Lea Moncoucy

What do you see around you right now? What do you hear or smell? How are you feeling-happy, sad, bored? And what thoughts are in your head? All the sensations, feelings, and thoughts you have every day are part of what is called your conscious experience-something that all humans have. But do they have a purpose? Would you act the same without them? These are the questions we will address in this article. We will first introduce the concept of conscious experience and then review the methods that scientists use to study it, which is not an easy task! Finally, we will explain why it is important to study consciousness at all.

The distinction between the neuropsychological processes of incentive salience (“wanting”) and hedonic reward (“liking”) is a cornerstone of neuroscientific research into motivation and pleasure. These processes have been shown to be dissociable, but their relationship to conscious experience remains unclear, as the bulk of relevant research has been conducted on animal models. In this paper, we ask whether we have sufficient evidence to assert that positive hedonic responses (ie unconscious “liking”) can influence human behaviour without eliciting an experience of pleasure, ie conscious liking. We review the available psychological research supporting the existence of such responses in the absence of subjective awareness and argue that current evidence is not only very sparse, but is also undermined by a possible conflation between motivational and hedonic responses, as well as by the absence of independent measures of subjective hedonic awareness. By drawing an analogy with state-of-the-art methods used in research in the study of conscious perception, we point to several problems with the existing evidence supporting the idea that positively valenced hedonic states can influence behaviour while remaining unconscious, and suggest possible improvements to future experiments. We conclude that we presently do not possess enough evidence to accept the existence of unconscious “liking”.

DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: ‘How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?’. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organisms act in the way they do for reasons that are shaped by extrinsic evolutionary cost functions, some also act for reasons of their own, even engaging in behaviour that may be detrimental to their own existence. For such organisms, we argue, phenomenal experience—what it feels like—has intrinsic value. Here, we elaborate on the perspective developed by Axel Cleeremans and Catherine Tallon-Baudry (Cleeremans, Tallon-Baudry 2022 Neurosci. Conscious, 2022, niac007. (doi:10.1093/nc/niac007)) and defend the claim that phenomenal experience broadens an organism’s ability to act in a manner that is not merely responsive to the objective value of an extrinsic evolutionary cost function but is also shaped by the preference-driven subjective value associated with items, situations, events or other agents. Importantly, we argue that the intrinsic value of subjective experience cannot always be reduced to other forms of extrinsic values, because subjective value can act not only as a driver of behaviour, but also as a target for behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’.