CONSCIOUSNESS

W. Roland Cook, Ph.D.

What Is Consciousness?

I am driving on the highway in pelting rain. Traffic is slow-moving. One hand on the wheel, the other holds a cell phone. I am calling to say I will be late for an appointment. The red tail light flashes on the car ahead. My foot moves from the accelerator to the brake pedal.

Where is this experience I am having -- my experiences of motions, sights and sounds of rain and traffic, communication miles apart, coordinating with traffic and weather? What performs the sensing, the actions, the coordinating? Does my brain control my actions in response to the environment that it senses, coupled with its past experience? If it is my brain, then what am "I" doing here?

Consciousness, like the air we breathe, is so naturally a part of us that we are typically unaware of it. We use the term "consciousness" to describe our awareness of "being conscious", of having experiences. And we can use it in a more general sense to describe a function of the brain. Consciousness is something which depends on the brain, which we know as our experience.

Is consciousness an "object". which we can discuss? Is it something we can point to, talk about, analyze, and test, by instruments and actions? We will talk about consciousness as an 'object', like the air we breathe, or the world we live in, as the sum total of our experiences.

How do we point to consciousness?

A 'pointer' is simply a reference to one thing by another. A pointer to conscious experience is language. When I say, "I see a tree", I am 'pointing' to my experience of a tree. "Tree", as a label or name which refers (points) to a tree, which I perceive to be 'out there', as an object in the external world, to which I can physically point. "Tree" is also the object in my experience to which I point via language. Typically this is called 'objective' and 'subjective' experience. The tree in my experience is subjective in that only I can know my own experience. The tree my language refers (points) to is something others can observe in their experience.

If no one else sees a tree, then my experience may be entirely subjective, meaning "only I am having the experience", and no one else has the same experience. This is characteristic of dreams, where I have my experience, but no one else has the same experience. I can describe my dream experience only via language. The language I use to describe a dream must then coincide, more or less, with how the words are interpreted by another person's (listener's or reader's) experience.

If I say, "I have a pain in my toe", no one else can feel my pain, nor identify its exact location. It is an object in my experience, similar to a tree, but is now confined to my internal, bodily world. It is not visible nor observable to anyone else. But I can point to my toe and show where I experience the pain, and describe what it feels like to me.

If I say, "I am completely satisfied", then I cannot even point to a location of my satisfaction. But I do point to the fact that I experience satisfaction.

In every case where I use language to convey a 'code' for my experience, the other person hearing or reading my code must be able to interpret my code from their own experience. Frequently these codes do not agree. Misinterpretations result, and as is common in translating from one language to another, the codes may signify different things in other persons' experiences. Not only the written or spoken codes convey our experiences, but also the context, mannerisms, and specific uses of words and how they are used will transmit to another person nuances of our feelings and experiences.

The upshot of all this is that consciousness is not something easily defined. It is like defining the "world". If we are asked to define the world, we would be just as nonplussed as we are in defining what we mean by consciousness. We might say "The world is what is 'out there', and my (conscious) experience is 'in here', in my head." But my body and head are also 'out there', and I do not actually experience my experience as 'being in my head'.

Whether the 'world' is "in our heads", or not, does not appear to be in question. Although we experience the world 'out there', and not 'in our head', it is now well known that the brain produces our conscious experience, and that all we experience does occur somehow within the brain.
Neurological and other studies show clearly that we reconstruct the world from our sensory information, in the brain, and that is where we perceive the "real world" external to our brains, including ourselves, our bodies and their orientations in a world of objects. Plato in his analogy of the cave, and Berkeley, the English philosopher, illustrated this point, and it is continuously being explained today by neurosciences and philosophy.
Click References (below): 1. For an extensive listing of Web Resources and 2. For Brief Summaries of Current Philosophical Positions.

Is consciousness a physical object?

There are many objects in science which we cannot touch, feel or see, such as electrons, electrical fields, waves in the vacuum, gravitational fields, and time, among others. We infer these as 'properties' of the world from our experience. We develop instruments to measure these properties, such as clocks, meters, telescopes, microscopes, supercolliders, and many others. Electrical waves are 'fields' which our TV's and radios detect, amplify and convert into images and sounds which we can see and hear. Instruments expand our conscious experiences of invisible properties of the world.

Similarly we cannot touch or feel conscious experience, but we can observe, measure, analyze and detect it via instruments. And we have direct experience of our own conscious experience. Its properties are those of all the sensations, thoughts, feelings and ideas that we experience.

There are no properties in the physical world, outside our direct experience, that we can directly observe. Therefore we must infer from our experience, not only what others experience, but also the properties of the world we observe, including the brain that produces our experiences. Science can only make inferences from observations of and about the world, to determine its properties. These inferences must be checked by extended observations, and against others' experiences, to ensure that we interpret our experiences accurately, and that they reflect what actually happens in the world, external to our experience of it.

Despite a long history that conscious experience is believed to be beyond and above the natural physical world (that is, a supernatural object) we can no longer adhere to this formulation. Since our experience is produced by the brain, there is every reason to consider our experience to be a natural part of the natural world. And, if we call the natural world a 'physical' world, then that world, which has produced our brains which produce our experiences, must also be producing a 'physical' process, our conscious experience. Our brains and our experience could not interact, as they do, if they came from or belonged to 'different worlds'.

Let us consider two analogies as illustrations for:

1. The Physical Nature of Consciousness
2. The Function of Consciousness, and
3.The Function of Language.

The Physical Nature of Consciousness.

One analogy is the physical concept of gravitation, which is fairly familiar to everyone by now. On the one hand we have something we call a "mass", and on the other we have a "field" of some sort which is an effect of this mass on its surroundings. Both the field and the mass are physical concepts. but they are completely different in their properties and specifications, appearance and just about everything else. In fact the field is what the ancients would have called a "spirit" that moves things around.

We can compare consciousness to the "field" and the brain to the "mass" which produces that field. Cognitive sciences study the field of our experience, while neuroscience studies the mass, the brain, and how it operates. Remember we are talking analogy, not exact similitude.

Another analogy is the computer, which is more to the point, since we all know pretty much what computers are, what they do, and may even know something about their inner workings, how they operate internally (by registers in memory banks, which contain bits which are zeroes and ones) -- and which are programmed (by conscious brains in the form of computer programmers).

Let us compare the brain to the computer hardware, comprising only registers composed of zeroes and ones -- and consciousness to the software programs, that can modify the computer's actions, tell it what to do, and produce an output so it can be understood by conscious brains.

We realize first of all that zeroes and ones corresponding to the brain's operations have no meaning whatsoever by themselves. One can look at synapses galore and not know anything about what they do or anything about what the brain does either, unless we can decode the meaning of brain operations (those registers of zeroes and ones).

Some research is now showing that synapses may not be the locus for much of our experiences and memory at all. Physically they are overwritten millions of times per day so they are hardly a locus for anything permanent, unless they result in "hard wiring" such as we find in appliances and automobiles, and operating systems in computers themselves. An alternative to synapses are microscopic spikes or stubs which line dendrites by the thousands, and may act as resonant ciruits for retaining memories. They would give the brain far more capacity than we could ever expect synapses alone to perform, but they can be seen only with the aid of electron microscopes.

The Function of Consciousness

We know there are specific properties of the brain analogous to computers. Our brains localize their operations for specific sensory experiences, in specialized areas for processing visual, hearing, body mapping, speech, language and other "experiences" -- this is analogous to computers which are designed to divide their operations into specific areas for similar kinds of pursuits.

But we have no conception of why or how one brain area translates neural impulses (or resonances) into one form of experience and not another. In the computer our conscious brains have designed unique systems for these special purposes.

Examine exactly what a computer is capable of doing. It is capable to accept inputs, to process these inputs and to produce outputs. The outputs may be variable, depending on conditions (or conditional probabilities) in the inputs and depending on the software. If this were not the case then computers would be useless for "solving problems". They could perform only simple tasks, based on simple inputs, which is what automobiles and appliances, and robots and operating systems require, and what many reflex and learned operations in our brains perform.

But with adequate software to identify different kinds of situations the computer can solve many different tyes of problems and handle many different kinds of variable situations. It is the same with the brain. The brain cannot respond to variable situations unless it "knows" what the neural inputs "mean" -- what they refer to -- are they a sound, a visual input, a taste, a smell of smoke, a fear response? -- is that automobile going to hit me or not? or where is that baseball trajectory going to be when my bat swings?

Only our conscious experience supplies the brain with this information, in the highly variable, constantly changing panorama of everyday experience. Without this conscious experience the brain would not be capable to coordinate all of its internal processing, to interpret its meaning, and to respond with the appropriate actions.

The Function of Language

An analogy for the function of "language" in the brain and for ourselves can also be seen in how the computer operates. Programs, telling the computer what to do, are written in a language which ends up as zeroes and ones in computer memory banks. This language is totally meaningless to the computer. You cannot ask the computer what any combination of zeroes and ones "means" or refers to. Every item in the computer requires a LABEL, both for input and for output. We label each item (combinations of zeroes and ones) with a NAME, so we can understand what the computer is saying to us after it completes its operations. Even the computer's operations are coded in language.

Thus analogously, via language, we (our brains) can label our (their) conscious experiences, compare them, exchange them, argue about them, discuss them, use them as commands and controls over other brains, and "talk to ourselves"...
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References

1. Web Resources

2. Brief Current Philosophy Summaries

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