Consciousness

Hi guys,

Thank you all for your thought-provoking comments. I'm so glad that everyone found this topic of consciousness so interesting, and I've really enjoyed reading all of the comments posted as a follow-up of the discussion last week.

Mostly, I find it really interesting that everyone seems to have their own conception of what consciousness is or isn't, or what it should be, and yet in our discussion last week someone raised the possibility that consciousness is just something you can recognize from your own experience. We seem to take for granted, much like with color perception, that one person's conception of what they experience as consciousness is the sam as another's, when it may be likely that we all experience consciousness differently. I am still a fan of the idea that there are multiple layers of consciousness, and that we are aware of things on different layers to a varying extent. This would explain how information can be stored in the brain and arise into our awareness at a later time, even when we are not able to retrieve the memory of first being exposed to that information. It also explains how one can drive, listen to the radio, talk on a cell phone, and navigate all at once (not that this is necessarily advisable). I think to really understand consciousness and what separates a conscious being from an unconscious one, we need to allow for the possibility that the distinction between these two states may not be black and white. 

Answering the question of whether or not language is necessary for consciousness is a task amenable to scientific inquiry. Importantly, what one concludes in either direction is dependent on how consciousness if defined. For example, consider observations of split-brain patients, who are unable to report seeing an object in their left field of vision, but who are able to select that object from among a row of objects significantly more than chance would predict (among other behaviors indicative of some type of awareness of the object such as drawing it). If consciousness is defined in terms of reportability, which constitutes an indication of introspective awareness, one would here conclude that the split-brain patients were not conscious of the object. However, if one defines consciousness in terms of some indication of awareness of that object such as an ability to select or draw that object, despite being incapable of reporting an awareness of it, than these patients would be considered conscious of the object.

With this anecdote in mind, it becomes apparent that while one can scientifically investigate the nature of consciousness, however, one does need to define consciousness before interpreting the results of empirical investigations of consciousness, as how one defines consciousness will pose important implications for the interpretation of results.

Further, I think this further illustrates point touched on in class, that consciousness is composed of various layers. For this reason, it seems that descriptions of consciousness should avoid seeking to define a single or principle criterion for defining what is “conscious” and instead set out to describe the various layers of consciousness and how these layers contribute to the processes of the others.

Hi guys,

  I really enjoyed our discussion last tuesday, I thought it provoked some really interesting questions about both the definition of conciousness and who and what we can apply the term to (dream states, sleep states, death, animals etc.)  One question that I had about the presentation was in reference to the "gorilla in the midst" demonstration. 

If my understanding is correct, researchers used this as an example of the failure of conciousness, demonstrating that most humans do not notice the gorilla because they are unable to be concious of all things at all times, and further that autistic patients would notice the gorilla because they display a different type of conciousness more similar to that of animals which enables them to be concious of more and in more detail.  This experiment reminded me of an experiment that I learned about in a cognition and memory class that I took while I was abroad.  In this experiment, subjects were asked to listen to an audio recording telling a story and then were exposed at random intervals to a voice calling their name.  Although I don't remember the exact details of the experiment, I do remember that they were asked to pay attention to the story for some detail.  Experimentors found that some people almost always noticed when their name was called, while others almost never noticed.  Researchers therefore proposed that there are really two groups of people: those who are better at focusing on the story and will not notice when they hear their name, and those who are less attentive and will notice when they hear their name. 

It seems to me that the same might apply to the gorilla in the mist experiment, namely that there is not a clear cut difference between autistic and non-autistic people, but that perhaps there is a continuum, and that some non-autistic people do notice the gorilla, and also might conceivably hear their name called.  Perhaps autistic people represent an extreme on this continuum?  Also on a more general note, I'm still unsure of how in these experiments we differentiate between attention and conciousness.  Are they the same thing or simply interrelated?

Thanks guys!

So I think all the discussion about the definition of consciousness is incredibly interesting-- and im not sure that there really is just one right answer. Kendra's above idea about a spectrum seems to me like a good way to define things, as with many of our topics, there is no black and white "conscious" "unconscious" with this definition and it is best to look at it with all of the variability in mind. I think one thing that has sort of been brought up as well is this idea that we will never really know another person's consciousness (beetle in a box idea) which also adds to the complexity of the issue. We define others as conscious all the time-- like when my professors think i am conscious AND attending to the material at hand but i'm actually daydreaming. Does that mean that their interpretation of my consciousness is wrong? (Which brings up a whole different issue that has also been discussed above about attention versus consciousness) Am I "unconscious" with respect to them? I sort of like this idea: that you can be conscious or unconscious WITH RESPECT to things... which fits into a our driving a car example.

Antoher interesting thing that i wanted to bring up, somewhat anecdotally, is the idea of productive thought in an unconscious setting. I know that when im thinking about work just before I go to bed I'll think of some of my best ideas, but then when i fully return to my awake state (even just afterwards when i tell myself i need to write the thought down) i can never get the phrasing or the idea quite right. Is there a state where we are able to think crticially and productively while still being unconscious? this relates to the above topics that were brought up about unconscious education, which i think is really interesting. can we practice putting ourselves into this state of lower attention in order to learn in new and different ways? is this better or worse?

lastly, since this discussion has been a bunch of little tidbits of thoughts anyway, i wanted to bring up the idea of artificial intelligence. We talked about the blue chip (Gillian's presenation i think?) which is trying to create a working brain from the neuron to neuron connections and upward. Would such a creation have consciousness? When we talked about it before we thought that it would-- sort of. We didn't say so explicitly, but we did get the feeling that if the creation was actaully exactly like a brain then it should function as such and have some form of consciousness so we all felt morally that it would be bad to simply turn such a thing off. do we really believe that consciousness is simply a combination of all of the neural connections and firing? as a biologist i want to be able to explain it as such, but this (and the thoguhts above, especially about the after-death phenomenon) really forces you to ponder ideas outside of the root science... such as faith and morality.

thanks for such an interesting discussion

            It seems to me that consciousness, as with many things, a spectrum exists upon which we can (subjectively) place both ourselves and others.  We discussed some of the levels of consciousness as being awake, asleep, dreaming, sleepwalking, hypnosis, coma, anesthesia etc. but one thing we didn’t discuss was the possible differences in individual people’s consciousness.  As with other internal states like emotion, consciousness is only something we can gauge because we assume that we are fully conscious when we are normally awake.  This is just another level of perception and it is entirely possible, and in fact in my opinion likely, that our consciousness is in fact only part of our subjective experience that we place on others in order to more usefully interact and connect with them.  The issue of animals and consciousness to me is again on the above mentioned spectrum; whether this is “higher” or “lower” than our own consciousness seems irrelevant.  That it is different seems likely.

            One issue that I found interesting was the idea of consciousness and memory being intrinsically linked.  Can you be conscious if you do not remember later that you were?  How long do you need to remember for to qualify consciousness (if memory is essential)?  To me it seems that memory and consciousness are only linked in the sense of the past.  Consciousness to me is in the moment.  It is the idea of being lucid and saying ‘yes, I am aware of myself and my surroundings’.  If you can’t remember something I don’t think that means you weren’t necessarily conscious at the time, it just means that you are no longer conscious of your previous state.  To me it seems that consciousness and memory do not have to be linked.  It is convenient if you can remember your conscious state and conscious decisions in order to help verify that state later on; but to be conscious in the present to me does not mean to be able to remember you were conscious later. This, however, is only my personal definition of consciousness.

            That I don’t feel there must be a connection between consciousness and memory makes many examples difficult to interpret; for example, the idea of infant amnesia.  Are we born conscious and just cannot remember it or is consciousness a concept/feeling that develops over time?  Do we obtain consciousness as we obtain other forms of awareness of the world around us?  As we look at neural correlates of the subjectively defined “conscious state” (wow that must be a difficult thing to research), I think it would be interesting to look at the brain waves of infants.  Do they show the same neural activity during normal awake hours as adults or are they developmentally not far enough along to show the same activity?  Does this mean (either way) that they are conscious or not?

            I’d like to go back to Natsu’s comment about learning new languages.  I worked in Paul’s lab this summer with Ian, and we spent a lot of time examining current education systems and brainstorming about educational reform. An often cited example about education, one that is totally relevant to a discussion about consciousness, is language acquisition.  When you take a step back and think about it, learning language of any kind, let alone two or three, is a daunting task, especially when you look at who primarily does the learning… kids.  Isn’t it interesting that we debate whether young children are conscious, and they can still learn language?  Perhaps there’s something here… Out of all the time children spend learning language, a very small portion of it is conscious education (doing workbooks, being forced to read a book by a teacher, practicing grammar exercises) and yet they still learn language!  Most of that time is spent learning language unconsciously, being educated inductively.

            There’s quite a bit of evidence besides the language example (though I think that’s the most interesting one) that suggest that great things can be produced unconsciously.  I think the word “unconscious” sounds…. passive?, stupid?, lazy?, undesirable? inauthentic?.... so in keeping with many of my other posts, I think the meaning of this word, all the cultural baggage it carries, needs to be changed. That, in sum, is why I think this is a great topic for inquiry and an area of research that I’d be eager to read more about.

 

In addressing one of Natsu’s questions, I don’t think we have to remember an event at all once we leave the situation to say that we were conscious. Consciousness, to me, is always in the present. You can be conscious from minute to minute and (like a person with amnesia) while not remembering anything. It seems to be that in class we wanted to tie memory and consciousness together, but it seems that memory of a conscious experience is different from the experience itself. We should not say that someone was not conscious of something when in fact they were at the time, they simply can’t remember it any more. Trauma seems to serve as a good example. I have seen people who during a traumatic event are certainly conscious of what is going on around them, what is happening, and their internal state during the event, and yet do not remember the event at a later time. They are certainly conscious of both the experience (physical pain) and the repercussions of the event, but they do not remember it actually happening. While I would say they do not have a conscious memory of the event, at the same time were conscious at the time and are certainly conscious of the results of such an event. Perhaps part of the consciousness of trauma is to erase the memory…

Also, what does this mean for people who are from some sort of brain injury unable to recall events? While people like HM (I think that was who we were talking about…) are unable to consciously remember anything from one minute to the next, in that one minute they are completely conscious. He has no conscious memory, but that does not mean he is unconscious.

I wanted to bring up again the study I mentioned in class. This study found that when researchers gave some people in comas fMRIs (I might have said EEGs in class), these people showed simply brain activation to people without comas (as well as in comparison to their own ‘baseline’ state) for all sorts of specific thought tasks (such as imagine yourself playing tennis). I find this remarkable, and difficult to deal with since we think of people in comas as unconscious. While not everyone in comas responded the same way in this imaging study, from our perspective they all were the same. How are we to tell if people are really unconscious in comas? Maybe this experiment could be used to determine if people are conscious…I’m not sure. It offers evidence, however, for more careful determination of coma status. Perhaps comas could be thought of on different levels instead of a general unconscious state. While we like to think of people with their eyes closed and not moving as being unconscious since we think of them as sleeping, we need to reevaluate this idea and understand that maybe that some of the people in comas may be just like us sitting still with our eyes closed---we might not be able to see, but we’re conscious of what’s going on.

 

            I have been thinking about a good definition of consciousness, and after our class discussion I have come to the conclusion that there are many ways to define consciousness. I think the definition of consciousness differs according to the context. The consciousness of a particular person at any given moment is different than the consciousness of a person interacting with another person. Consciousness at any given moment is driven by behavior within the surrounding environment. Our consciousness is driven by behavioral choices that change on a daily basis. Repeated behavioral choices evolve into habits which I think are not conscious behaviors. As someone brought up in class, habits are unconscious behavioral choices and to get rid of habits a person must be conscious of these behavioral choices. Overall, I think consciousness can be defined by a person’s interaction with the ever changing and ever evolving environment.

            I think that interactions between two people require another definition of consciousness. In this case, consciousness involves a social and emotional connection between two people, which is driven by language. This definition of consciousness allows us to understand why pet owners consider their pets to be conscious. I think that we associate consciousness with social and emotional language. Animals communicate with their owners via language, verbal and physical, such as barking or wagging of the tale, and these behavioral cues make animals conscious. Human consciousness, similar to animal consciousness, requires language. For a person to be conscious they need to be communicating in some form to another person. This is why people in comas are considered unconscious, because they cannot communicate with the language needed to be considered conscious and usually do not express any form of social or emotional language.

             

      

             

      

The study of consciousness brings up similar issues as the study of love (my presentation topic).  First, both love and consciousness cannot easily be defined, and there appears to be no universally agreed upon or single definition for these topics.  Then, the question arises, can something that is not completely defined be studied?  One approach researchers of love have taken, which also may be helpful for researchers of consciousness to take, is to recognize the multidimensionality of the topic at hand and instead study specific components related to the main topic.  For example, when studying love, you can study specific aspects such as commitment, attachment, or infidelity.  

One other interesting idea is to consider if our consciousness survives after death?  I recently was told by a friend who attended a conference at Haverford at few weeks ago about a talk on the survival of consciousness after death.  According to my friend, the researchers performed a study where they interviewed a couple hundred individuals who were brought into hospitals 'dead' and then ended up being revived and brought back to life.  Many of the individuals who experienced this, described that while they were 'dead' they could perceive what was going on still, they saw the emergency room and saw doctors and nurses working on their body.  To make this evidence even more convincing, they also had a blind individual experience the same thing, and the blind individual was also able to see and describe the situation very accurately giving details about the color of the walls and what exactly was going while his or her body was being revived, and details of what was being done to them.  I found this evidence really interesting.  It suggests that maybe our brains create the thing that is consciousness and even once our brains and bodies cease to exist our consciousness lives on some how.  I found a website that describes some the evidence of consciousness surviving after death (i'm not 100% sure this is the same evidence my friend heard presented at the conference, but it seems pretty similar- so it may be the same).  Here is the website: 

http://www.near-death.com/evidence.html 

I thought the idea of consciousness living on after we die to be an interesting and controversial one, I'm still not sure how I stand, but I definitely am interested in learning more about it.  I'd be interested to hear what other people think about consciousness surviving us after we die.  

Consciousness personally proved challenging to discuss this past week due to its lack of a solid definition. While talking about it, people seemed to refer to lots of different kinds or types of consciousness. As like many of the topics we have discussed, using one term to represent a number of distinct things leads to difficulties. I think this flaw hindered our conversation – we repeatedly got caught up on what “consciousness” really is, while it in fact seems impossible to generate an all-encompassing definition for this complex, multi-faceted concept. If someone can create a really solid definition that brings in all of our thoughts, that’d be awesome. But, considering how many years people have been struggling with this task, I don’t find it likely to be solved any time soon. With that said, I think our conversation did lead us to some interesting areas to analyze further in depth throughout this forum.

 

Two general sub-areas in particular grabbed my attention. First, the differences (if there are any) in the consciousness of someone who is not awake. That could include someone who is asleep, hypnotized, comatose, sleep-walking/talking, etc. Along with the differences between these states comes the importance of comparing consciousness in the moment and consciousness in some longer period of time. For instance, certainly hypnotized people (and sometimes people who sleep-walk/talk) can be aware of their surroundings, reflect on their own actions in a larger environment, judge those actions/thoughts, and maybe even change them during the hypnotic state and potentially even afterwards once awoken (e.g. using hypnotism to alleviate phobias). However, their abilities to make decisions and interact with the environment seem at least partially controlled by someone else – the hypnotist. Should they be considered conscious? Are they conscious in the moment, but not once the wake up? Is it not consciousness at all and the influence of hypnosis depends on the power of the unconscious mind? I’m not really sure, and I think a lot of these questions can be broadened to the other “not awake” states I suggested above. Discerning what the differences between all of them, particularly in relation to consciousness, is not an easy endeavor.

 

The other part of the our conversation that really hit me was while our discussion concerning the power of the unconscious mind for not only learning, but also enacting complex and astounding physical and intellectual tasks. For athletes and musicians, I think this definitely makes sense – practice makes perfect. Getting something so engrained in one’s mind (or nervous system) so that one’s muscles just “know” how to do it can allow one to somehow do it better than actively attending to every muscle movement. However, I then think about this in non-extracurricular activities, but about performances such as surgery. For example, what if I need surgery on my knee – I would want my surgeon to do the best job possible. However, would it better for him/her to unconsciously do the procedure or rather think about each step meticulously, making sure to not mess up? In being so careful, would he/she maybe be more likely to screw something up? The applications for this unconscious performance seem endless in many aspects of life, but I’m not sure I like the idea of having my surgeon (no matter how experienced) just not really pay attention while cutting my leg open.

 

Thanks for an engaging discussion and I’m interested to see what the rest of you think…