Consciousness?

*working paper*

Consciousness?

It’s the unforgettable feeling of cold mountain air filling you lungs when you take that first deep breath in the morning. It’s the way a melody can make you tap your feet or cause your eyes to swell up with tears. It seems to be with you and at the same time seems to be you. In some cases it hides from detection, while in others it shows itself when we least expect it to. It’s something so familiar to us, yet remains one of humanities most perplexing unanswered questions. What is Consciousness? Why do we seem to have it? What is its purpose? Why does the physical body have any influence on or over the mind and visa versa, or do the mind and body even correlate at all? These are the hard questions; hard to grasp and even harder to answer. More so, one of the biggest challenges that continues to puzzle even the most intellectual of minds is, where do we begin? What do we do first? Where do we look? How do we find the theoretical ‘loose end’ to this giant ball of knotted mysteries? Fortunately, it is our curiosity, our subjective experiences, our consciousness, our feeling of ownership over the very thing itself that has continued to push us forward in the pursuit of solving one of life’s greatest mystery. Beautifully, it seems, the elegance of consciousness is its allowance of consciousness.

Beginning with the early philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, etc.), and continuing on into later generations, (such as Descartes, Nietzsche, etc.) the great thinkers of our kind have pondered and prodded this ‘hard-problem’ (Chalmers, 1996) we seem to be faced with. While there has been some progress in the field of philosophy as to what consciousness could or could not be (ie. Cartesian Dualism was once the popularly held belief among scholars however is now widely accepted as not to be an accurate understanding of consciousness), it is not until recently that the scientific community has been able to actively participate and contribute. Fortunately, due to the rapid increase and advancements in technology over recent years, scientist for the first time are able to study and explore what is going on inside the physical brain. With the help of brain imaging scans, such as fMRI’s, Neuroscience is beginning to uncover the inner workings of the brain. Scientists are learning the responsibilities certain regions of the brain seem to be assigned and what role certain mechanisms have in enabling different regions to communicate with each other. But how does this help with understanding consciousness? Studying and understanding how the brain works will only give us just that, how it works. What about consciousness?

Where do we begin?

Often the initial question asked is, how do we define consciousness? What are its parameters? How do we identify it? How do we know it when we encounter or observe it? It is my opinion that perhaps asking how to define consciousness is a futile question. Is it absolutely necessary for us to have a precise, laid out and defined explanation of what consciousness is in order to study it? My argument is, well, isn’t that what we are trying to figure out in the first place? How can we accurately define what consciousness is when we cannot explain the components that make up consciousness? Seems a bit backwards to me. We could not accurately define our place in the solar system until Copernicus discovered and understood the planetary properties and mathematical components of physics which showed the Earth in not at the center of the solar system and shifted our view from geocentric to heliocentric. We could not accurately understand our place in the natural world until Darwin showed we are in fact part of the animal kingdom and not separate from it. But even if we could come to some universally agreed upon definition of consciousness, what would that look like? What would fulfill our parameters in a complete definition of consciousness? So again I ask, is it absolutely necessary to have a definition first? Take the idea of communication for example. As children, we are first introduced to speech through sounds in the womb, then once we are born, sounds made by those around us. Eventually babies enter the prelinguistic speech phase where coos and babbling become their form of communication (Papalia, 2015). Gradually through discovery and interaction with others, we begin to learn language sound and structure. We learn what phonetic sequences are important to our cultural environment and hold onto those while ignoring sequences that do not warrant relevancy (to our own subjective experience, remember the entirety of the mystery of consciousness is the subjective experience). As we continue to learn more, we begin to create our first words, our first sentences, our ability to communicate with others. It isn’t until several years later that we are introduced to the letters of the alphabet and writing, seemingly core components of communication, yet we are able to communicate, even if at a rudimentary level, before any of these ideas are discovered and understood. Granted this may be a crude example, but the idea is holds the same. An understanding and defined sense of what something is is not necessary in order for us to explore, discover, learn and integrate components of said thing. Sometimes a definition can follow fundamental insights in explaining something and don’t have to precede them (Seth, 2012).

It goes with reason, however, I need to outline some sort of basic gist of what consciousness is to me so from here on when referring to consciousness I simply mean the following: Any subjective experience we have. Of being a self. It is the appearance of and our perception of the world around us. The awareness of waking in the morning and relying on intuitive common sense that consciousness is present. The understanding that without it and its subjective property, there is nothing, no world, no self, no meaning, no experience and no perception (again I reiterate this is in relation to the self. I am not arguing that without consciousness the entire universe would cease to exist, I am merely driving home it is the self, the subjective being, that we are focused on here). So with this basic understanding, where do we go from here?

As I mentioned earlier, one approach in the study of consciousness comes from the field of neuroscience. It seems to be generally agreed upon by both philosophers and scientists that the something that is consciousness has to do with the brain. Therefore, in recent years with the advancement of functional brain imaging technology, neuroscientists have turned their attention to studying brain mechanics and processes as a way to possibly gain some insight into what consciousness is or at least try to uncover the seemingly correlation that exists between the two. Now, it is important to keep in mind here before we continue that research in consciousness science does not need to or is even necessarily out to explain why consciousness exists, but rather what components (if any) are taking place in the brain that can help account for a piece of the subjective conscious experience. ‘Consciousness science, at least for now, does not need to explain why consciousness exists, to go about unravelling the biological and physical properties that underlie its many properties, in much the same way that physicists have laid bare many mysteries of the universe without accounting for the brute fact that it is there.' (Seth, 2010). Researchers such as Dr. Anil Seth from the University of Sussex have dedicated their entire life’s work to studying and exploring the brain in an attempt to uncover the mysteries of the subjective experience. One of Dr. Seth’s main premise behind the need for neuroscience in consciousness studies comes from the question, how much can we rely on our own judgements about what we are experiencing? If introspection is our main source of understanding subjective experience, and everyone has their own introspection on their own subjective experiences, how in the world will we ever get anywhere? Well, if we know consciousness has something to do with the brain, then why not study the mechanics and processes taking place inside of it in order to see if we can uncover (again if any) a component(s) involved in the subjective experience? Personally I find this to make the most sense as to where we should begin our exploration for understanding consciousness. I do not believe it will solve the hard-problem, and if anything I am more apt to believe more questions will surly arise (for example the Bayesian brain model) from this research, but it is a starting point and a way to get the proverbial ball rolling.

Does understanding more about how the mind (brain) works seem to make my first-person experience of being alive seem any less mysterious or wondrous? 

Our sensory perception has long been agreed upon to play a vital role in our subjective experiences. Even with drastically varying theories, philosophers have understood our senses hold some ‘gateway’ between the physical world and our conscious minds. 17th century philosopher John Locke believed we are born as a ‘blank slate’ and that all knowledge is gained through sense experience, or empiricism. George Berkeley gave us the subjective dualism approach in which he also argued all knowledge is gained through perception experiences but took it one step further and posed that this was all there was. Berkeley believed material matter did not exist in a metaphysical sense (immaterialism) and that only spirit and mind did. Thus, everything existed in the ideas and minds of perceivers, and objects cannot exist without this. While this is no longer a widely held perspective on the hard problem, is does demonstrate that even early on, there was an understanding that our sensory perception played some vital role in our subjective experiences.

Now, fast forward to modern day and we can still see this same train of thought remains in our study of consciousness. However, for the first time in human history, we are now able to examine this correlation through the scientific method utilizing technological advancements in neuro-imaging techniques.