Is Consciousness a Passive Recipient of the End-Product of Sophisticated Unconscious Computations?

paper, Clark and Thornton showed how trading achieved representations against computational search could allow to easily solve problems that seemed intractable without some recoding of the incoming information. Perruchet and Vinter generalized this approach, and posited the formation of representations isomorphic to the world structure as the ultimate question that cognitive sciences have to address. Crucially, they postulated from the outset that all mental representations are conscious, on the basis of a twofold consideration. On the one hand, everyone knows that at least some mental events are conscious, because we have direct and personal evidence of their existence. Even those who argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal cannot reject this assessment. On the other hand, the existence of an unconscious mental life is a postulate or a presupposition, given that we have, by definition, no direct proof of an unconscious counterpart to our conscious mental life. It emerges from these two simple premises that, in striking contradiction with a widespread view among cognitive scientists, a framework relying exclusively on the representations and the mental operations we are aware of are more parsimonious than accounts postulating, in addition, a parallel cognitive apparatus. It is worth adding that exclusively relying on the conscious/attentional system brings out important functional constraints on the available explanatory tools, such as limited capacity, seriality of processing, and quick forgetting. The approach outlined by Perruchet and Vinter (2002) meets the desired objective of accounting for conscious representations (roughly) isomorphic to the world structure thanks to the power of self-organizing principles. The progressive organization of A commentary on