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From: Mandel%pco@HI-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Discussion of "consciousness"
Message-ID: <870113160008.186005@HIS-PHOENIX-MULTICS.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 13-Jan-87 11:00:00 EST
Article-I.D.: HIS-PHOE.870113160008.186005
Posted: Tue Jan 13 11:00:00 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 22:35:20 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mandel%pco@HI-MULTICS.ARPA (Mark A. Mandel)
Organization: The ARPA Internet
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Approved: ailist@sri-stripe.arpa


 >   I would say that if one is "conscious" of an event, then
 >   the features/schema of that event are available to his
 >   goal-setter/planner for planning of future behavior ( and
 >   vice-versa ).

This is true, but its (in this context) implied converse is not.
Clinical psychology furnishes ample examples of goalsetting/planning
that is not accessible to the person's conscious awareness in the usual
ways.  Q:  "Why did you walk into that restaurant?" A:  "No particular
reason, I just suddenly felt like having a cup of coffee." Further
probing by the therapist brings forth the awareness that certain
circumstances of weather, recent experience, and hearing a song on the
radio, all associated with an emotion-packed memory of a dead friend,
had "caused" the person to attempt to reproduce an occasion on which he
had met with that friend.

The example is wholly fictitious, but this sort of hidden cause comes up
all the time in therapy.  Evidently some process in the person planned
to meet the friend by going into the restaurant, although the person was
not consciously aware of the plan or the conditions that had produced
it; if he had been, he would certainly have recognized the impossibility
of meeting someone who is dead.  And if we say that he was aware of the
conditions and planned consciously, but immediately forgot the entire
operation, how do we explain (except by special pleading) his failure to
recognize the unreality of the plan?  The only solution is to accept
unconscious planning.

So we cannot use "subject has access to event X for purposes of
planning" as a criterion for "subject is conscious of event X."