How close are we to clearly defining and scientifically dissecting exactly what consciousness is?
I won’t see it in my lifetime.
You are asking us to predict the future. I do not think anyone here is capable of doing that.
There are currently lots of theories and definitions of consciousness in the literature. Nearly everyone who studies the subject thinks that all of them, or all of them except the particular one that they themselves propose, are deeply flawed. Maybe, one day, a consensus will be reached, at which point we could reasonably say that a scientific understanding of consciousness had now been reached (in reality, scientific advance is largely about reaching a consensus of experts), but how long that might happen is impossible to say. Conceivably, there might, one day (perhaps even one day quite soon), be some unexpected empirical discovery that will precipitate the relatively sudden formation of a consensus. If such a startling discovery were to happen tomorrow, maybe a scientific consensus might emerge and stabilize within a year or two. However, as a close observer of the field, I think such a discovery is unlikely to occur, and that a scientific consensus about consciousness is much more likely to emerge from a long process of discussion and mutual criticism. In either case, it is impossible to say how long it will all take.
If anyone posts here that the problem is solved, or nearly solved, that means nothing except that they think that the particular account of consciousness that they happen to favor is the right one. Whatever that account is, it will not be hard to find other people, equally or more expert in the field, who will strongly disagree with it.
I started a PhD program in behavioral neuroscience hoping to get some type of an answer in what makes consciousness possible. I started lose interest when I quickly realized the level of research is currently way, way, way more basic than that as a general rule. Researchers are gaining good understanding of how brain cells work at the molecular level and even how those scale up to store memories but I haven’t read anything that suggests that there is any significant progress in understanding consciousness as a whole. There are plenty of theories out there but it will probably take a huge theoretical breakthrough to make significant progress in that regard. That doesn’t exist now to the best of my knowledge and there is no way of knowing when or if it ever will.
Not now, but we will be, one day.
It doesn’t really work like that. You’re making the assumption that “consciousness” is a genuine, definable property which we just haven’t managed to discover yet. And that’s an understandable assumption; it’s what we instinctively feel and there’s a sizeable proportion of philosophers who still argue it is.
But I’d say it isn’t. And I suspect most scientists would agree. We already know what “consciousness” is: it’s the stage where an animal’s brain is developed to sufficient degree of complexity that it starts to gain the ability to self-reflect and to grasp its own place in the world. That’s all it is. There’s no light-switch moment at which an animal suddenly goes from lacking consciousness to having it; it’s just a question of degree. Some insects have a brain of sorts, but it’s not developed enough for us to think of it as “conscious”. Same goes for fish. Small mammals is a toss-up. Larger mammals like dogs and elephants are developed enough that they self-reflect to some extent. And by the time you get to humans the animal’s brain is so developed that it has enormous capacity for intelligence and self-reflection.
Human brains consist of the interaction of the electrical and chemical signals emitted by millions of neurons and synapses. That system is developed enough that it can understand itself and its place in the physical world around it. Humans refer to that stage of development as “being conscious”, but because we don’t want to believe that’s all we are, we convince ourselves there’s something more to consciousness than that. But there isn’t. When science advances to the point where it can create robots with sufficiently complicated “brain” systems, they’ll be “conscious” just like we are. We don’t yet have the ability to create that degree of complexity, but we do know what it is.
EDIT: Reading your post again, it’s possible that you’re already agreed with what I was saying in my post above - that consciousness is simply the name we use to refer to an animal’s brain that has developed to a sufficient level of complexity to allow it some degree of self-reflection and a certain capacity for intelligence - and rather you’re asking what the level and nature of that development is. If so then we’re on the same page and the question you’re asking is a question for the neuroscientists. But in philosophy, and in common opinion, the position I’m outlining is by no means the accepted one yet; a lot of people still believe there’s something more to consciousness than the physics of the interaction between neurons in an animal’s brain.
IANA scientist, though I do have a master’s in Neuroscience, and I disagree.
It’s a common misconception IMO that consciousness is just an emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain. There are aspects of consciousness where we don’t understand how they could possibly emerge.
That’s not to say they’re supernatural or anything, just that it is wrong to believe we understand everything the brain does on a rudimentary level, and the rest is just scaling up. There are things that we don’t understand on any level yet.
Consider the hard problem of consciousness. This tends to be a difficult one for people to grok, but I’ve had most success putting it this way:
The hard problem of consciousness
Say you step on a drawing pin, and feel pain. We can divide this event into three stages:
- Detection of the stimuli: your body has to detect that something has occured and relay that information to the brain.
- The actual, negative sensation of pain.
- The behaviour that follows. Yelling “ouch!” and hopping around on one foot, say.
Now, we understand part 1) very well, and our understanding of part 3) is improving all the time.
But part 2) is a mystery. We don’t know how things can have sensations.
We can trivially write programs to do steps 1) and 3), to one degree or another, but would have no idea where to start with step 2).
In fact, if you gave me a robot and asked me to tell you if it felt sensations, I wouldn’t even know what to check or look for (though testing for 1) and 3) is trivial).
And all this is just pain: the same is true of other sensations e.g. colour.
I have been closely involved with the field of consciousness studies for several decades now, going back to a time when the luminaries of the field could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I cannot think of any serious consciousness researcher who would agree with that. Actually, I doubt if you really agree with it. Do you really believe that the word “consciousness” refers to a brain? It is a common (though far from universally accepted) view that consciousness is, somehow,* a product of the brain, somewhat as, forward motion is a product of a car’s engine, but that is quite different from saying that consciousness (or, what you probably mean, some particular organism’s consciousness) is a brain.
*And, of course, that “somehow” is where most aspects of the problem are hidden away.
I would say that almost everyone (neuroscientist, psychologist, philosopher, or whatever) who has thought at all seriously about the matter believes this. It is important to note, however, that very few of them today think that this “something more” is something non-physical, “spiritual”, or otherwise beyond the reach of the scientific method.
The continuing prevalence of the naive notion that anyone who holds that “there’s something more to consciousness than the physics of the interaction between neurons in an animal’s brain” must be some sort of antiscientific dualist (and probably one of those wicked, willfully obscurantist “philosophers”, to boot), is, frankly, one of the biggest impediments there is to actually reaching a scientific understanding of the phenomenon.