What zombies can't do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness

Could an individual act and speak just like other individuals without having any internal conscious experience? Belief in the possibility of so-called philosophical zombies serves as a litmus test for whether someone believes in some form of mind-body dualism or materialism. This chapter focuses on a related hypothesis that is emerging within psychology referred to as the psychological zombie hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that our behaviors and judgements are produced by an 'inner-zombie' whose mental work does not depend on conscious awareness, and that those mental operations which are typically accompanied by conscious awareness do not rely on awareness to generate the operations and their outputs. This hypothesis suggests that mental operations which are typically accompanied by conscious awareness can be produced in the absence of conscious awareness, thus demonstrating the superfluousness of awareness.

[1]  F. Craik,et al.  Depth of processing and the retention of words , 1975 .

[2]  Bertram Gawronski,et al.  On the propositional nature of cognitive consistency: Dissonance changes explicit, but not implicit attitudes , 2004 .

[3]  A. Reber.  Implicit learning of artificial grammars , 1967 .

[4]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Thinking about the Self from a Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective , 2007 .

[5]  C. Frith,et al.  Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. , 2003, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[6]  J. Mazziotta,et al.  Modulating emotional responses: effects of a neocortical network on the limbic system , 2000, Neuroreport.

[7]  L. Festinger,et al.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , 2017 .

[8]  Lawrence Weiskrantz,et al.  A Perimetric Study of Visual Field Defects in Monkeys , 1963 .

[9]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Social cognitive neuroscience: a review of core processes. , 2007, Annual review of psychology.

[10]  Bertram Gawronski,et al.  At the boundaries of automaticity: negation as reflective operation. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Why there are complementary learning systems in the hippocampus and neocortex: insights from the successes and failures of connectionist models of learning and memory. , 1995, Psychological review.

[12]  Jonathan Evans.  Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. , 2008, Annual review of psychology.

[13]  R. Kirk.  Sentience and Behaviour , 1974 .

[14]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[15]  Tanya L. Chartrand,et al.  Automatic Activation of Impression Formation and Memorization Goals: Nonconscious Goal Priming Reproduces Effects of Explicit Task Instructions , 1996 .

[16]  S. Rauch,et al.  Masked Presentations of Emotional Facial Expressions Modulate Amygdala Activity without Explicit Knowledge , 1998, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[17]  S. Sloman.  The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. , 1996 .

[18]  S. Chaiken,et al.  Dual-process theories in social psychology , 1999 .

[19]  Joan Y. Chiao,et al.  An Event-related fMRI Study of Artificial Grammar Learning in a Balanced Chunk Strength Design , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[20]  M. Gluck,et al.  Interactive memory systems in the human brain , 2001, Nature.

[21]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion , 2003, Science.

[22]  L Weiskrantz,et al.  Visual capacity in the hemianopic field following a restricted occipital ablation. , 1974, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[23]  L. Ross,et al.  Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. , 1981 .

[24]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. , 1993, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[25]  D. Kahneman,et al.  When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End , 1993 .

[26]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Integrating automatic and controlled processes into neurocognitive models of social cognition , 2006, Brain Research.

[27]  J. Bargh,et al.  Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[28]  J. Metcalfe,et al.  A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower. , 1999, Psychological review.

[29]  A. Dijksterhuis,et al.  A Theory of Unconscious Thought , 2006, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[30]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Evidence-based and intuition-based self-knowledge: an FMRI study. , 2004, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[31]  Peter Carruthers,et al.  The illusion of conscious will , 2007, Synthese.

[32]  N. Costes,et al.  Haemodynamic brain responses to acute pain in humans: sensory and attentional networks. , 1999, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[33]  Von O. Leirer,et al.  Cognitive representation of personality impressions: Organizational processes in first impression formation. , 1980 .

[34]  Jennifer A. Mangels,et al.  A Neostriatal Habit Learning System in Humans , 1996, Science.

[35]  D. Schacter,et al.  Do Amnesics Exhibit Cognitive Dissonance Reduction? The Role of Explicit Memory and Attention in Attitude Change , 2001, Psychological science.

[36]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures , 1996, Pain.

[37]  M. Lieberman,et al.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging responses relate to differences in real-world social experience. , 2007, Emotion.

[38]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Reflexion and reflection: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference , 2002 .

[39]  J. Brehm.  Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. , 1956, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[40]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  The X- and C-Systems: The Neural Basis of Automatic and Controlled Social Cognition. , 2007 .

[41]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  I Know You Are But What Am I?!: Neural Bases of Self- and Social Knowledge Retrieval in Children and Adults , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[42]  C. N. Macrae,et al.  Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study , 2002, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[43]  Matthew D. Lieberman,et al.  Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[44]  M. Velmans.  Is human information processing conscious? , 1991, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[45]  H. Markus.  Self-schemata and processing information about the self. , 1977 .

[46]  Eliot R. Smith,et al.  Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use in person perception and stereotyping: simulation with a recurrent connectionist network. , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[47]  M. Packard,et al.  Differential effects of fornix and caudate nucleus lesions on two radial maze tasks: evidence for multiple memory systems , 1989, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[48]  M. Bushnell,et al.  Pain affect encoded in human anterior cingulate but not somatosensory cortex. , 1997, Science.

[49]  C. Nathan DeWall,et al.  Evidence that logical reasoning depends on conscious processing , 2008, Consciousness and Cognition.

[50]  J. Bargh,et al.  The perception–behavior expressway: Automatic effects of social perception on social behavior. , 2001 .

[51]  M. J. Rae,et al.  On the Mind , 1855, Journal of psychological medicine and mental pathology.

[52]  D. Bem,et al.  Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: on the salience of premanipulation attitudes. , 1970, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[53]  Z. Kunda,et al.  Stereotypes and the Construal of Individuating Information , 1993 .

[54]  Scott T. Grafton,et al.  Functional Mapping of Sequence Learning in Normal Humans , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.