EXPERIENCE concerns consciousness — undoubtedly one of the most significant scientific challenges of the 21st century. Consciousness refers to the felt qualities of mental states: the sweetness of a banana, the distinctive hue of International Klein Blue, the anxiety associated with one’s to-do list. Such conscious mental states all have phenomenal character (i.e. qualia): There is something it is like for us to be in each of these states; there is nothing it was like for the neural network Alpha Go to win against
the South-Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol, or for a stone to be that stone. As a scientific problem, consciousness has been the object of intense scrutiny since the beginning of the 1990s, essentially through a highly interdisciplinary research program dedicated to understanding its neural mechanisms. Today, the “search for the neural correlates of consciousness” proceeds apace, and so does theory development. But there is also a sense that the field has now reached an uneasy stasis of sorts; a sense that in focusing almost exclusively on what consciousness does (that is, on the difference between what we can do with and without consciousness), we have lost track of what we were trying to explain in the first place, namely why it is the case that we feel anything at all. In other words: What is the function of consciousness?
Thus, contra the prevalent sentiment that “what it feels like” plays no functional role in shaping what we do, EXPERIENCE takes the opposite perspective and defends the idea that what we feel is fundamental to everything that we do.
To develop this perspective, the project adopts a multidisciplinary strategy deployed over four work packages. The first work package (WP1) leverages philosophical methods and aims to (1) analyse the extant literature and question the distinction between the functional and phenomenal aspects of consciousness, (2) show that conscious experience has intrinsic value for the subjects whose experiene it is, and (3) to unify different fields in which the central notions of value, valence, utility, reward, affect have been used.
WP2, by far the most substantial work package, is dedicated to testing two claims. The first is that all conscious perception is valenced. The second is that only conscious perception is valenced. The first claim amounts to hypothesize that conscious perception is always associated with an affective disposition. Thus, we have attitudes and dispositions (micro-valences) even towards supposedly neutral objects such as teapots and umbrellas. Different lines of research aim to test this hypothesis, seeking to analyse (1) how micro valence permeates every perception, whether about affect or not (e.g. similarity judgments), (2) where micro-valence is represented in the brain, and (3) how it relates the representations embedded in neural networks. To do so, we use representational similarity analysis, which makes it possible to compare the structure of different “quality spaces”. To address our second claim, we manipulate visibility such that some items fail to be perceived consciously. The question is then: Do such stimuli continue to elicit affective reactions? The literature is not consistent on this issue, with some studies claiming “unconscious affect” is possible and others not.
WP3 examines motivation, and the possibilty of unconscious motivation. It tests the claim that intentional action can only be motivated by valenced subjective experience. In other words: The actions I choose to carry out cannot be driven by unconscious determinants — for indeed, what would be the point of a rewarding incentive that you fail to perceive? Different lines of enquiry are aimed at showing that existing research fails to convincingly demonstrate that unconscious motivation is possible.
Finally, WP4 will leverage suggestion, placebo and hypnosis to show that what we feel can trump reality. In other words: what we do is determined by what we believe to be the case rather than by what is actually the case. Here again, different empirical lines of research will test this claim.
