CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Philosophy 41
conflict was primarily over the disagreement between Shen Xiu of the North who taught that
enlightenment was a gradual process and Hui Neng of the South who taught that enlightenment
was sudden and instantaneous. Certain critical Zen historians have downplayed this
issue and argued that the split was due more to politics and personal ambitions. This paper
argues that the conflict was based on opposing definitions of both consciousness and enlightenment
which were only alluded to by the recorded gradual verses sudden enlightenment
debate. The Northern school believed that consciousness was an objective, quantifiable and
even malleable entity to be trained and molded. Their definition of enlightenment was the total
purification of consciousness that took place over time. The Southern school headed by Hui
Neng, believed that consciousness was a subjective, unquantifiable experience. They believed
that enlightenment was achieved by the utter dissolution of all preconceptions, which in turn
led to an experience of complete, unmitigated self awareness. As many modern discussions
over consciousness involve extrapolations from primary and secondary sources concerning
Zen Buddhism, this historical debate is very important to contemporary discussions over the
nature of consciousness; for this medieval disagreement lies at the root of all subsequent
views of consciousness found within the Zen tradition. This paper takes an in depth look at
the both primary and secondary sources regarding the portrayal of consciousness during the
golden age of Zen, paying special attention to differing descriptions of consciousness, definitions
of enlightenment and meditative practices as taught by these two competing schools.
The purpose of this paper is to shed light onto the historical backdrop upon which our contemporary
discussions over the nature of consciousness are built and to both clarify and stimulate
further scholarship on Zen’s notion of consciousness. C14
3 The Detectable Consciousness Joy CY Hung, Allen Houng
(Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang Ming University, Taipei,
Taiwan)
Ned Block pointed out that consciousness is a mongrel concept which involves a number
of very different ‘consciousnesses’. Thus he made a distinction, the phenomenal-consciousness
and the access-consciousness, among all the concepts connoted and the different phenomena
denoted to avoid conflation which leads to bad results. Per his definition, the phenomenal-consciousness
is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what
it is like to be in that state. The access-consciousness is availability for use in reasoning and
rationally guiding speech and action. Block further specified that whatever cognitive processes
underlie our ability to report the experiences are to be defined as phenomenal consciousness.
This definition might preclude some states that are defined conscious clinically, such as
MCS (minimally conscious state). Patients of MCS demonstrate inconsistent but discernible
evidence of consciousness by the index of N100, showing patients being able to detect the
occurrence of discrete environmental sounds, and by the elicitation of MMN (mismatch negativity),
showing patients being able to discriminate between different types of sounds. Recent
studies show that the self-referential stimulus (call subject’s own name) effectively evokes
residual brain activity by eliciting MMN in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC)
(Qin, 2008). These evidences imply their ability to create and utilize neuronal representations
of the immediate sensory auditory environment (Näätänen, 1992; Näätänen et al., 2007) and
thus are to be considered included within the realm of consciousness further to the phenomenal-consciousness
defined by Block. We suggest a distinctive category, the detectable consciousness,
to define conscious states that are unreportable, nevertheless can be detected by
using ‘indirect’ techniques and objective measurement. The distinction could make clear the
definition of conscious states related to this sort apart from the hard problems that are to be
solved or might be unsolvable. This nuanced view will also make clearer the sphere of related
researches on comatose state, dream state, memory, and mental imagery etc. C17
4 What is it Like to be Unconscious? Gary Williams
(Baton Rouge, LA)
In this paper I want to respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is simply ‘ridiculous’ to suppose
that consciousness is a cultural construction. In so doing, I will argue that a distinc-