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What if everything you’ve ever believed about your mind being locked inside your skull turned out to be wrong? Not just a little wrong. Completely, fundamentally, gloriously wrong. Science has spent decades telling us that consciousness is simply neurons firing, chemicals exchanging, electrical pulses racing through tissue. A brain-made storm in a biological cup. That’s the official story, anyway……..Continue reading….
By: Kristina
Source: Discover Wild Science
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Critics:
Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood by the majority of people despite the difficulty philosophers have had defining it. The term ‘subjective experience’, following Nagel, is ambiguous, as philosophers seem to differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about its meaning.
Max Velmans proposed that the “everyday understanding of consciousness” uncontroversially “refers to experience itself rather than any particular thing that we observe or experience” and he added that consciousness “is [therefore] exemplified by all the things that we observe or experience”, whether thoughts, feelings, or perceptions.
Velmans noted however, as of 2009, that there was a deep level of “confusion and internal division” among experts about the phenomenon of consciousness, because researchers lacked “a sufficiently well-specified use of the term…to agree that they are investigating the same thing”.He argued additionally that “pre-existing theoretical commitments” to competing explanations of consciousness might be a source of bias.
Within the “modern consciousness studies” community the technical phrase ‘phenomenal consciousness’ is a common synonym for all forms of awareness, or simply ‘experience’, without differentiating between inner and outer, or between higher and lower types. With advances in brain research, “the presence or absence of experienced phenomena” of any kind underlies the work of those neuroscientists who seek “to analyze the precise relation of conscious phenomenology to its associated information processing” in the brain.
This neuroscientific goal is to find the “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC). One criticism of this goal is that it begins with a theoretical commitment to the neurological origin of all “experienced phenomena” whether inner or outer. Also, the fact that the easiest ‘content of consciousness’ to be so analyzed is “the experienced three-dimensional world (the phenomenal world) beyond the body surface” invites another criticism, that most consciousness research since the 1990s, perhaps because of bias, has focused on processes of external perception.
From a history of psychology perspective, Julian Jaynes rejected popular but “superficial views of consciousness” especially those which equate it with “that vaguest of terms, experience”. In 1976 he insisted that if not for introspection, which for decades had been ignored or taken for granted rather than explained, there could be no “conception of what consciousness is” and in 1990, he reaffirmed the traditional idea of the phenomenon called ‘consciousness’, writing that “its denotative definition is, as it was for René Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume, what is introspectable”.
Jaynes saw consciousness as an important but small part of human mentality, and he asserted: “there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until … what is introspectable [is] sharply distinguished”[7]: 447 from the unconscious processes of cognition such as perception, reactive awareness and attention, and automatic forms of learning, problem-solving, and decision-making.
The cognitive science point of view—with an inter-disciplinary perspective involving fields such as psychology, linguistics and anthropology—requires no agreed definition of “consciousness” but studies the interaction of many processes besides perception. For some researchers, consciousness is linked to some kind of “selfhood”, for example to certain pragmatic issues such as the feeling of agency and the effects of regret and action on experience of one’s own body or social identity.
Similarly Daniel Kahneman, who focused on systematic errors in perception, memory and decision-making, has differentiated between two kinds of mental processes, or cognitive “systems”: the “fast” activities that are primary, automatic and “cannot be turned off”, and the “slow”, deliberate, effortful activities of a secondary system “often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration”.
Kahneman’s two systems have been described as “roughly corresponding to unconscious and conscious processes”. The two systems can interact, for example in sharing the control of attention .While System 1 can be impulsive, “System 2 is in charge of self-control”, and “When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do”.
Some have argued that we should eliminate the concept from our understanding of the mind, a position known as consciousness semanticism. For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.
In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones. The Science and Religion Forum 1984 annual conference, ‘From Artificial Intelligence to Human Consciousness‘ identified the nature of consciousness as a matter for investigation; Donald Michie was a keynote speaker. A decade later Michie presented an engineering view of consciousness in the computer science context.
Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books, journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, Psyche, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Society for Consciousness Studies.
Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts.
The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.
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