On the subject of whether or not you can always be correct about the contents of your consciousness:
“Let us therefore look at the bizarre mirror image to blindsight: Anton’s syndrome. Patients who suddenly become completely blind due to a lesion in the visual cortex in some cases keep insisting on stillbeing visually aware. While claiming to be seeing persons, they bump into furniture and show all the other signs of functional blindness. Still, they act as if the phenomenal disappearance of all visually given aspects of reality is not phenomenally available to them. For instance, when pressed by questions concerning their environment, they produce false, but consistent confabulations. They tell stories about nonexisting phenomenal worlds, which they seem to believe themselves, while denying any functional deficit with regard to their ability to see.
-- I still vividly remember one heated debate at an interdisciplinary conference in Germany a number of years ago, at which a philosopher insisted, in the presence of eminent neuropsychologists, that Anton’s syndrome does not exist because a priori it cannot exist. Anton’s syndrome shows how truthful reports about the current contents about one’s own self-consciousness can be dramatically wrong. It would also be an ideal starting point for philosophical debates concerning the incorrigibility—On a functional construal of judgment, can there be rational, sentient beings that suffer from such a strong dissociation between consciousness and cognition that they are so systematically out of touch with their own conscious experience? Well, in a domain-specific way restricted to internal self-representation
and metacognition, there are. Anton’s syndrome gives us good empirical reasons to believe
that self-consciousness actually is “such an ill-behaved phenomenon”. Patients suffering from Anton’s syndrome certainly possess the appropriate conceptual sophistication to form rational judgments about their current visual experience. The empirical material interestingly shows us that they simply do not, and this, in all its domain-specificity, is an important and valuable constraint for philosophical theories of consciousness.”
On the subject of whether or not you can always be correct about the contents of your consciousness:
“Let us therefore look at the bizarre mirror image to blindsight: Anton’s syndrome. Patients who suddenly become completely blind due to a lesion in the visual cortex in some cases keep insisting on stillbeing visually aware. While claiming to be seeing persons, they bump into furniture and show all the other signs of functional blindness. Still, they act as if the phenomenal disappearance of all visually given aspects of reality is not phenomenally available to them. For instance, when pressed by questions concerning their environment, they produce false, but consistent confabulations. They tell stories about nonexisting phenomenal worlds, which they seem to believe themselves, while denying any functional deficit with regard to their ability to see.
-- I still vividly remember one heated debate at an interdisciplinary conference in Germany a number of years ago, at which a philosopher insisted, in the presence of eminent neuropsychologists, that Anton’s syndrome does not exist because a priori it cannot exist. Anton’s syndrome shows how truthful reports about the current contents about one’s own self-consciousness can be dramatically wrong. It would also be an ideal starting point for philosophical debates concerning the incorrigibility—On a functional construal of judgment, can there be rational, sentient beings that suffer from such a strong dissociation between consciousness and cognition that they are so systematically out of touch with their own conscious experience? Well, in a domain-specific way restricted to internal self-representation and metacognition, there are. Anton’s syndrome gives us good empirical reasons to believe that self-consciousness actually is “such an ill-behaved phenomenon”. Patients suffering from Anton’s syndrome certainly possess the appropriate conceptual sophistication to form rational judgments about their current visual experience. The empirical material interestingly shows us that they simply do not, and this, in all its domain-specificity, is an important and valuable constraint for philosophical theories of consciousness.”
Thomas Metzinger, Being No One, p. 235