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I left class wondering if we are going to talk about definitions of consciousness in class this week. It seems that humans have been questioning consciousness for centuries and yet we don't quite know what it is.

I read the article posted by Jessica Varney above. It addressed one of the things I have been thinking about: theory of mind and how it relates to consciousness. Cheney and Seyfarth, two researchers mentioned in the article, came to Haverford last semester and gave lectures on primate brain and behavior. They said primatologists still haven't come to a conclusion as to whether nonhuman primates demonstrate theory of mind, attributing mental states to others. One researcher in the article thinks that upbringing by humans influences awareness, so so-called feral children might not have the same "consciousness" we do, and nonhuman primates raised by humans might have a more similar version of awareness to humans than their relatives raised in the wild. It seems that there have been conflicting observations on both the issues of self-awareness and theory of mind in nonhuman primates; I wonder if one can exist without the other, and if both are necessary for what we call consciousness.

I watched a show a while ago about a phenomenon that sometimes occurs during surgery in which people are conscious, so they are completely aware and can feel everything, though they can't move because of the paralyzer given to them. Medical researchers are trying to develop more sophisticated measurement devices so that surgeons can detect when patients could still be conscious and adjust their anesthetic accordingly. I find this fascinating. First of all, it's interesting that some of the cables between brain and body can be active while others aren't; nocireceptors still send pain messages to the brain, though the brain can't send messages to motor neurons. Second, it's amazing that we have such advanced surgical techniques that allow us to fix problems even in the brain, but we still can't reliably measure consciousness.