How Well Are We Moving Toward a Most Productive Science of Consciousness ?

This will be a commentary on TSC 2008, not a summary, so I should say something about the perspective I bring. Consciousness is, after all, the medium in which we live our lives — the very subject of the founding of a science psychology, rejected by behaviourists on irrelevant metaphysical fears, and then treated only gingerly in the computational and information processing metatheories that have dominated much of the discipline and beyond over the last half century (Dulany, in press). For that matter, I can say this of studies I read in a range of psychology journals, including those submitted to me in my 20 years as Editor of the American Journal of Psychology: it seemed rather clear to me that conscious states and contents of the experimental subjects were centrally and causally involved in the production of their experimental effects — consistent, by the way, with a mentalistic metatheory I have presented (e.g. Dulany, 1997; 2004). In an increasing number of studies those effects are specifically investigated. Shouldn’t a most productive science of consciousness focus on what consciousness explains — on what it permits in mentation and in action? With the symbolic contents of conscious states we represent events out there in perceptions, in the past in remembrances, even of our own conscious experience, and in a future as expected or wished