The Refrigerator Light Problem: A Puzzle for Consciousness Researchers

The Refrigerator Light Problem

Is consciousness thick or thin? In other words, how pervasive is consciousness? Are we conscious all the time? Or just some of the time?

When we reflect on our experience consciousness usually seems pervasive - we look around the room and everything seems smooth and seamless like we are conscious from the time we are awake to the time we fall asleep - but are we wrong about that? Is it even possible for us to be wrong about something like that?

Analogously, we can ask whether the refrigerator light is always on. Naively, it seems like it’s on even when the door is closed, but is it really? Every time we open it to test our theory the light is on. The question is easily answered because we can investigate the design and function of refrigerators and conclude that the light is designed to turn off when the door is closed. We could even cut a hole in the door to see for ourselves.

But the engineering approach won’t help us with whether consciousness is pervasive because we currently have no clear consensus on how consciousness works or how to build a conscious robot or what we would even use to test whether a robot is conscious.

The problem is that every time we want to test whether consciousness is pervasive by introspecting on our experience, the act of introspection corrupts the data. We never get a "pure sample" because in order to test whether there is experience without introspection we have to use introspection.

The refrigerator light problem boils down to trying to decide between two views:

The Thick View: Consciousness seems pervasive because it is pervasive, but we often cannot access or report this consciousness.
The Thin View: Consciousness seems pervasive, but this is just an illusion.

The Illusion of Consciousness

Julian Jaynes was a famous “thin theorist”. He wrote:

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of…It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that doesn’t have any light shining on it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not. (Origin of Consciousness, 1976, p. 23)

But was Jaynes right?

Consider the famous case of the absent-minded driver. You have been driving on the highway for hours. It's late. You're tired. All of a sudden you “wake up” but can’t remember the past 60 seconds. There is a gap in your memory, like someone spliced the tape of your experience together.

Were you conscious during your time of absent mindedness?

On the one hand your memory is blank - you don’t remember being conscious, just like when you wake up from deep dreamless sleep.

But on the other hand, you managed to stay on the road so you must have been aware of some elements of the road. Awareness implies consciousness so you were conscious. This is the thick view: it says you were conscious while you were absent-minded you just don’t have consciousness of your consciousness during that time. In contrast, the thin view says that you were not conscious during your time of absent mindedness.

So how do we determine which theory is correct?

Introspection is of no help in deciding between the two theories because it’s indeterminate - the phenomenology suggests that the thick view is true but thin theory has an explanation of the data as well: it predicts that introspection would lean towards thick theory.

Although our introspection seems to tell us that consciousness is pervasive the thin theorist believes this is a case of the mechanisms of consciousness generating a false sense of pervasiveness. Julian Jaynes thought that one of the functions of consciousness was to knit together the gaps in between all our experiences so as to generate a “seamless” and “smooth” phenomenal reality.

It’s only when consciousness breaks down that we begin to notice the gaps.

Empirical science won't resolve the debate either

But if introspection is of no help, why can’t we just use the tools of empirical science to test the two different theories?

The problem is that the two different views will interpret the data differently.

(source: wikipedia)

Imagine we took human subjects and had them do a change blindness test, a common problem used to test for the neural correlates of consciousness. In the test the subject is presented with two similar images. The images flash back and forth and you have to find the “difference”. As soon as you become conscious of the different you press a button, which is then correlated with neural activity. In principle scientists should be able to determine the neural correlates of consciousness. Then it’s only a matter of determining whether those same neural mechanisms are active in, e.g., the absent-minded driver.

The problem, however, is that thin and thick theorists are going to interpret the results of the change blindness study differently. The thick theorist might say that what the test is really probing for is not consciousness itself but when we become aware of our consciousness and are able to report our consciousness with the button - but crucially for the thick theorist being conscious is different than reporting consciousness. That is, change blindness is testing for reports of consciousness but not consciousness itself. For the thick theorist it’s possible that we were conscious of the difference between the two photos before we were ever able to report our consciousness.

Another way in which the thick theorist might think about it is this: the thick theorist will say that just because there was no report of consciousness that doesn't mean there was no consciousness. The thin theorist in contrast is going to say: if the subject didn't report the consciousness, there was no consciousness. Some thin theorists will go further and say that consciousness cannot occur independently of reporting consciousness.

Conclusion

So here we are, with a seemingly simple question: How pervasive is consciousness?

Yet we are unable to either use introspection or empirical science to easily answer the question.

Why?

Part of the problem is we have to use our introspection to first determine what it is we want to explain: or we trying to explain a phenomena that is pervasive or one that is not pervasive but makes you think it's pervasive? Otherwise we won’t have a target for our scientific theorizing. But depending on whether the thick or thin view is true, our introspection may or may not be misleading about the nature of what it is we are trying to explain. So we need empirical science to help us decide between the two theories. But the two theories themselves give different interpretations of the empirical evidence.

The problem can be generalized for almost all consciousness research. The state of consciousness science is in a very dire predicament.

a steemit original
images: pixabay, wikipedia

For more information on the refrigerator light problem, see:

Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A., & Wilken, P. (Eds.). (2009). The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Blackmore, S. (2002). There Is No Stream of Consciousness. What is all this? What is all this stuff around me; this stream of experiences that I seem to be having all the time? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(5-6), 17-28.