My Consciousness on Consciousness

The term consciousness is used to describe a broad number of interconnected phenomena that all have to do with minds. If your patient appears to be awake and able to parse the world around them in some way, you can check this box on your diagnostic criteria. However, it can also refer to a variety of significant and seemingly related aspects of the mind's operation.

Many mental processes have been mechanically explained by science, but the ones that get thrown together under the heading of consciousness tend to be very high level and complex in ways that we haven't even come close to explaining. Unfortunately, whenever science fails to fully explain an intriguing subject, you can be sure that some crazy people will fill the void with whatever they can think of.

Many handwavy versions of mysticism or spirituality have adopted the word "consciousness" as a buzzword to give totally incomprehensible beliefs about souls or spiritual energy, or really just about anything, a veneer of sophistication. Even when more seriously minded people get around to debating it, getting them to agree on a definition of what it is is notoriously difficult. Despite this perplexity, there is clearly something intriguing going on in conscious minds that isn't going on in unconscious brains or rocks.

Let's try to gain a feel of what that is and why it fascinates those who want to learn more about how minds work and why they are unique. When you're awakened from a dreamless slumber. There are a few physical differences that are more relaxed by most external metrics. It's possible that your eyes are darting back and forth. Maybe you drool a little on your pillow, but there's a world of difference between what you feel and what you see. Your senses are still working normally. If there is noise, your eardrums will vibrate. Your skin's temperature receptors that detect heat will continue to indicate the room's ambient temperature. You, on the other hand, are unaffected by any of this. Those senses can fire incessantly for hours, but their messages will not be detected or received in the usual way because no one will be home for 6 hours. If you're lucky, you don't have any subjective first-person perceptions of the world. That's fascinating.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? was published in 1974. Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, proposes that we think of consciousness as the sensation of being something. It doesn't make sense to ask, "How does it feel to be asleep, under anesthesia, or under a rock?" However, if you're awake, you'll notice that you're experiencing the world as a subject. When we try to think about the objective aspects of that phenomenon, the issues really start to show up.

We can easily discern symptoms of attentiveness and wakefulness on the outside. However, the subjective experience of what it's like to be someone else, a bat, or any of the other species we'd ordinarily consider conscious. I have no method of accessing that internal state for any entity other than myself, and for something as important to my view of the world as it is.

Consider a person who appears to be awake and alert on the outside yet, from their perspective, is in the same mental state as you are when you are sleeping. This may or may not be physically possible, but it demonstrates the difficulties of the problem. A philosophical zombie whose body appears to be interpreting the world around them, but no one is actually home. How could we ever tell the difference between a philosophical zombie and a conscious person without a complete map of which brain states correspond to which mental states, even if we could build such a map, even if we could somehow scan every single neuron in someone's brain and translate that into a meaningful interpretation of what it means to be conscious?

We'd still be a long way from understanding how that particular combination of neurons gave rise to the sense of eating delicious cupcake. This explanatory gap between objective quantifiable material and how it feels inside a conscious mind is part of the mystique and mystery that surrounds consciousness, and that's partly why people attach strange or ludicrous beliefs to it.

It's the most obvious and personal thing in the world in some ways, the only data we have constant access to throughout our waking lives. In other senses, it's the most remote and foreign thing imaginable, completely inaccessible. Even with the most advanced analytical tools and badass science at our disposal, one might be tempted to dismiss the problem as a quaint thought experiment for ivory tower types, but there are numerous legal, ethical, and practical considerations that revolve around other people's subjective experiences.

What is it like to be a chicken race for fowl, or how does a fetus experience pain? Scientists have uncovered potentially relevant data in neuroscience and psychology, marking significant milestones in the long process of bridging the gap between the two disciplines. However, we still don't have any solid answers to those queries, but the information is right here... I have consciousness.

Why should I wait for scientists to solve the problem? Is it possible for me to merely think about it and find out how it works? Although we can probably infer some broad characteristics of consciousness from our own experiences, there are good reasons to be skeptical of introspection as a reliable source of information in this case.

Although this review by Richard Nisbet and Timothy Wilson is from the 1970s, it outlines some major elements from a series of research that look at people's capacity to effectively describe their own mental processes.

Even when test subjects experience significant changes in cognition over the course of an experiment, when asked to reflect and describe those changes, they're often completely unaware that anything has changed, let alone how their mental landscape has changed or what caused it, according to the paper, which is at least suggestive. We're thinking we'll be able to figure it out from the inside out.

Even when people are asked to look at something that has changed significantly, they can be completely unaware of it. At first glance, there's little reason to believe that what we perceive of consciousness will provide us with useful information regarding its fundamental nature or operation. Even if we are diligent and engage in a lot of thorough reflection, we may get the impression that our mind is this or that, but this is only an impression. Because it's a feeling about feelings, it's no more valid than a feeling about who will win the World Series or who is the best.

Nonetheless, consciousness is interesting to think about. Numerous philosophers and scientists have found many interesting ways to dissect and analyze the phenomena involved and even to suggest some answers to the big questions surrounding it, like what it is, how it is or where it comes from.

References:

Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914

Hixon JG, Swann WB Jr. When does introspection bear fruit? Self-reflection, self-insight, and interpersonal choices. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1993 Jan;64(1):35-43. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.64.1.35 PMID: 8421251.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231

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