Definition of consciousness

[Patrick_Mc]

Is there a definitive explaination of exactly what consciousness really is? It would seem only logical to me that any expression of what consciousness is would have to be subjective.

[Suburban_Plankton]

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Stewart,

“I can’t define it, but I know it when I feel it”

[njtt]

@Patrick_Mc

Is there a definitive explaination of exactly what consciousness really is?

The short answer is no, there is no definitive explanation (or definition). There are a lot of competing ones. If you want a detailed answer, this would be a good place to start.

[Autolycus]

This.

[Peremensoe]

I’d recommend this article.

[septimus]

Let me recommend Julian Jaynes’ famous book The Origin of Subjective Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

It’s a very fun, interesting, and thought-provoking book. However, it may leave you with more questions and fewer answers. :dubious:
Edit: I see spark240 just linked to a Jaynes paper. I’ll read that … but the book is worth reading in its entirety anyway.

[Peremensoe]

The book is tremendous, and for me it explained a great deal that didn’t make sense otherwise. The linked piece is just a little taste.

[njtt]

Jaynes’ work is interesting and well worth reading, but it is very far from being in the mainstream of current informed opinion about consciousness. At the time he published his major book (in 1976), there was very little serious research being done on consciousness at all. Over the last 20 years, it has become a very lively area of research in disciplines ranging from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, to anesthesiology. Very little of this work is significantly influenced by Jaynes.

If you want to get an idea of where the field is at these days look at the websites for the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the Center for Consciousness Studies, or the article I linked to earlier. As I implied before, you won’t find a lot of consensus, but you won’t find much (maybe a teeny bit) about Jaynes either.

[JWT_Kottekoe]

I heard Jaynes speak ca. 1980 and his ideas came across to me as complete nonsense. He thinks consciousness orginated around the time of Homer. Full disclosure: I have never read his book, so ignore my comment if you like.

[njtt]

The trouble is that Jaynes’ definition of consciousness is particularly eccentric. Even if his theory is right, it does not really explain what most other researchers on consciousness think is most in need of explanation (not that they agree amongst themselves, but Jaynes’ definition is more “out there” than most).

[DSeid]

I am a fan of Doug Hofstadter’s take, as summarized in the Science article.

the main idea is simply that our feeling of a conscious “I” is but an illusion created by our neuronal circuitry: an illusion that is only apparent at the level of symbols and thoughts, in much the same way as the concepts of pressure and temperature are only apparent at the level of 1023 molecules but not the level of single molecules. In other words, Hofstadter denies consciousness an element of ontological reality, without denying that our thoughts and feelings, pains and longings have an “inner reality” when we have them. But to show that consciousness is a collective phenomenon of sorts, he needs to delve deep into the theory of computation and, in particular, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel’s proof of his incompleteness theorem, as these concepts are key to the idea the author wants to convey. And he does this admirably in a mostly playful manner, choosing carefully constructed analogies more often than mathematical descriptions.

Gödel showed in 1931 that any formal system that is complicated enough must contain statements that are patently true but remain unprovable within that formal system. The important point here is that the true statements Gödel explicitly constructed play a dual role: they can be understood at a higher–that is, symbolic–level, while representing purely number-theoretic assertions at the same time. To achieve this, Gödel constructed a mapping between conceptual statements (such as “This statement is not provable within the formal system XYZ”) and purely number-theoretic identities that effectively creates a barrier between levels of description that is as impenetrable as the barrier between our thoughts and the patterns of neuronal firings. In the same manner, Hofstadter suggests, our ability to construct symbols and statements that are about these symbols and statements creates the “strange” reflexive loop of the book’s title out of which our sensation of “I” emerges.

Which becomes closely related to current work on neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).

conscious perception is believed to require more sustained, reverberatory neural activity, most likely via global feedback from frontal regions of neocortex back to sensory cortical areas (Crick and Koch, 1995) that builds up over time until it exceeds a critical threshold. At this point, the sustained neural activity rapidly propagates to parietal, prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortical regions, thalamus, claustrum and related structures that support short-term memory, multi-modality integration, planning, speech, and other processes intimately related to consciousness. Competition prevents more than one or a very small number of percepts to be simultaneously and actively represented.

Another way to put it, much more comprehensively, is within the framework of Stephen Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory (pdf) which explains how all conscious states are resonant states.

[njtt]

What I said about Jaynes pretty much applies to Hofstadter too.

[Peremensoe]

@njtt

The trouble is that Jaynes’ definition of consciousness is particularly eccentric. Even if his theory is right, it does not really explain what most other researchers on consciousness think is most in need of explanation (not that they agree amongst themselves, but Jaynes’ definition is more “out there” than most).

What do you see as the primary points which demand explanation and are not addressed under a Jaynesian approach?

[njtt]

@spark240

What do you see as the primary points which demand explanation and are not addressed under a Jaynesian approach?

It is a long time since I read Jaynes, but for one thing, he regards consciousness as dependent upon language. Most people think animals and babies are conscious too. Whatever sort of awareness animals and babies (or come to that, prehistoric people) have, and regardless of whether or not you think it deserves to be called consciousness, Jaynes’ theory does not address it. Furthermore, what Jaynes calls consciousness, even if his theory is broadly right, pretty obviously depends on this basic animal awareness (i.e., what most people call consciousness) already being there, so explaining it is a more fundamental problem.

To a considerable extent, Jaynes seems to be trying to explain what makes humans smarter than animals, rather than consciousness. Of course, there are plenty of people who think he gets even that wrong, and that his historical and psychological claims are mostly just wild speculation backed up by some carefully selected fragments of evidence. Personally, I do not have a strong opinion on that - it is not really my field - but I rather think that people who are seriously concerned with the evolution of the human mind today probably regard him as, at best, an important pioneer, but eccentric and outdated, and, at worst, as a clever crank who writes well.

[septimus]

I’m not well-informed on this topic, and certainly don’t want to misrepresent Jaynes’ theory, however …

If Jaynes had written
[ul][li] “a narrative-based mode of cognition became more prevalant about the time of the Iron Age”[/li][/ul]
rather than
[ul][li] “subjective consciousness came into existence about the time of the Iron Age”[/li][/ul]
then I think Jaynes’ arguments would have still been interesting and important, and many of the objections would disappear.

[njtt]

@septimus

If Jaynes had written
[ul][li] “a narrative-based mode of cognition became more prevalant about the time of the Iron Age”[/li][/ul]
rather than
[ul][li] “subjective consciousness came into existence about the time of the Iron Age”[/li][/ul]
then I think Jaynes’ arguments would have still been interesting and important, and many of the objections would disappear.

I am inclined to agree.

Of course, he wouldn’t have sold nearly as many books.