Consciousness, Part One

The Emergence and Nature of Human Consciousness, Part One: Toward a Definition of Consciousness

The outer skin and other external features of humans are deceptive. They show a solidity and continuity that conceal the true nature of a human. If a person’s consciousness were visible, a human would take on the appearance of an ever-changing entity, a being in a state of flux, one whose boundaries would be shifting and indefinite, while perhaps remaining in a loosely-defined general area. Consciousness lies at the heart of our study. It is also one of the hardest of all terms to define, and any attempt to do so immediately runs into the paradox discussed earlier in this book: Is it possible for the brain to understand its own deepest functions, or does the complexity of the brain preclude such an understanding? In short, is it even possible for us to discuss consciousness coherently, much less grasp its quintessence?

Consciousness is the essential phenomenon that makes a human different in degree from other animals. Humans may not be alone in the possession of consciousness, but it is the advanced level of human consciousness and the powers that derive from it that have given the human species at least some level of control over this planet's surface. Human history may be thought of as the way in which the experience of consciousness has affected the lives and interactions of humans on this planet. It is the central thesis of this book that humans do not understand their own consciousness fully. They are unaware of all the variables that affect it, are unable to describe it clearly even as they are experiencing it, and hence are unable to analyze completely the situations in which they find themselves. In my view it is the incomplete nature of human comprehension that is the chief factor driving the convoluted history of our species. Obviously, therefore, a definition of consciousness is crucial if we are to grasp this idea.   

So what do we mean by the term consciousness? What is it? One way in which consciousness may be defined is the entire set of a human’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, perceptions, and imaginings when they are awake (or in the dream world of sleep, which is a simulacrum of waking consciousness). It is the sense of being a self, an I set aside from other selves. It is the awareness of being aware.    

But in a sense, none of these descriptions really gets to the heart of the matter. Consciousness feels like something. It is something which is experienced. (We might well ask, what does it mean to experience something?) Every human seems to experience the phenomenon of consciousness in a completely subjective and unique way, and yet, there is enough overlap in the experience of consciousness between and among these humans that they understand something about what it's like to be another human.

The sense of experience that humans have at any given moment is sometimes referred to by the term mental state, how life seems at that moment. (And of course the word seems is itself ambiguous.) As I have said, trying to understand the link between the one and a third kilograms (or so) of gelatinous stuff in our skulls and mental states is, in my mind, the supreme challenge to the human brain. It is every bit as challenging as the human attempt to understand the quantum world's counterintuitive operations. So, let's review the ideas of some of the foremost students of this elusive phenomenon, the consciousness that defines who and what we are.

 Attempting a Definition of Consciousness

 William James, in his classic study, The Principles of Psychology [1890], used the term the stream of thought (which many express as the stream of consciousness) to describe the actual experience of the self being awake and aware. Here is how James described this stream:

 How does it go on? We notice immediately five important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:

1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.

3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.

4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.

5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects - chooses from among them, in a word - all the while.¹

It bears emphasis that if we accept James' quite reasonable and empirically-verifiable criteria, then we must conclude that every conscious human who has ever lived has had a unique internal life experience (however similar their external circumstances to other people), and it is probable that all humans who live in the future will also have a unique internal life experience. (I would add that it may be possible in the future for the consciousnesses of two or more separate humans to, temporarily, intersect so completely that a group rather than individual identity might emerge.)

The philosopher Thomas Nagel tackled consciousness in his famous article, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in 1974. It was his contention that there is something that it is like to be when one is conscious, using as his example the experience of bats, who navigate dark environments largely by echolocation. This mode of perception is largely alien to humans, virtually inconceivable. A human does not know what it would be like to be a bat. Nagel uses this example to argue that experience is inherently subjective, and that it isn't really possible to know the subjective experience of other sentient beings, especially beings who are very different from humans. Nagel states that while it is possible to describe mental events in an "objective" way, this wouldn't give us a true idea about what it is like to experience them if we had no first-hand experience.²

 So it can be argued that consciousness is experienced in a uniquely internal and subjective way. But what is it to be conscious? Stanislas Dehaene, a researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience, defines the key element of consciousness to be what he calls conscious access. This, he says, is the ability to "see an object and describe our perception to others". Dahaene then elaborates on this idea. First, out of myriad possible sensory stimuli, consciousness can focus on one specific stimulus. In fact, Dahaene maintains that we can really only focus on one thought at a time, although that thought might be complex. Next, attention given to one item means attention given to a previous item must be dropped. When we make such a change of focus, to an item of which we had been preconscious, a whole host of mental processes are now engaged, such as language. Dahaene then points out the phenomenon of selective attention, the product of the brain's ability to filter out various sensory stimuli and memories. The action of this filtering process is one of which we are not aware. Finally, he says that conscious access rests on vigilance, attention, and wakefulness, but even these are not enough by themselves to enable us to have such access.³

Max Velmans begins his survey of consciousness by posing a series of  questions, what he calls the five chief problems involved in understanding it:

Problem 1.    What and where is consciousness?

Problem 2.  How are we to understand the causal relationships between consciousness and matter and, in particular, the causal relationships between consciousness and the brain?

Problem 3.  What is the function of consciousness? How, for example, does it relate to human information processing?

Problem 4.  What forms of matter are associated with consciousness – in particular, what are the neural substrates of consciousness in the human brain?

Problem 5. What are the appropriate ways to examine consciousness, to discover its nature? Which features can we examine with first-person methods, which features require third-person methods, and how do first- and third-person findings relate to each other?

In terms of a definition, Velmans keeps it simple and direct: consciousness rests on experience. If a person is experiencing, they are conscious. If they're not experiencing something, they're not. Expanding on this, he maintains that the presence or absence of "phenomenal content" defines the presence of consciousness.⁴ We will look at the concept of phenomena below.

What causes consciousness? From where does it arise? John R. Searle, who specializes in the philosophy of mind and language, is quite firm in his opinion that what he calls mental phenomena arise from the physiology of the brain itself. He rejects the notion of objective reality, arguing that "in general mental states have an irreducibly subjective ontology". He also rejects the idea that the human brain is capable of comprehending everything about the reality in which it is immersed. Consciousness, he states, "is as much a part of the natural biological order as any other biological features such as photosynthesis, digestion, or mitosis."⁵

Mark Rowlands first considers the nature of what is called phenomenal consciousness. He points out that it is difficult to describe its content in a non-circular way. He argues that the major attempts to define phenomenal consciousness all have inherent limitations. For example, definitions often focus chiefly on sensory perceptions, the limitations of which he points out:

There is often a tendency, particularly in the case of visual examples, to place undue emphasis on perceptually basic, or near basic, experiences: experiences of a patch of redness, and the like. But this, as Wittgenstein would put it, might provide a diet of philosophically one-sided examples. Often, the phenomenal character of an experience can depend on its significance for the experiencer, and this, at least ostensibly, cannot be reduced to the significance of a conglomeration of perceptually basic, or near basic, properties.⁶

Rowlands examines the contention that such experiences have a qualitative feel, that they possess qualia. [Broadly speaking, qualia represent the sensory experience of phenomena.] He cites Nagel's argument, that it is something to be like when one experiences qualia, but he sees this argument as incomplete. He also examines the argument that phenomenal consciousness is best approached by examining the physical conditions in which it occurs. Rowlands says that even taken collectively these approaches—analysis of sensory experience, focusing on qualia, recreating specific physical states—are insufficient. After considering various issues surrounding the concept of phenomenal consciousness, and other attempts at a definition,  Rowlands arrives at the following position: consciousness possesses a dual structure. It can "be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed". He argues that consciousness therefore has a "hybrid character". It is "something of which we are aware" in conscious experience, and it is "something with which we are aware".⁷

Gerald Edelman initially gives us a rather conventional definition of consciousness, describing it as a kind of awareness, and he adds to it the observation that consciousness "is thus a process, not a thing", a process "not exhausting all aspects of the objects with which it deals". It involves, he says, such things as mental images, volition, decision-making, and intentionality. By this last word he means (as many others have also said) that conscious thought is about something, be it an object or something which has occurred. It has content. Consciousness is not only awareness but awareness of its own functions or awareness of the fact that it is having perceptions. He makes a distinction between what he calls primary consciousness, which chiefly deals with mental imagery, and higher-order consciousness, "which in humans is also able to embody a model of the personal (what we shall call direct awareness) and also of the past and future."⁸

Edelman expands on his examination of consciousness with a list of what he calls constraints. The first is an assertion that a "global theory of brain function" and consciousness must rest on "a materialist metaphysics and on an epistemology of qualified realism". (By qualified realism, Edelman means that our perception of reality is indirect.) The second constraint is the contention that a model of consciousness must rest on an overarching theory of brain function. Edelman calls his global brain theory the theory of neuronal group selection. By this Edelman means a theory of consciousness that is strictly biological. In his words, "The theory should stay close to the structure, development, and evolution of the nervous system as it relates to the rest of the phenotype". The third constraint is the contention that consciousness can only form in "a species having the appropriate brain structure at a certain stage of brain development". And the fourth constraint is the contention that a carefully constructed model of brain function should be explanatory. It should allow us to say that if certain carefully defined conditions exist, then consciousness will emerge in an animal's brain.⁹

Edelman surveys a number of conventional, dictionary-based definitions of consciousness, and then plunges into the tasks that must be accomplished by what he calls an extended theory of consciousness. Among these are accounting for consciousness as an evolutionary product, accounting for the varieties of consciousness, explaining how primary consciousness leads to higher order consciousness, explaining the subjective character of consciousness, the ability of consciousness to account for objects outside of itself, and many others. It is by following these rigorous and extensive criteria that he hopes to point the way to a comprehensive definition.¹⁰

Antti Revonsuo focuses first on the concept of phenomenal consciousness, or as he puts it, "the study of the world-for-me, or, more generally, worlds-for-someone: the subjective psychological realities within which all of us live our lives." The foremost feature of phenomenal consciousness, in Revonsuo's view, is presence. As he puts it, "For a sensation to be present-for-me it must manifest itself directly before my mind, somewhere within my perceptual space." Presence, he says, is both spatial and temporal, and is something which happens to one in the immediate present. Then Revonsuo elaborates. Consciously-experienced events have a location, they are occurring within a person's subjective experience and most of them have an identifiable source. They possess duration, but here he is careful to note that the experience itself has duration, not necessarily the stimulus causing it. Experiences also have intensity.

Of particular note to Revonsuo is the next feature of experience: its quality. Experiences  are of a certain kind, such as the perception of one color as opposed to another, or of one kind of physical sensation as opposed to another. "Qualities are thus the 'stuff' that experiences are made of." He adds:

The sensory-perceptual world we normally enjoy involves immensely complex, ever-changing dynamic combinations of qualities. The qualities are carefully organized to make up shapes and forms, surfaces and objects, melodies and words, aromas and caresses: the entire world-for-me.¹¹

Revonsuo then moves to a discussion of qualia, pointing to them as the basis of phenomenal consciousness. But he adds an important note: we don't experience qualia, these irreducibly basic phenomena, simply as a mass of sensations and perceptions. These phenomena are organized by the brain in such a way that "they are instinctively taken as meaningful, familiar objects".¹²

It is because qualia appear to present themselves in patterns that evoke meaning that it would be a good idea, at this juncture, to talk about the idea of representation in consciousness. Different researchers use the term to mean somewhat different things. What do we mean, in general, when we say the mind represents something? In the realm of pure thought, such as when we imagine or visualize objects, the objects we see in our imagination are mental representations of those objects, not the objects themselves. The use of language is a form of representation, inasmuch as words represent objects or ideas. Mathematical expressions represent ideas specific to that realm. Memories, especially those based on association, are a form of representation. In the view of some researchers there is a representing world and the represented world. [Broadly speaking, the represented world is the exterior world we perceive and the representing world is the way that world is interpreted in our consciousness.] As one specialist puts it, "The representation is an element within the representing world, and it reflects, stands for, or signifies some aspect of the represented world". ¹³

There is strong debate among philosophers about this doctrine, with many rejecting it outright. The great weakness of the representational view, in the eyes of many, is that it cannot adequately account for our awareness of bodily sensations. One can make a coherent argument for representation, or intentionality [again, the idea that perceptions have content] in such areas as visual stimuli. It is more difficult, even impossible, say critics, in such areas as painful or pleasurable physical experiences. There are representationalist philosophers who have attempted to integrate bodily sensations into representational schemes, but these efforts have not been universally convincing.

Self representational schemes seem to rest on the idea that not only do we experience phenomena in a subjective way, but we are aware of our own awareness. We have the experience and we are aware that is the self that is experiencing whatever phenomenal input is causing our subjective awareness, that it is the self that is being represented.¹⁴ This particular viewpoint (which I am greatly over-simplifying for the sake of brevity) is also disputed by various philosophers.

Some researchers prefer to emphasize different kinds or varieties of consciousness. These varieties are known as higher-order theories of consciousness. For example, the philosopher Ned Block differentiates between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. In a 1995 paper he explained the distinction:

Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action.

Block argues that it is possible to have phenomenal consciousness without having access consciousness. We might be aware of a sound, for example, and not associate it with a particular source doing a specific thing. When we identify that source, we are in access mode.¹⁵

Antonio Damasio points out that consciousness supports the actions the human animal needs to take in order to survive. Such actions include the acquisition of energy for the body and defense against physical threats. The images that consciousness provides us facilitate these actions by giving us options and letting us imagine outcomes. Advanced consciousness is therefore an evolutionary advantage humans have over other living things. As he puts it,

The pathbreaking novelty provided by consciousness was the possibility of connecting the inner sanctum of life regulation with the processing of images. Put in other words, it was the possibility of bringing the system of life regulation—which is housed in the depths of the brain in regions such as the brain stem and hypothalamus—to bear on the processing of the images which represent the things and events which exist inside and outside the organism.¹⁶

Damasio then turns to the issues that surround a definition of consciousness. Here he makes crucially important points about the term mind, which is often used interchangeably with the term consciousness. Consciousness is only one part of the mind, the part that "pertains to the knowing of any object or action attributed to a self". We can have mind without the experience of consciousness.¹⁷

Paul Nunez maintains that consciousness is what he calls a fundamental entity, something that can only be described by circular definitions. He offers an unconventional interpretation of the term. He puts it this way:

"To me, consciousness seems more analogous to fundamental physical properties like charge and energy...Given this argument, I posit that any serious study of consciousness must adopt a conceptual framework that allows for the possibility that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe."¹⁸

Needless to say, such a position is open to very wide interpretation, and it is also one which many scientists and philosophers would contest vigorously.

There are researchers who argue that humans do not actually possess conscious thought at all. Philosopher Peter Carruthers says that we cannot explain the sources of our thought, and our interpretations of the thoughts of others are affected by unconscious influences we cannot really know.

I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. I came to this conclusion by following out the implications of the two of the main theories of consciousness... Now, whichever view you adopt, it turns out that thoughts such as decisions and judgments should not be considered to be conscious. They are not accessible in working memory, nor are we directly aware of them. We merely have what I call “the illusion of immediacy”—the false impression that we know our thoughts directly.

Carruthers maintains that we are required to try to guess the motivations of others, and we generally do so by assuming that others know their own mind, when in fact they face the same illusion of immediacy as we. He maintains that the unconscious and what we call the conscious "are not separate spheres; they operate in tandem." Consciousness, he argues, "is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process." ¹⁹

Finally, other researchers speculate that quantum mechanics can give us insights into consciousness, citing the strange fact that quantum events seem to vary depending on whether they are observed or not. Some philosophers wonder if inanimate objects or individual particles possess consciousness (panpsychism). And there are ideas, such as those espoused by Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is an illusion, and if it goes too far to say that it doesn't really exist, it can at least be said it doesn't exist in the way we think it does.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

 Philosopher David Chalmers has written extensively on consciousness, and is most notably associated with the idea of "the hard problem of consciousness". Here is his definition of the term:

The hard problem...is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspect of thought and perception: the way things feel for the subject. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations, such as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I am calling consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind.

Chalmers speaks of what another researcher has called "the explanatory gap". Chalmers asserts that even if we had a thorough understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness, which is to say the places in the brain that are electrically active during conscious experience, we would still be at a loss to explain what it's like to be aware of our awareness. "Remarkably, subjective experience seems to emerge from a physical process. But we have no idea how or why this is."²⁰

The response to Chalmers has, unsurprisingly, been varied. Some have even gone so far as to assert the hard problem is beyond solution. Adopting a position sometimes known as mysterianism, they contend that our brains are capable of knowing the hard problem exists, but lack the cognitive abilities to understand it.²¹

One researcher believes that concentrating on the hard problem distracts us from more pressing issues:

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem)...In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions).

But this researcher is not only talking about mapping the regions of the brain's activity. There is, he says, a more important consideration. He contends that a good model of the conscious brain might be Hermann von Helmholtz's concept of the brain as prediction machine. According to this hypothesis, the brain combines sensory signals (the meaning of which is not always apparent) with expectations and beliefs about the nature of the world. This process makes consciousness a sort of elaborate guess. When there is input that seems to violate these expectations, it's not always perceived as such. Finding out how the brain handles perception is therefore crucial to our understanding of consciousness, more so perhaps than trying to understand why consciousness exists in the first place.²²

The "Easy" Problems of Consciousness

Chalmers has also discussed what he believes to be the "easy" problems of consciousness, by which he means mental phenomena that can be explained by straightforward scientific means, mental phenomena that have clearly identified mechanisms. Chalmers includes within this definition the following, in his words:

the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;

the integration of information by a cognitive system;

the reportability of mental states;

the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

the focus of attention;

the deliberate control of behavior;

the difference between wakefulness and sleep.²³

Chalmers' concept has been challenged by several other consciousness researchers, among them philosopher E. J. Lowe. Lowe argues that the terms Chalmers uses are themselves ambiguous and more applicable to insentient objects than to human beings. Moreover, Lowe contends that the experience of qualia and human cognition are deeply, intimately interrelated.²⁴

The Search for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness

Since the advent of brain scans capable of detecting activity in certain parts of the brain during particular states of conscious awareness, there has been a major effort made to locate the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), those brain regions which seem to generate consciousness itself. But several researchers make a crucial point about this subject, which I summarize like this: Simply because some region of the brain "lights up" on brain scans when a person is feeling a particular emotion or sensation, it does not "explain" what it is like to experience the phenomenon. It merely indicates that that region of the brain is involved in the phenomenon.

And yet these regions bear examination. Perhaps the most crucially important study of this matter was published by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in 1990. In a paper entitled "Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness", Crick and Koch laid out a cogent argument that the key to understanding the workings of consciousness is an understanding of what happens at the neural level. To illustrate this they focused on visual perception. After examining the mechanisms that underlie it, they came to the following conclusion:

Why, then, is consciousness so mysterious? A striking feature of our visual awareness (and of consciousness in general) is that it is very rich in information, even if much of it is retained for only a rather brief time. Not only can the system switch rapidly from one object to another, but in addition it can handle a very large amount of information in a coherent way at a single moment. We believe it is mainly these two abilities, combined with the very transient memory systems involved, that has made it appear so strange. We have no experience (apart from the very limited view provided by our own introspection) of machines having complex, rapidly changing and highly parallel activity of this type. When we can both construct such machines and understand their detailed behavior, much of the mystery of consciousness may disappear.²⁵

Koch and another respected expert in the study of consciousness, Florian Mormann, came to the following conclusion after another extensive examination of the issues surrounding NCCs. It was their opinion that a feedback system from the frontal lobe to the sensory cortices reaches a sort of critical mass, upon which activity is distributed to a wide number of brain regions, creating what they call "the global workspace model of consciousness". They further concluded while there can be "complex behavior without conscious sensation", consciousness itself rests on this feedback system.²⁶

A very thorough examination of the brain substrate that is involved in the generation of consciousness has identified what its author refers to as the consciousness system. Within this system are interacting networks of brain structures and neurotransmitters, all working in concert, frequently in parallel to each other, and exerting their influences in varying degrees at varying times. The overall tasks of the system are alertness, attention, and awareness. The consciousness system has both cortical and subcortical structures. The cortical structures involved include the association cortices (frontal and parietal), the anterior cingulate region, medial frontal cortex, the precuneus, the posterior cingulate region, and the retrosplenial cortex. [The retrosplenial cortex is involved in various cognitive functions, such as navigation, imagination, and episodic memory. It has major connections to the hippocampal regions.] The subcortical structures include the upper brainstem, thalamus, hypothalamus, and basal forebrain. The basal ganglia, cerebellum, claustrum, and amygdala may also be involved. At least seven different neurotransmitters appear to play a role as well.²⁷ [It should be noted here that the term association cortex is sometimes rendered as the association areas, and refers to most of the cerebral surface. These areas process and coordinate information coming from the sensory cortices.]

The author makes a crucial observation about the role of the association cortices:

It is the collective activity of widespread areas of the bilateral association cortex that determines the level of consciousness. Taken as a whole, the higher-order association cortex interacts with subcortical arousal systems to exert powerful control over the overall level of arousal, attention, and awareness.²⁸

The author of this study emphasizes that the neurophysiology of consciousness is just as important as the neuroanatomical networks involved in it, and that this physiology is much less well understood. Many hypotheses about neurophysiology have been proposed, such as that of Koch and Mormann above. I hope an examination of specific areas of conscious experience and other aspects of mind will yield clues to this.

 Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon

 In a significant study released in 2011, physicist and expert in complex networks Danielle Bassett and psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argued that, "The brain...can be understood as a complex system or network, in which mental states emerge from the interaction between multiple physical and functional levels." They first note the ability of complex network theory to describe connections within a system, and how the system's growth can be shaped by external factors. This theory, they contend, is "particularly applicable to the study of the human brain", which they describe as a complex system with many subcomponents interacting across both time and space. They contend that the constraints on the brain's anatomy constrain its physiology, while noting that the degree of a brain region's neuronal connectivity does not necessarily tell us about that region's specific function. (Interestingly, they explain that the cortex possesses multipotentiality, noting that in people blind from a young age structures devoted to vision can develop into structures devoted to hearing.)²⁹

Most significantly, the authors point out that the brain's components are organized in different scales of size, and act at different rates of speed. They refer to this as multiscale organization. For example, the highest frequency of gamma waves (those in excess of 30 hertz) appear to be necessary in higher cognitive processes, while lower frequencies of gamma, beta, delta, or theta waves affect other functions. [These brainwaves are the electrical pulses produced by groups of neurons.] It is this multiscale organization that allows the brain to be "more than the sum of the system’s parts at any particular level or across levels" as they put it. Consciousness itself may be the product of this organization, a genuine emergent phenomenon.³⁰ There appears to be a constant interaction between the brain and what the authors call mind, the contents of the physical brain. It is this interaction that appears to shape who and what we are.

Summary

So, after weighing these various opinions, and considering the evidence presented in the previous chapters of this volume, along with my own hypotheses, I take the following positions:

A. Consciousness arises solely from the anatomy and physiology of the brain. When an animal brain becomes sufficiently large in absolute terms, sufficiently large in relation to the animal's size and composed chiefly of cortical tissue (in other words, when a brain possesses a high degree of encephalization), and, most crucially, when an animal brain has a connectome of sufficient density and interconnectivity, consciousness will arise. In the human animal, absolute brain size, degree of encephalization, and connectome complexity have allowed that animal to have the highest degree of conscious awareness of any member of the animal kingdom. It is probable that the capacity for conscious experience grew throughout our genus's evolutionary development. Consciousness is therefore one of the emergent phenomena brought about by organic evolution, a phenomenon which is more than the sum of its component elements, and its possession gives humans distinct survival and reproductive advantages.

B. There is no separation of "mind" and "body". Mind, being an emergent property of a sufficiently sophisticated brain, is an aspect of body. However, the terms consciousness and mind are not synonymous. Consciousness is only a part of the mind. Other features of the mind can act without being consciously experienced.

C. While consciousness arises out of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, it cannot be understood simply by an analysis of the physical factors which underlie it and by which it is generated. Consciousness can only truly be apprehended by the experience of phenomena or qualia and the ways by which we access such phenomena or qualia. The perception of sensory information is imbued with various degrees of association and meaning. Inanimate objects often carry a variety of such meanings and associations, and other animals, particularly humans, often carry far more such meanings and associations. Moreover, since all regions of the brain are interconnected, intellectual, emotional, and basic survival functions interact with each other on a constant, reciprocal basis. Our responses to the world and our picture of ourselves are the product of this extremely complex interaction.

D. All definitions of consciousness are, to varying degrees, circular. The term awareness is an example of this principle. (To be aware is to be conscious. To be conscious is to be aware.) Again, consciousness must be experienced to be understood. Consciousness is not a thing, it is a process, a manifestation of the mind's hypotheses about itself and the "outer" world. And as is the case with the fundamental forces which underlie all physical reality, consciousness is best understood by what it does rather than what it is. It is the emergent brain property that permits a human to understand that they are a distinct physical entity, one set apart from other physical entities. It gives a human a sense of being a self (whether we accept the ultimate reality of that term or not). A self has a life story or narrative, and this narrative is based on a set of memories particular to the person who has them. A self has a characteristic way of perceiving reality, one which has been shaped by certain genetic predispositions, emotional reactions, and reactions to those reactions. Consciousness allows for the imagination of various scenarios, courses of action, personal expressions, and images involving the self. Consciousness allows a human to think about their own thoughts, to engage in reflexive and recursive thought. It is the awareness that one is aware. It incorporates within itself the entire sum of a human's sensory perceptions when awake, the ways the brain filters those perceptions at any given moment, the focus of a human's attention, the subconscious influences at work at any given moment, and the mixture of intellect and emotion by which a human interprets their experience. There appear to be different levels of consciousness, such as the distinction between the basic experience of qualia and the interpretation of those qualia.

E. Every human's conscious awareness is unique and individual. No two humans experience conscious awareness in identical ways. We must assume that no two humans in the past have ever had identical states of consciousness. And although we cannot assume that in the future no two humans will ever have identical conscious states, we must consider it unlikely. Therefore, we must assume that every human being who has ever lived has experienced the world in their own particular way. We must also assume, in my view, that they did not fully understand this experience. Nonetheless, humans have enough similarity of conscious experience that they can, to a limited degree, understand the experience of others. This understanding is by its very nature incomplete, and it is easy for a human to believe that they understand more about others than they really do. Humans sometimes say that they are of "one mind" with another or with a group of others. I submit that the concept of "one mind" is an illusion. Humans are forced to make assessments of other humans, but these assessments are often based on guesswork, and are never more than approximations.

F. Consciousness does not give a human a direct understanding of reality. It gives them a mediated version of it, one which is specific to our species. No human perceives "the thing in itself", nor has any human in the past ever done so. It is unlikely that any human in the future will ever do so, either. What humans perceive are representations of reality, a reality that is often filtered through a distinct sense of self. The processes which form consciousness do so in a synergistic fashion. But the processes themselves are flawed or incomplete. Perception can actually be misperception. Memory is not a fully reliable or complete record of a human's experience. What we think is understanding can actually be misunderstanding. Sensations may not be interpreted completely. Subconscious influences can affect judgment. Conflicting emotions can prevent complete focus on a given situation. The intellect may be lacking in key information. In short, consciousness has given humans immense powers and capabilities, but it has also made these same humans deeply fallible. Intelligence, and consciousness in general, did not evolve to give humans complete understanding of their situation. They evolved to help humans survive long enough to reproduce their genes. It is unlikely in the extreme that humans have the ability to consciously understand everything about the reality in which they live.

 Personal Observations

The brain, the core of the nervous system, combines incoming sensory data with the emotional/intellectual memory of the past self and its reaction to similar input. Our responses to the world and our picture of ourselves are the product of this extremely complex interaction. There is a continuous synergetic relationship between the “outer” world of experience and the “inner” world of consciousness.

This picture of ourselves and the responses to the world formed by the human nervous system are (in most humans) consistent enough, predictable enough, and stable enough to allow for interaction with other humans and with the physical environment in which all of these humans live. It is sufficient to allow humans to make assessments about themselves relative to those humans and the environment. It provides a human with the means to navigate the ordinary, everyday world. It does not, however, provide a human with the automatic ability to cope with the most difficult or challenging or novel situations.

The fundamental reason consciousness began to evolve, in my view, is that certain information received by an animal is more crucial than other information. Certain information takes priority, and the ability of a nervous system to sort out signals, assess them, and attend to the most crucial ones is very much the key to survival. In a sense, I think consciousness is yet another manifestation of natural selection. (We will examine the possible origins of consciousness in the next chapter.)

An individual consciousness, the product of the brain's evolution, is shaped by the world, but it in turn shapes the world. Since the world is enormous in relation to it, this may not seem possible. But the individual brain decides what reality is, even though the person possessing that brain may not be fully aware that such a decision is being made. It is by the individual response to the world that consciousness shapes that world. In a sense, the world is what I say it is in the universe of myself. When we are awake we and the world are influencing each other, and humans are constantly interpreting their experience. What we are doing by this process, in my view, is creating a continuous metaphor, a picture of reality suited to the capacities of our brains.

I have stated that consciousness is best understood by what it does rather than what it is. And what it does, within the limits of genetic inheritance and inherent human physical capabilities, is make the human animal almost infinitely malleable in its behavior, if not at the individual than at the collective level. The collective action of consciousnesses working in concert can shape the world decisively, but never in the exact way anticipated. Human consciousness appears to be very good at organization (in general), but very poor at the understanding of long-term consequences (again, in general). Human consciousness, as stated in the conclusions, is inherently incapable of understanding everything in the environment around it. Nor is human consciousness able to perceive or understand all the variables at work in a given situation. These variables are simply too multitudinous, too diverse, too varied in their origins, and too complex and subtle in their interactions. It is unlikely (but not impossible) that any human will ever possess complete understanding of the nature and operation of these variables.

Human consciousness makes possible a capacity often called reflexivity, which fundamentally means self-awareness. It is the realization that one is part of the reality one is observing, and that the act of observing can itself alter this reality. Human consciousness allows for self-assessment, a trait unique to humans. Humans can evaluate their thoughts, current situation, and actions. They can think about their own thinking. Humans are capable of describing (in part) their internal experience and conveying this (however imperfectly) to other conscious humans. They are capable of compartmentalization, the ability to separate patterns of thought and the associated content these patterns create from other patterns and content.

Finally, every human who has ever survived infancy has lived in the river of consciousness, a place saturated with sensory perceptions, one in which vague, ill-defined pictures are "seen" and pieces of conversation and music are "heard". It is a place of both reaction and initiative, continuously changing, a place where long-forgotten memories can spontaneously be revived, along with the attendant emotions surrounding them. It is (for the vast majority) a place where language is processed and used. It holds tastes, preferences, knowledge, intellect. It is a place not only where we feel but try to understand what and why we are feeling. It is the place where the hidden or non-conscious parts of the mind act to shape us. It is the place in which the human senses the existence of a unique being—themself. And it is the place in which interaction with other conscious minds and with the world in which everyone exists takes place. When two conscious humans interact, it is as if two rivers have briefly flowed into each other, however incompletely. These confluences, over the course of a lifetime, give human consciousness characteristics that are virtually impossible to fully assess. The quest to understand consciousness and all the factors that shape it is, in one sense, a search for that which has driven the human story forward, a story that has unfolded in often puzzling or unexpected ways. Consciousness can be a place of mundane, ordinary experience, or a place of exaltation, or a place of torment, or a place of serenity, or a place of madness. But however it is being experienced, it is for us the entire universe. It is everything we are or ever will be. So now we turn to the possible origins of this elusive, seemingly indefinable phenomenon, reassured perhaps that we can know how it may have come to be without really being able to define it.

 

 1.            James, William, The Principles of Psychology,

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin9.htm

2.            Nagel, Thomas, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/maydede/mind/Nagel_Whatisitliketobeabat.pdf

3.            Dehaene, Stanislas, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin Books, 2014, pp. 9, 20-23)

4.            Velmans, Max, Understanding Consciousness

https://www.questia.com/library/120092331/understanding-consciousness, pp. 4, 8

5.            Searle, John R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995, pp. 1, 19. 24, and 90

6.            Rowlands, Mark, The Nature of Consciousness

https://www.questia.com/library/105042552/the-nature-of-consciousness, pp. 1-2

7.            Rowlands, pp. 3-15, p. 122

8.            Edelman, Gerald M., The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1989, pp. 4-5

9.            Edelman, pp. 10-11, 264

10.          Edelman, pp. 15-19

11.          Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006, pp. 32-35.

12.          Revonsuo, pp. 35-37

13.          Rowlands, 198-201; Herbert A. Simon, "On the Forms of Mental Representation", pp. 2-10, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/185337/9_01Simon.pdf?sequence=1;

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Mental Representation"; Timothy L. Hubbard, "What is mental representation? And how does it relate to consciousness?" in Journal of Consciousness Studies, January 2007.

14.          Kriegel, Uriah, Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 1-3, 101-103.

15.          Block, Ned, "On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness" in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1995) 18, 227-287

16.          Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999, pp. 23-25.

17.          Damasio, pp. 26-28.

18.          Nunez, Paul L. Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 249-251.

19.          https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-thing-as-conscious-thought/

20.          Chalmers, David J., "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience", Scientific American

Vol. 273, No. 6, December 1995, pp. 80-86.

21.          http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

22.          https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one

23.          http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

24.          https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/2-1-73-80.pdf

25.          Francis Crick and Christof Koch, "Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness", in Seminars in the Neurosciences, Vol. 2, 1990 : pp 263-275

26.          http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness

27.          Hal Blumenfeld, "Neuroanatomical Basis of Consciousness" in The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, Second Edition. Editors: Steven Laureys, Olivia Gosseries, Giulio Tononi. London: Academic Press, 2009, 2016, p. 4-8.

28.          Blumenfeld, p. 5

29.          Danielle S. Bassett and Michael S. Gazzaniga, "Understanding complexity in the human brain" in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, September 11, 2011

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170818/

30.          Bassett and Gazzaniga