Oxyopia Abstract
May 3, 2002
Noon
489 Minor Hall
Stanley Klein, PhD
Professor of Vision Science and Optometry, School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley
Host: Dennis Levi
Title
"Backward referral and other paradoxes of consciousness"
Abstract
Consciousness has become a hot area of scientific research. The
mystery surrounding one aspect of this research, psychological time,
is featured in this September's special issue of Scientific American.
In this issue, Antonio Damasio discusses Benjamin Libet's famous
set of experiments connecting mind time to brain time to physical
time. Libet compared the perceived time of direct human brain stimulation
to the perceived time of skin stimulation. Libet found several perplexing
time anomalies including backward referral, where consciousness
of an event occurs before the event itself (or so it seems). Roger
Penrose, a leading physicist, claims the causal laws of physics
need to be changed because of Libet's finding. I reexamined Libet's
data from the point of view of a signal detection psychophysicist.
I will discuss how to interpret Libet's impressive data using psychometric
functions, and how to estimate their reliability. Even though I
will provide a strong critique of how Libet and others have interpreted
the data, I will also provide a defense of the strange notion of
backward referral. In addition, I will introduce other paradoxes
of consciousness that were found by Libet. Details of this reanalysis
together with many other articles, commentaries and responses regarding
Libet's work can be found in the latest issue of Consciousness and
Cognition at Science Direct.
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