject, and only their absence can be noticed by the subject. The normal case is that actions are not accompanied by a conscious sense of agency (only an unconscious representation) and so a lack of this feeling is typically not an anomaly that the patient suffering delusions of control needs to explain. It is only when they would “look for” (however this analogy is to be cashed out mechanistically—see below) this representation that it is expected and so its absence is an anomaly that needs to be explained.

This consideration of the occasionality problem shows us that there are theoretical benefits to taking seriously the distinction between conscious and unconscious representations of own agency. By doing so and considering the different roles conscious and unconscious representations play in cognition we see that the occasionality problem doesn’t arise. As such we don’t need to add assumptions to our models, such as assuming that they only fail some of the time, which lack supporting evidence. However, we do have a new set of issues to consider. What then is the analogy of “looking for” the representation of agency that produces the expectation of the sense of agency needed to explain delusions of alien control? This question is no less than what distinguishes an unconscious representation of agency from a conscious sense of agency, and this is what Dennett has called the “Hard Question” of consciousness.

The Hard Question

The approach to the sense of agency used by traditional accounts such as the comparator model and the inference to mental state causation are only designed to answer one question about the sense of agency: how is a representation of one’s own agency elicited? This is a vitally important question in the study of the sense of agency, but to think it is the only question is to treat awareness as the end of the line of a computation, the dreaded Cartesian Theatre, and to deny the possibility of an unconscious representation of one’s own agency. In addition to this question, we also need to ask of accounts of agency what Dennett calls the “Hard Question” [not to be confused with any purported “Hard Problems” (Chalmers, 2003)3]: after the representation of own agency is elicited by one or other of these mechanisms, well, then what happens (Dennett, 1991, p. 255)? What is the difference between a representation of my own agency of which I become aware and one that languishes forever in the apparent irrelevance of unconsciousness?

The analogy employed above of “looking” for the sense of agency suggests one possible answer. Perhaps an unconscious representation of agency becomes a conscious representation when the subject’s attention is directed to it? In the following section I consider and discuss this possibility. Having found this wanting, I consider a further possibility, that the answer to the Hard Question is that the representation enters into the mechanisms required for verbal report. I argue that this answer is also unsatisfactory, as it is inconsistent with behavioral evidence of a sense of agency in non-verbal animals. These first two options are Functionalist theories. They propose that consciousness is playing a certain role in cognition. Although these two specific proposals seem to fail on empirical grounds it is important to note that other Functionalist theories, notably those that identify consciousness with multiple functional roles remain open. Finally, I propose a radical alternative suggesting that the answer to the Hard Question is to be found not in the uses to which representations are put within a cognitive system, but in the nature of the representations themselves. Regardless of which of the two research agendas individuals chose to pursue, it is clear that we do not have an answer to the Hard Question for the sense of agency nor do we spend enough time thinking about it.

Attention

One potential answer to the Hard Question is attention. Such an answer is suggested by well-known cases of inattentional blindness, where subjects fail to see perfectly obvious stimuli (like a woman in a gorilla suit) simply because their attention is directed elsewhere (Mack and Rock, 1998). More specifically, let us hypothesize that the difference between an unconscious representation of agency and the conscious sense of agency is that the conscious representation is attended to. If this is true then we would have a clear research agenda: understand how and why a representation of agency is selected or not selected for attention and understand the mechanisms of attention.

Such a view has not been developed in detail for the sense of agency; indeed, I am suggesting here that consideration of the Hard Question with respect to the sense of agency has been neglected almost entirely. Notwithstanding, attention based accounts of consciousness do have some currency in the explanation of perceptual consciousness. Prinz (2000, 2012), for example, advocates such a view. Unfortunately evidence is mounting that attention is not a good answer to the Hard Question, at least not on its own, as attention is not sufficient for consciousness. That is, subjects can attend to things of which they are not conscious. Here I discuss one well-studied example.

Norman et al. (2013) have provided compelling evidence that subjects can visually attend to objects, namely two-dimensional shapes, even when they cannot consciously see those objects. They start from prior observations of the effects of taking two-dimensional shapes as the objects of attention in color discrimination tasks. In these tasks, subjects are asked to indicate with a button press the color of a circle. Before the target colored circle appears a supraliminal spatial cue is presented. In the trials of interest here the, cue appears some distance from where the target circle will ultimately appear. However, it may appear in the same shape as the cue or a different shape. See Figure 1 for an example layout.

FIGURE 1  

Figure 1. The spatial layout of the stimuli. In the center we see a fixation cross, above and below are two rectangles. A cue appears at the x and disappears, followed by a target at one of the two circles. The subject’s task is to indicate the color of the target. Subjects respond faster to cues appearing within the same shape as the cue, even though they are as far from the cue as the target in the other shape.

When the target appears in the same object as the cue, response times are facilitated (Egly et al., 1994). Norman et al. take this as characteristic of attention to such shapes.

Norman et al. repeated this experiment, but made the shapes invisible. They presented on a screen an array of Gabor patches whose orientation rapidly alternated between vertical and horizontal. Within the array rectangles were defined by Gabor patches flickering out of phase with the remainder of the array (Norman et al., 2013, p. 838). When the background patches were vertical, those defining the rectangle were horizontal, and vice versa. Observing the array subjects reported seeing flickering Gabor patches, but were unable to see the rectangles. Indeed, subjects were no better than chance when asked to guess whether or not such flickering displays contained rectangles (Norman et al., 2013, p. 840). Despite the invisibility of the shapes there was a facilitation effect in the color discrimination task characteristic of attention being directed at the shapes. That is, subjects were faster at responding to targets which appeared in the same shape as the cue, than for targets which appeared the same distance from the cue but in a different shape (Norman et al., 2013, p. 839).

In this study we see an effect characteristic of attention being directed at an object, despite the object being invisible. This demonstrates that subjects can attend to shapes of which they are not conscious. In general, this also suggests that attention is not sufficient for consciousness. Without a reason to think that the sense of agency will be an exception to this, it seems unlikely that attention will answer the Hard Question for the sense of agency.

Reportability

Often we take it that we can be confident that a subject experiences something if they are able to verbally report it. Although such reports are susceptible to a variety of introspective omissions and commissions (Dennett, 1991, p. 96; Schwitzgebel, 2008), in practise, verbal reports (especially questionnaire responses) are very often treated as the best way to operationalize experience. Indeed the theories of the sense of agency introduced above are built on studies using questionnaires to ask subjects to report their experiences of agency. At the heart of this approach lies an intuition that, however imperfectly, we are able to talk about those things that we experience, but not those things that reside in our unconscious minds. This intuition suggests an approach to the Hard Question: perhaps the difference between conscious and unconscious representations is just that conscious representations are available for report. Although such an approach would be highly controversial (Block, 2007), there is no approach to the Hard Question that is not controversial, and this proposal remains live.

That said, we do have strong reason to doubt that it is reportability that distinguishes conscious and unconscious representations of own agency, as there are many non-verbal animals that display evidence of experiencing a sense of agency. This suggests that being available for verbal report is not necessary for a conscious sense of agency.

Good evidence for this comes from the mirror self-recognition test. This test, first proposed by Gallup (1970), involves marking an animal surreptitiously (usually when anesthetized) with a non-irritating, odorless dye on a part of the animal’s body that cannot be seen without a mirror (such as the forehead). An animal is deemed to pass the mirror self recognition test if there is a significant increase in mark directed behavior coincident with the animal observing itself in the mirror (Gallup, 1970, p. 87). Such behavior indicates that the animal has recognized itself in the mirror as it uses the mirror to direct actions towards itself. A sense of agency is needed to pass such tests. To learn to recognize oneself in a mirror one needs to realize that the actions one sees in the mirror are equivalent to the actions one is currently performing (Povinelli, 2001, p. 855). In order to recognize oneself in a mirror, then, one needs to know (amongst many other things) what action one is performing. This is a function of the sense of agency (Povinelli and Cant, 1995). As such, passing the test is good evidence for a sense of agency.

Where this creates a problem for using reportability as an answer to the Hard Question is in the fact that many non-verbal animals pass the mirror self-recognition test. This includes chimpanzees (Gallup, 1970), orang-utans, human raised gorillas (Povinelli and Cant, 1995), bottlenose dolphins (Marten and Psarakos, 1994) and European magpies (Prior et al., 2008). These animals thus show evidence of experiencing a conscious sense of agency. As such, verbal report does not seem necessary for consciousness, and thus investigating how unconscious representations of agency become available for verbal report is a non-starter as a solution to the Hard Question.

The solutions considered so far to the Hard Question are Functionalist theories. They posit that for a representation to be conscious is for it to be used a certain way, say be being attended to or by being made available for report. On such views it is use which constitutes consciousness. Whilst the two options considered here do seem like non-starters, there are other Functionalist theories available. Other accounts, such as Dennett (1991) multiple drafts model Dennett (1991) or Baars (1988) global workspace Baars (1988), suggest that consciousness is not a single use within a cognitive system, but rather a conglomeration of many uses and these options remain live. My point here is not to solve the problem of what distinguishes conscious and unconscious representations, but merely to suggest that in sense of agency research this is a problem we should spend more time on. Next, I turn to a theoretical basis for approaching the Hard Question that offers a fundamentally different kind of solution to the options considered so far.

Vehicle Theories

Vehicle theories of consciousness answer the Hard Question in a rather different way. The key issue we are getting at is: what is the difference between an unconscious and a conscious representation of own agency? The proposals considered thus far have followed Dennett in hypothesizing that this difference is a difference between how unconscious and conscious representations are processed (e.g., are they subject to attention or made available for verbal report). In other words the difference is a matter of what is done with the representation. Such approaches are Functionalist theories in that they consider the particular use of a representation within a cognitive system to constitute that representation’s being conscious.

Vehicle theories, in contrast, hypothesize that the difference between conscious and unconscious representations is not how they are processed, but in the nature of the representation itself (O’Brien and Opie, 1999, p. 128). The nature of conscious vehicles of representation (also known as representation bearers) is hypothesized to be different to the nature of unconscious representing vehicles. On such views consciousness is a way of representing the world using different kinds of vehicle than those used by unconscious representations. On this kind of view the answer to the Hard Question is not “and then some additional processing occurs” but rather, “and then the vehicle of representation is changed from one form to another”.

O’Brien and Opie propose a general answer to this question making use of distinctions in kinds of representing vehicles offered by Dennett (1982). In particular they focus on a distinction between “explicit” representations which are: “physically distinct objects, each possessed of a single semantic value” (O’Brien and Opie, 1999, p. 133) and “potentially explicit” and “tacit”4 representations which are to be understood in terms of a computational system’s capacity to make certain information explicit in the above sense. In general, O’Brien and Opie hypothesize that we are conscious of all and only things that are represented in an explicit form. All unconscious representations would then take the form of potentially explicit or tacit representations.

According to this version of a Vehicle Theory, a conscious sense of agency would be an explicit representation of own agency. That is, a discrete vehicle, such as a stable pattern of activity across a layer of neurons (O’Brien and Opie, 1999, p. 138), with that content. An unconscious representation of agency would not be a discrete vehicle, but a disposition in the cognitive system to produce such a representation. To allow for unconscious representations of own agency on such a view, the output of the comparator model or Wegner et al. inference needs to be reconceived. It is not an explicit representation of own agency, but rather a change in the dispositions of a computational system to produce such a representation.

If such an approach is correct then we have a new way to approach the Hard Question for the sense of agency. How is the output of the comparator model, or whichever account we ultimately agree on, made explicit? Why is it the case that it is sometimes not made explicit? Is this a matter of the subject metaphorically “looking for” it, if so, how would that be understood more literally?

The benefit of taking this approach is that it offers a new kind of answer to the Hard Question by offering a new conception of what properties of a computational system distinguish conscious from unconscious representations. With this reconceptualization we can deploy O’Brien and Opie’s hypothesis for the sense of agency and answer the Hard Question in a way that doesn’t seem to be falsified like the other answers considered here. In addition, a research agenda is set: why and how is a representation of own agency sometimes made explicit? Of course this question has not yet been answered. Indeed whichever form of the Hard Question we prefer it is clear that we have not yet answered it, although there seem to be two promising avenues to approach it. And so I implore us, as a community to ask of ourselves, now that we have made progress in understanding how a representation of own agency is elicited, then what happens?

Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that in order to explain the sense of agency we need to move beyond proximal etiological explanations and consider the Hard Question. Although such accounts, including the comparator model and the inference to apparent mental sate causation, are powerful so far as they go, they fail to distinguish between conscious and unconscious representations of own agency. As a consideration of the occasionality problem suggests, not only is this a real distinction, but such representations can play very different roles in cognition. Finally, I have suggested that there are ways we can approach the Hard Question, and although some of the specifics of certain particular approaches might seem like non-starters on empirical grounds it should be clear that there are alternative approaches, both Functionalist and vehicle, available and specific questions to ask. Now what happens?

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

1. ^ As a rough guide 1 degree is approximately the angle subtended by a point either side of your thumb nail held at arms length.
2. ^ Now of course in the normal case our eyes saccade constantly allowing us to build a much more detailed visual representation than is possible from staring at a fixation point making the area of clear vision significantly larger than the 2 to 3° observable in a fixation task. This doesn’t affect the central Dennettian claim that periphery is not clear and colored in the way that we would typically assume. Nor do we typically reflect on howmuch moving our eyes is necessary for seeing the way we do.
3. ^ The supposed “Hard Problem” of consciousness is the problem of explaining how mental and physical states give rise to conscious experience, given that it seems that no explanation in terms of the structure or function of mental states is sufficient to explain this (Chalmers, 2003). This is a problem closely tied with mysterian and dualistic approaches to consciousness. In contrast the “Hard Question” is a question within the materialist tradition, which works from arguments that a structural or functional explanation of consciousness is possible in principle, and asks what is the difference between a conscious and unconscious mental representation.
4. ^ There are differences between “potentially explicit” and “tacit” representations. These differences become important when we consider the kinds of computations being performed within a cognitive system, but won’t play a role in this short statement of O’Brien and Opie’s hypothesis regarding consciousness (indeed O’Brien and Opie argue that a Vehicle Theory could only be true for connectionist systems and that the “potentially explicit” versus “tacit” distinction does not apply to such systems).

References available at the Frontiers site.