Rosenthal makes assertions about what can and cannot happen without being conscious. Although his distinctions are informative, they do not substitute for data. We have little precise information that differentiates the immediate feeling of awareness, such as that possible for Korsakoff patients, from the later episodic memory of conscious experience. Appeals to introspection are useful starting points, but they are clearly are not to be trusted in this context. Rosenthal also asks why conscious thinking would be more efficacious than thinking that is not conscious. The answer is that the whole armamentarium of planning becomes available to conscious thought, together with episodic memory and the linguistic mediation that goes along with it.
1.2 A more extreme case of the consciousness/memory paradox occurs when the condition becomes permanent. Patients with some kinds of hippocampal or thalamic damage, such as Milner's famous patient H. M., or patients with severe Korsakoff syndrome, have a seemingly normal awareness of things around them but forget events and experiences as soon as these drift out of awareness. Over a period of days, H. M. improved in the learned art of mirror-tracing even though the task had to be re-explained to him, and the doctor re-introduced to him, each day. The nonepisodic memory for the skill remained, but the episodic memory that supported experience was lost. Such patients lose the ability to plan as well as the ability to remember, as my theory of consciousness (Bridgeman, 1992a) requires. A very short-term plan, such as eating the next bite of dinner or speaking a sentence, can occur normally, but plans that drive behavior over periods of more than a few minutes are impossible.
1.3 In his sections 1.6 - 1.9 Rosenthal makes assertions about what can and cannot happen without being conscious. Although his distinctions are both informative and tantalizing, they do not substitute for data. We have little precise information that differentiates the immediate feeling of awareness, such as that possible for the Korsakoff patient, from the later episodic memory of conscious experience. We may well treat certain kinds of events and behaviors as being unconscious when they had seemed conscious during their execution, as data from the above conditions suggest; appeals to introspection are useful starting points, but they are clearly are not to be trusted in this context.
2.1 In his para. 1.9, Rosenthal asks why conscious thinking would be more efficacious than thinking that is not conscious. The answer is that the whole armamentarium of planning becomes available to conscious thought, together with episodic memory and the linguistic mediation that goes along with it. Thought without awareness is limited to our own resources, while language through the parallel-serial-parallel interface allows the thoughts of others to enrich our own. This is already grounds enough for the emergence of human consciousness. Planning at a lower level might be better described by the relatively inflexible subplans introduced in the commentary of Laming (1992). These allow some limited sequences of actions to be performed without using the full-blown mechanism that engages episodic memory.
2.2 At the end of his commentary Rosenthal lapses into the language of states again. If we think of speech acts as expressing mental states, we have a problem of relating the one to the other. But if consciousness is a process, a concomitant of engaging in speech or of performing a sequence of planned actions, then there is nothing to explain, no tie between language and consciousness, because the two are different ways of describing the same process. Looking inside the brain one finds no states, only billions of neurons signalling to one another in a continuous dynamic transformation.
Bridgeman, Bruce (1992a) On the Evolution of Consciousness and Language. PSYCOLOQUY 3(15) consciousness.1
Bridgeman, B. (1992b) Qualia and Memory: Response to Laming on Bridgeman on Consciousness. PSYCOLOQUY 3(24) consciousness.9
Laming, D. (1992) Some Commonsense About Consciousness: Commentary on Bridgeman on Consciousness. PSYCOLOQUY 3(23) consciousness.8
Rosenthal, D. (1992) Consciousness, Plans, and Language: Commentary on Bridgeman on Consciousness. PSYCOLOQUY 3(32) consciousness.14