Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century
Consciousness is the
quality or
state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
[1][2] It has been defined as:
sentience,
awareness,
subjectivity, the ability to
experience or to
feel,
wakefulness, having a sense of
selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.
[3] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
[4] As
Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in
The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."
[5]
Western
philosophers since the time of
Descartes and
Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained
mechanistically; whether
non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to
language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a
dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like
computers or
robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of
artificial intelligence.
At one time consciousness was viewed with skepticism by many scientists, but in recent years it has become a significant topic of research in
psychology,
neuropsychology and
neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for
information to be present in consciousness—that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as
subliminal perception,
blindsight,
denial of impairment, and
altered states of consciousness produced by drugs and alcohol, or spiritual or meditative techniques.
In
medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful
stimuli.
[6] Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.
[7]
Etymology and early history
John Locke, British philosopher active in the 17th century
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to
John Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.
[8] Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind".
[9] His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in
Samuel Johnson's celebrated
Dictionary (1755).
[10]
The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin
conscius (
con- "together" and
scio "to know"), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our word—it meant "knowing with", in other words "having joint or common
knowledge with another".
[11] There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase
conscius sibi, which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something". This phrase had the figurative meaning of "knowing that one knows", as the modern English word "conscious" does. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word "conscious" retained the meaning of the Latin
conscius. For example,
Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another."
[12] The Latin phrase
conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself". For example,
Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness".
[13] Locke's definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place.
A related word was
conscientia, which primarily means
moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as
Cicero.
[14] Here,
conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.
[15] René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use
conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.
[16] Descartes used
conscientia the way modern speakers would use "conscience". In
Search after Truth (
Inquisitio Veritatis; publ. 1701) he says "conscience or internal testimony" (
conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio).
[17][18]
In the dictionary
The dictionary meaning of the word
consciousness extends through several centuries and associated cognate meanings which have ranged from formal definitions to somewhat more skeptical definitions. One formal definition indicating the range of these cognate meanings is given in
Webster's Third New International Dictionary stating that
consciousness is: "(1) a. awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact: intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one's inner self. b. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact. c: concerned awareness: INTEREST, CONCERN -- often used with an attributive noun. (2): the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought: mind in the broadest possible sense: something in nature that is distinguished from the physical. (3): the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span -- compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS."
Philosophy of mind
The
philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness. The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:
Consciousness—Philosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience... Something within one's mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it (or is poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is 'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is 'something it is like' for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial.[19]
In a more skeptical definition of
consciousness,
Stuart Sutherland has exemplified some of the difficulties in fully ascertaining all of its cognate meanings in his entry for the 1989 version of the
Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:
Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.[20]
Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned to defend a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for example Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues.
The coherence of the concept
Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is.
[21] While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness,
[22] skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in illusions.
Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a
Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world.
Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.
[23] More generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness.
[20]
Types of consciousness
Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it.
[22] Others, though, have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people (for instance, the
objective versus
subjective aspects of consciousness), or else is an
umbrella term encompassing a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.
[24]
Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called
phenomenal (P-consciousness) and
access (A-consciousness).
[25] P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called
qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we
perceive, information about what we perceive is access conscious; when we
introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we
remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as
Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction,
[26] others have broadly accepted it.
David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the
hard problem of consciousness.
[27]
Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story.
William Lycan, for example, argued in his book
Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness
of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.
[28]
Mind–body problem
Illustration of dualism by
René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the
pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.
The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was
Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as
Cartesian dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called
res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called
res extensa (the realm of extension).
[29] He suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the
pineal gland.
[30]
Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed.
[31] Alternative solutions, however, have been very diverse. They can be divided broadly into two categories:
dualist solutions that maintain Descartes' rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and
monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are
substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and
property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are
physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way),
idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter is merely an illusion), and
neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these camps.
[32]
Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book
Man a Machine (
L'homme machine). His arguments, however, were very abstract.
[33] The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on
psychology and
neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as
Gerald Edelman[34] and
Antonio Damasio,
[35] and by philosophers such as
Daniel Dennett,
[36] seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as
Christof Koch,
[37] have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of
artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can
simulate or embody consciousness.
[38]
A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that
quantum theory may provide
the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed
quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness.
[39] Notable theories falling into this category include the
holonomic brain theory of
Karl Pribram and
David Bohm, and the
Orch-OR theory formulated by
Stuart Hameroff and
Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel
[40] could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.
[41]
Apart from the general question of the
"hard problem" of consciousness, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience arises from a physical basis,
[42] a more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of
free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum.
Problem of other minds
Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?
[43] This is called the
problem of other minds.
[44] It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of
philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.
[45] Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois.
[46] and Colin Allen a professor at Indiana University regarding the literature and research studying
artificial intelligence in androids.
[47]
The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior: we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do.
[48] There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the
principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe.
[48] Some philosophers, such as
Daniel Dennett in an essay titled
The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.
[49] More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can
do, including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences.
[50]
Animal consciousness
The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences.
[51] Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals due to the fact that he believed only humans have a non-physical mind.
[52] Most people have a strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed.
[51]
Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known.
Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled
What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like
for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself.
[53] Other thinkers, such as
Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.
[54] Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive —
Donald Griffin's 2001 book
Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.
[55]
On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the
University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals. After the conference, they signed in the presence of
Stephen Hawking, the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness', which summarizes the most important findings of the survey:
"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far East. It is not obvious to the society."
[56]
"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals [...], including all mammals and birds, and other creatures, [...] have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."
[57]
Artifact consciousness
The idea of an
artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of
Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the
Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.
[58] However, the possibility of actually constructing a conscious machine was probably first discussed by
Ada Lovelace, in a set of notes written in 1842 about the
Analytical Engine invented by
Charles Babbage, a precursor (never built) to modern electronic computers. Lovelace was essentially dismissive of the idea that a machine such as the Analytical Engine could think in a humanlike way. She wrote:
It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. ... The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.[59]
One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist
Alan Turing, titled
Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful; but he proposed to replace all such questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the
Turing test.
[60] To pass the test, a computer must be able to imitate a human well enough to fool interrogators. In his essay Turing discussed a variety of possible objections, and presented a counterargument to each of them. The Turing test is commonly cited in discussions of
artificial intelligence as a proposed criterion for machine consciousness; it has provoked a great deal of philosophical debate. For example,
Daniel Dennett and
Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,
[61] while
David Chalmers argues that a
philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.
[62] A third group of scholars have argued that with technological growth once machines begin to display any substantial signs of human-like behavior then the dichotomy (of human consciousness compared to human-like consciousness) becomes passé and issues of machine autonomy begin to prevail even as observed in its nascent form within contemporary industry and technology.
[46][47]
In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the
Chinese room argument",
John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be formatted to "simulate" conscious states. His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are. To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle imagines a room stocked with computers and algorithms programmed to respond to Chinese questions, i.e., Turing machines, programmed to correctly answer in Chinese any questions asked in Chinese. Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean. And this is all a current computer program would do. If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be affectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve. Searle would pass the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he is only conscious of what he is doing when he speaks English. Another way of putting the argument is to say that computational computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax in the way strong AI advocates hoped. Processing semantics is conscious and intentional because we use semantics to consciously produce meaning by what we say.
[63]
In the literature concerning artificial intelligence, Searle's essay has been second only to Turing's in the volume of debate it has generated.
[63] Searle himself was vague about what extra ingredients it would take to make a machine conscious: all he proposed was that what was needed was "causal powers" of the sort that the brain has and that computers lack. But other thinkers sympathetic to his basic argument have suggested that the necessary (though perhaps still not sufficient) extra conditions may include the ability to pass not just the verbal version of the Turing test, but the
robotic version,
[64] which requires
grounding the robot's words in the robot's sensorimotor capacity to
categorize and interact with the things in the world that its words are about, Turing-indistinguishably from a real person. Turing-scale robotics is an empirical branch of research on
embodied cognition and
situated cognition.
[65]
Scientific study
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.
[66] 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.
[67] 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,
[68] journals such as
Consciousness and Cognition, and methodological work published in journals such as the
Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
[69]
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.
[37]
Measurement
Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted
operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion that is used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.
[70] For example, subjects who stare continuously at a
Necker cube usually report that they experience it "flipping" between two 3D configurations, even though the stimulus itself remains the same.
[71] The objective is to understand the relationship between the conscious awareness of stimuli (as indicated by verbal report) and the effects the stimuli have on brain activity and behavior. In several paradigms, such as the technique of
response priming, the behavior of subjects is clearly influenced by stimuli for which they report no awareness.
[72]
Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it raises a number of issues.
[73] For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain errors—but it is difficult to make sense of the idea that subjects could be wrong about their own experiences, and even more difficult to see how such an error could be detected.
[74] Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls
heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.
[75]
Another issue with verbal report as a criterion is that it restricts the field of study to humans who have language: this approach cannot be used to study consciousness in other species, pre-linguistic children, or people with types of brain damage that impair language. As a third issue, philosophers who dispute the validity of the
Turing test may feel that it is possible, at least in principle, for verbal report to be dissociated from consciousness entirely: a
philosophical zombie may give detailed verbal reports of awareness in the absence of any genuine awareness.
[76]
Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not the only possible criterion.
[73] In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement. The last three of these can be used as indicators of consciousness when verbal behavior is absent.
[77] The scientific literature regarding the neural bases of arousal and purposeful movement is very extensive. Their reliability as indicators of consciousness is disputed, however, due to numerous studies showing that alert human subjects can be induced to behave purposefully in a variety of ways in spite of reporting a complete lack of awareness.
[72] Studies of the
neuroscience of free will have also shown that the experiences that people report when they behave purposefully sometimes do not correspond to their actual behaviors or to the patterns of electrical activity recorded from their brains.
[78]
Another approach applies specifically to the study of
self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others. In the 1970s
Gordon Gallup developed an operational test for self-awareness, known as the
mirror test. The test examines whether animals are able to differentiate between seeing themselves in a mirror versus seeing other animals. The classic example involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near the individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot, thus indicating that they recognize that the individual they are seeing in the mirror is themselves.
[79] Humans (older than 18 months) and other
great apes,
bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, pigeons, European magpies and elephants have all been observed to pass this test.
[80]
Neural correlates
Schema of the neural processes underlying consciousness, from
Christof Koch
A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brains—that is, studies of the
neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness. Several brain imaging techniques, such as
EEG and
fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in these studies.
[81]
Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band)
oscillations in brain activity. This idea arose from proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma oscillations could solve the so-called
binding problem, by linking information represented in different parts of the brain into a unified experience.
[82] Rodolfo Llinás, for example, proposed that consciousness results from
recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus) thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the
gamma band frequency via synchronous oscillations.
[83]
A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not sufficient to produce consciousness: it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness even when areas such as the
primary visual cortex show clear electrical responses to a stimulus.
[84] Higher brain areas are seen as more promising, especially the
prefrontal cortex, which is involved in a range of higher cognitive functions collectively known as
executive functions. There is substantial evidence that a "top-down" flow of neural activity (i.e., activity propagating from the frontal cortex to sensory areas) is more predictive of conscious awareness than a "bottom-up" flow of activity.
[85] The prefrontal cortex is not the only candidate area, however: studies by Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues have shown, for example, that visually responsive neurons in parts of the
temporal lobe reflect the visual perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e., bistable percepts during binocular rivalry).
[86]
Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience of stimulus intensity (brightness, contrast). In the research group of Danko Nikolić it has been shown that some of the changes in the subjectively perceived brightness correlated with the modulation of firing rates while others correlated with the modulation of neural synchrony.
[87] An fMRI investigation suggested that these findings were strictly limited to the primary visual areas.
[88] This indicates that, in the primary visual areas, changes in firing rates and synchrony can be considered as neural correlates of qualia—at least for some type of qualia.
In 2011,
Graziano and Kastner
[89] proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as
hemispatial neglect. In the
attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person's attentional processing.
Attention is a style of
information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema that represents attentional states. To be aware of X is explained by constructing a model of one's attentional focus on X.
In the 2013, the
perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to
transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are in deep sleep or in a vegetative state,
[90] making it potentially useful as a quantitative assessment of consciousness states.
Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up. For example, assuming that birds are conscious — a common assumption among neuroscientists and ethologists due to the extensive cognitive repertoire of birds — there are comparative neuroanatomical ways to validate some of the principal, currently competing, mammalian consciousness–brain theories. The rationale for such a comparative study is that the avian brain deviates structurally from the mammalian brain. So how similar are they? What homologues can be identified? The general conclusion from the study by Butler, et al.,
[91] is that some of the major theories for the mammalian brain
[92][93][94] also appear to be valid for the avian brain. The structures assumed to be critical for consciousness in mammalian brains have homologous counterparts in avian brains. Thus the main portions of the theories of Crick and Koch,
[92] Edelman and Tononi,
[93] and Cotterill
[94] seem to be compatible with the assumption that birds are conscious. Edelman also differentiates between what he calls primary consciousness (which is a trait shared by humans and non-human animals) and higher-order consciousness as it appears in humans alone along with human language capacity.
[93] Certain aspects of the three theories, however, seem less easy to apply to the hypothesis of avian consciousness. For instance, the suggestion by Crick and Koch that layer 5 neurons of the mammalian brain have a special role, seems difficult to apply to the avian brain, since the avian homologues have a different morphology. Likewise, the theory of Eccles
[95][96] seems incompatible, since a structural homologue/analogue to the dendron has not been found in avian brains. The assumption of an avian consciousness also brings the reptilian brain into focus. The reason is the structural continuity between avian and reptilian brains, meaning that the phylogenetic origin of consciousness may be earlier than suggested by many leading neuroscientists.
Joaquin Fuster of UCLA has advocated the position of the importance of the prefrontal cortex in humans, along with the areas of Wernicke and Brocha, as being of particular importance to the development of human language capacities neuro-anatomically necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans.
[97]
Biological function and evolution
Opinions are divided as to where in biological
evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first mammals, (iii) independently in mammals and birds, or (iv) with the first reptiles.
[98] Other authors date the origins of consciousness to the first animals with nervous systems or early vertebrates in the Cambrian over 500 million years ago.
[99] Donald Griffin suggests in his book
Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.
[55] Each of these scenarios raises the question of the possible survival value of consciousness.
Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled
On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History an
epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity — “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery”.
[100] To this
William James objects in his essay
Are We Automata? by stating an evolutionary argument for mind-brain interaction implying that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of
natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness has not only been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this if it had been efficacious.
[101][102] Karl Popper develops in the book
The Self and Its Brain a similar evolutionary argument.
[103]
Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent.
[104] This has been called the
integration consensus. Another example has been proposed by
Gerald Edelman called dynamic core hypothesis which puts emphasis on
reentrant connections that reciprocally link areas of the brain in a massively parallel manner.
[105] Edelman also stresses the importance of the evolutionary emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans from the historically older trait of primary consciousness which humans share with non-human animals (see
Neural correlates section above). These theories of integrative function present solutions to two classic problems associated with consciousness: differentiation and unity. They show how our conscious experience can discriminate between a virtually unlimited number of different possible scenes and details (differentiation) because it integrates those details from our sensory systems, while the integrative nature of consciousness in this view easily explains how our experience can seem unified as one whole despite all of these individual parts. However, it remains unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Nor is it explained what specific causal role conscious integration plays, nor why the same functionality cannot be achieved without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds of information can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect.
[106] Hence it remains unclear why any of it is conscious. For a review of the differences between conscious and unconscious integrations, see the article of E. Morsella.
[106]
As noted earlier, even among writers who consider consciousness to be a well-defined thing, there is
widespread dispute about which animals other than humans can be said to possess it.
[107] Edelman has described this distinction as that of humans possessing higher-order consciousness while sharing the trait of primary consciousness with non-human animals (see previous paragraph). Thus, any examination of the evolution of consciousness is faced with great difficulties. Nevertheless, some writers have argued that consciousness can be viewed from the standpoint of
evolutionary biology as an
adaptation in the sense of a
trait that increases
fitness.
[108] In his article "Evolution of consciousness", John Eccles argued that special anatomical and physical properties of the mammalian
cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness ("[a] psychon ... linked to [a] dendron through quantum physics").
[109] Bernard Baars proposed that once in place, this "recursive" circuitry may have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms.
[110] Peter Carruthers has put forth one such potential adaptive advantage gained by conscious creatures by suggesting that consciousness allows an individual to make distinctions between appearance and reality.
[111] This ability would enable a creature to recognize the likelihood that their perceptions are deceiving them (e.g. that water in the distance may be a mirage) and behave accordingly, and it could also facilitate the manipulation of others by recognizing how things appear to them for both cooperative and devious ends.
Other philosophers, however, have suggested that consciousness would not be necessary for any functional advantage in evolutionary processes.
[112][113] No one has given a causal explanation, they argue, of why it would not be possible for a functionally equivalent non-conscious organism (i.e., a
philosophical zombie) to achieve the very same survival advantages as a conscious organism. If evolutionary processes are blind to the difference between function
F being performed by conscious organism
O and non-conscious organism
O*, it is unclear what adaptive advantage consciousness could provide.
[114] As a result, an exaptive explanation of consciousness has gained favor with some theorists that posit consciousness did not evolve as an adaptation but was an
exaptation arising as a consequence of other developments such as increases in brain size or cortical rearrangement.
[115] Several scholars including Pinker, Chomsky, Edelman, and Luria have indicated the importance of the emergence of human language as an important regulative mechanism of learning and memory in the context of the development of higher-order consciousness (see
Neural correlates section above).
States of consciousness
A Buddhist monk meditating
There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be absent, including dreamless sleep, coma, and death. There are also a variety of circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in less drastic ways, producing what are known as
altered states of consciousness. Some altered states occur naturally; others can be produced by drugs or brain damage.
[116] Altered states can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control, changes in emotional expression, alternations in body image and changes in meaning or significance.
[117]
The two most widely accepted altered states are
sleep and
dreaming. Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity, metabolic activity, and eye movement; each is also associated with a distinct pattern of experience and cognition. During ordinary non-dream sleep, people who are awakened report only vague and sketchy thoughts, and their experiences do not cohere into a continuous narrative. During dream sleep, in contrast, people who are awakened report rich and detailed experiences in which events form a continuous progression, which may however be interrupted by bizarre or fantastic intrusions.
[118] Thought processes during the dream state frequently show a high level of irrationality.
Both dream and non-dream states are associated with severe disruption of memory: it usually disappears in seconds during the non-dream state, and in minutes after awakening from a dream unless actively refreshed.
[119]
A variety of
psychoactive drugs and
alcohol have notable effects on consciousness.
[120] These range from a simple dulling of awareness produced by
sedatives, to increases in the intensity of sensory qualities produced by
stimulants,
cannabis, empathogens–entactogens such as MDMA ("Ecstasy"), or most notably by the class of drugs known as
psychedelics.
[116] LSD,
mescaline,
psilocybin, and others in this group can produce major distortions of perception, including hallucinations; some users even describe their drug-induced experiences as mystical or spiritual in quality. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects are not as well understood as those induced by use of
alcohol,
[120] but there is substantial evidence that alterations in the brain system that uses the chemical neurotransmitter
serotonin play an essential role.
[121]
There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis and people who practise various techniques of meditation. Some research with brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation. It has been disputed, however, whether there is enough evidence to count these as physiologically distinct states of consciousness.
[122]
The most extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was made by psychologist
Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s. Tart analyzed a state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body); input-processing (seeing meaning); emotions; memory; time sense; sense of identity; evaluation and cognitive processing; motor output; and interaction with the environment.
[123] Each of these, in his view, could be altered in multiple ways by drugs or other manipulations. The components that Tart identified have not, however, been validated by empirical studies. Research in this area has not yet reached firm conclusions, but a recent questionnaire-based study identified eleven significant factors contributing to drug-induced states of consciousness: experience of unity; spiritual experience; blissful state; insightfulness; disembodiment; impaired control and cognition; anxiety; complex imagery; elementary imagery; audio-visual
synesthesia; and changed meaning of percepts.
[124]
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a method of inquiry that attempts to examine the structure of consciousness in its own right, putting aside problems regarding the relationship of consciousness to the physical world. This approach was first proposed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, and later elaborated by other philosophers and scientists.
[125]
Husserl's original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and psychology.
In philosophy, phenomenology has largely been devoted to fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the nature of
intentionality (
"aboutness").
In psychology, phenomenology largely has meant attempting to investigate consciousness using the method of
introspection, which means looking into one's own mind and reporting what one observes. This method fell into disrepute in the early twentieth century because of grave doubts about its reliability, but has been rehabilitated to some degree, especially when used in combination with techniques for examining brain activity.
[126]
Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.
Square version of the neon spread illusion
Introspectively, the world of conscious experience seems to have considerable structure.
Immanuel Kant asserted that the world as we perceive it is organized according to a set of fundamental "intuitions", which include
object (we perceive the world as a set of distinct things);
shape;
quality (color, warmth, etc.);
space (distance, direction, and location); and
time.
[127] Some of these constructs, such as space and time, correspond to the way the world is structured by the laws of physics; for others the correspondence is not as clear. Understanding the physical basis of qualities, such as redness or pain, has been particularly challenging. David Chalmers has called this the
hard problem of consciousness.
[27] Some philosophers have argued that it is intrinsically unsolvable, because qualities (
"qualia") are
ineffable; that is, they are "raw feels", incapable of being analyzed into component processes.
[128] Most psychologists and neuroscientists reject these arguments. For example, research on
ideasthesia shows that qualia are organised into a semantic-like network. Nevertheless it is clear that the relationship between a physical entity such as light and a perceptual quality such as color is extraordinarily complex and indirect, as demonstrated by a variety of
optical illusions such as
neon color spreading.
[129]
In neuroscience, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating how the perceived world of conscious awareness is constructed inside the brain. The process is generally thought to involve two primary mechanisms: (1) hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, and (2) memory. Signals arising from sensory organs are transmitted to the brain and then processed in a series of stages, which extract multiple types of information from the raw input. In the visual system, for example, sensory signals from the eyes are transmitted to the
thalamus and then to the
primary visual cortex; inside the cerebral cortex they are sent to areas that extract features such as three-dimensional structure, shape, color, and motion.
[130] Memory comes into play in at least two ways. First, it allows sensory information to be evaluated in the context of previous experience. Second, and even more importantly,
working memory allows information to be integrated over time so that it can generate a stable representation of the world—
Gerald Edelman expressed this point vividly by titling one of his books about consciousness
The Remembered Present.
[131]
Despite the large amount of information available, the most important aspects of perception remain mysterious. A great deal is known about low-level signal processing in sensory systems, but the ways by which sensory systems interact with each other, with "executive" systems in the frontal cortex, and with the language system are very incompletely understood. At a deeper level, there are still basic conceptual issues that remain unresolved.
[130] Many scientists have found it difficult to reconcile the fact that information is distributed across multiple brain areas with the apparent unity of consciousness: this is one aspect of the so-called
binding problem.
[132] There are also some scientists who have expressed grave reservations about the idea that the brain forms representations of the outside world at all: influential members of this group include psychologist
J. J. Gibson and roboticist
Rodney Brooks, who both argued in favor of "intelligence without representation".
[133]
Medical aspects
The medical approach to consciousness is practically oriented. It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs. In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments. Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the
amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.
[134]
Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially
neurologists and
anesthesiologists. Patients may suffer from disorders of consciousness, or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure. Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering
general anesthesia, or inducing
medical coma.
[134] Also,
bioethicists may be concerned with the ethical implications of consciousness in medical cases of patients such as
Karen Ann Quinlan,
[135] while neuroscientists may study patients with impaired consciousness in hopes of gaining information about how the brain works.
[136]
Assessment
In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as
neuropsychological assessment.
[77] There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise. The simple procedure begins by asking whether the patient is able to move and react to physical stimuli. If so, the next question is whether the patient can respond in a meaningful way to questions and commands. If so, the patient is asked for name, current location, and current day and time. A patient who can answer all of these questions is said to be "alert and oriented times four" (sometimes denoted "A&Ox4" on a medical chart), and is usually considered fully conscious.
[137]
The more complex procedure is known as a
neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a
neurologist in a hospital setting. A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated use of language. The outcome may be summarized using the
Glasgow Coma Scale, which yields a number in the range 3—15, with a score of 3 indicating
brain death (the lowest defined level of consciousness), and 15 indicating full consciousness. The Glasgow Coma Scale has three subscales, measuring the
best motor response (ranging from "no motor response" to "obeys commands"), the
best eye response (ranging from "no eye opening" to "eyes opening spontaneously") and the
best verbal response (ranging from "no verbal response" to "fully oriented"). There is also a simpler
pediatric version of the scale, for children too young to be able to use language.
[134]
In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.
[138]
Disorders of consciousness
Medical conditions that inhibit consciousness are considered
disorders of consciousness.
[139] This category generally includes
minimally conscious state and
persistent vegetative state, but sometimes also includes the less severe
locked-in syndrome and more severe
chronic coma.
[139][140] Differential diagnosis of these disorders is an active area of
biomedical research.
[141][142][143] Finally,
brain death results in an irreversible disruption of consciousness.
[139] While other conditions may cause a moderate deterioration (e.g.,
dementia and
delirium) or transient interruption (e.g.,
grand mal and
petit mal seizures) of consciousness, they are not included in this category.
| Disorder |
Description |
| Locked-in syndrome |
The patient has awareness, sleep-wake cycles, and meaningful behavior (viz., eye-movement), but is isolated due to quadriplegia and pseudobulbar palsy. |
| Minimally conscious state |
The patient has intermittent periods of awareness and wakefulness and displays some meaningful behavior. |
| Persistent vegetative state |
The patient has sleep-wake cycles, but lacks awareness and only displays reflexive and non-purposeful behavior. |
| Chronic coma |
The patient lacks awareness and sleep-wake cycles and only displays reflexive behavior. |
| Brain death |
The patient lacks awareness, sleep-wake cycles, and brain-mediated reflexive behavior. |
Anosognosia
One of the most striking disorders of consciousness goes by the name
anosognosia, a Greek-derived term meaning
unawareness of disease. This is a condition in which patients are disabled in some way, most commonly as a result of a
stroke, but either misunderstand the nature of the problem or deny that there is anything wrong with them.
[144]
