Consciousness feels like this:
photo credit Charles Dominic Dass on pixels.com
but it works like this:
photo credit: Ethan Sees on pexels.com
In 2019, newly retired, I embarked on a personal project that had been in the background for decades. I had been looking for a way to understand how consciousness works. I did not want the answer of all answers; I just wanted a way to come to grips with this question. I have the tools of neuropsychology and a working assumption that consciousness is a brain based phenomenom.
That the brain is the source of consciousness is not universally accepted. I have much respect for the work of Annaka Harris (Conscious, 2019), for example, who takes the position that consciousness extends beyond the human brain. Harris makes an interesting case, as do neuroscientists arguing the neural basis of consciousness. We do not really know. The task is as much about finding useful frameworks to understand this thing as it is to find final answers.
It is a big task. There is not even a universally accepted definition of an experience we all share yet can not put into words. I came to some conclusions that are in some minor fashion satisfactory. I take the approach that the mind can be viewed as a mechanism by which the brain manages information. The system operates in two phases. Very broadly, one is a conscious information acquisition phase, the other is an unconscious information storage phase. Information cycles between the phases, undergoing different levels of processing at each stage.
In building this framework I drew on the cognitive operations by which we take in sensory information, analyze it, learn, remember, and then use the information. These are the central concerns of neuropsychology. The last twelve columns have been laying out some elements, such as various conscious and unconscious information processes. This column focusses on how those information processes might explain consciousness.
First, a thought about scale. The experience of consciousness is intense, and easily overwhelms any appreciation of the machinery in the background. The conscious experience tells us that we are aware of everything around us. It is as if we had virtual reality headgear on and fully believed we were in the real world. But our experience of the real world is actually restricted, which I wrote about in The Limits of Consciousness. The reality is that consciousness is more like a small area of focus on a very large world of data.
Next, a few thoughts about the place of consciousness in the overall scope of mental things. We really do not have any subjective sense of the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental operations. It feels like everything is in consciousness. The whole issue can become a little more tractable by asking, what does consciousness actually do? More specifically, what if consciousness stopped working normally? Could we use that to work out how it functions normally?
Neuropsychology focusses on cognitive functions, and how they can be affected by brain injury, disease or disorder. Some types of injury can affect awareness of those cognitive functions. There are some odd and very specific disorders of consciousness wherein we lose the ability to be aware of just one thing.
I am referring to a set of disorders called agnosia, which means loss of knowledge. Someone who has any kind of agnosia loses awareness of that thing. As if it never existed. Agnosia is a virtual blind spot in consciousness, while everything else is still in full, normal awareness. The phenomenon is seen despite evidence that the body does register the sensory information; it is the only conscious awareness of the information that is lost.
Agnosia has been identified in many different areas of cognitive function. It is possible to have a perfectly functional visual system of eyes, optic nerves and responses to visual stimuli, but not be aware of what is seen by those eyes. It is called visual agnosia, and when it occurs it is usually in people who have sustained injuries to the brain’s visual processing centres at the back of the head, in the occipital lobes. It was first documented in soldiers at the end of World War I.
In one more recent study of visual agnosia, the affected patient was asked to walk a hallway that had various items, like chairs, partially blocking the way. Despite insisting he was blind, the patient avoided all the obstacles while walking the hall. People with visual agnosia will say they have no idea how, but their behaviour can be shaped by visual information. Information and awareness of information are uncoupled.
Beyond loss of awareness of vision, it is possible to have a form of agnosia for specific types of visual processing, such as understanding faces or words. In these instances, people are unable to read text or recognize familiar faces. A very strange form of agnosia can develop for the capacity to pay attention to something. We are accustomed to seeing, hearing and feeling things all around us. In a syndrome called neglect, people lose awareness of stimuli on the left side. There is nothing in the left side of the visual field because there is no longer a left visual field. There is no left side at all. Neglect might affect what is in the visual field, or the ability to be aware of touch on the left side of the body, or hear sounds presented to the left ear. Patients with this disorder may not eat food on the left side of their plate, or shave the left side of their face. In their minds, there is no left side. There is no there, there.
Agnosias can arise in different areas of sensation and cognition. This tells us something important about awareness, or consciousness more broadly. Awareness can be disrupted in just one area of function, while still working just fine in all other respects. Agnosias also make it clear that consciousness works for things we see, hear or feel, but also for types of information we think about or hold in memory.
What we learn from agnosia is that awareness can be compromised in limited ways because it is structured to take in information from the world and understand it. This is what it does. Awareness itself is a specialized cognitive function. Well, this is interesting. It implies that the brain operates a cognitive function dedicated to just being aware of something; holding it in consciousness. A thought, the cat in the doorway, a memory. Anything.
Following on that, we can think of awareness as a mental operation that is active in attention. Loss of awareness means an inability to pay attention to one specific kind of information. In neglect, one can not focus attention on the left side of things because there is no awareness of the left side of things. Or, you could say one can not be aware of the left side of things because there is no ability to focus attention on the left.
So here we are with attention as a necessary cognitive function to consciously absorb, analyze and understand information. The information might be sensory data from the external world, information from memory or thoughts. Awareness is a special type of experience of whatever is in the focus of attention.
Where there is awareness there is potential for intentional interaction with the environment, not just response. Instead of an automatic response to a stimulus, awareness provides the potential for exploration and curiosity. Consciousness then becomes a cognitive capacity to actively acquire information by way of attending, examining and analyzing the environment. It is a mental place where one learns new things, and considers things previously learned. Since it operates in attention, it has a tight focus of plus or minus seven items at a time. The items may be simple or complex, but that is the size of the attention span.
Consciousness is then, one, a cognitive function to learn and think. It can also be thought of as a very specific sensory experience, wherein you are conscious of something. Conscious awareness is the place where attention is focussed, in a background produced by the prediction function. Prediction is (I think) omnipresent and attention is the flashlight beam focussed on a segment of it for a time. Two versions of the real world, or knowledge, at the same time: what prediction is telling us to expect in the real world, and what the sensory data in attention is telling us as a refreshed data set, if you will. Attention is superimposed on prediction, like a lense on a fuzzy background.
I think that consciousness is the experience of attention focussed reality on anticipated reality.
It is not unlike depth perception. We experience visual images as having depth, in three dimensions, because our two eyes are slightly offset on our faces. Eyes are just a few centimetres apart, which means that the visual information from the left eye is from a slightly different angle than that in the right eye. The combination of the two inputs is very similar, but not identical, and those two visual images superimposed, one on the other, gives rise to a novel visual experience of three dimensionality. Persons who have vision in only one eye do not have this experience of depth perception. Two visual inputs are necessary for that kind of experience.
Consciousness operates in a similar situation, in which two versions of reality, the sensory feed and the prediction feed, are simultaneously presenting information from the same environment. The overlap of attention on prediction is holding two versions of reality in one place at one time. Is this consciousness? It is an idea I find useful.
Holding simultaneous mental representations from the attention function and the prediction function seems to be the context in which a different experience arises. Not just a sensory response to stimuli, it is a cognitive recognition of stimuli. This is what is lost in the syndromes of agnosia, or loss of knowledge, when a person is no longer aware that they see, or aware that they can recall a memory, or aware that there is a left side of space. It is possible to demonstrate that the sensory apparatus works just fine. It is only the conscious awareness of the stimulus which is gone.
If you are in a place that has not changed since the last time you were there, how much attention do you pay to your surroundings? If nothing moved or changed, would you pay any attention at all? It is more likely you would find your attention wandering, focussed on anything else.
Outer world or inner, there is always something to grab our attention. It will not be much more than seven somethings, and it need only be two or three. That is the place where awareness will be operating, looking for the next piece of useful information.
Theories of consciousness are just that, theories. It is hard to think how they might be tested. Seeing the mind as an information processing vehicle is likewise just a set of ideas. I find them useful to tie together much of what I know about cognitive functions in a structure that provides a rationale for consciousness. To wit, the job of consciousness is to find, acquire and analyze information. The mind’s overarching goal is to organize and store information so that it becomes useful knowledge. Perhaps a conscious mind is adaptive if it improves the odds for survival.