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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Sensing the Brain Several models of
consciousness focus on its behavior as a "sense" capable of
perceiving the processing of the brain. The British philosopher
Nicholas Humphreyargued that to be conscious is
to feel sensations, as opposed to perceptions.
Animals have developed two ways of representing the interaction between
the body and the world: "affect-laden" sensations and
"affect-neutral" perceptions.
Sensation and perception are separate and parallel forms of
representation. Sensations are to be
found at the boundary between the organism and the world and at the boundary of
past and future. One "senses" a circle of light hitting the retina;
one "perceives" the sun in the sky. One can have sensations about
perceptions and perceptions about sensations. Humphrey(The Use of Consciousness,
1967) speculated that we possess an "inner eye" that behaves like any
other sense, except its object is the brain itself. This inner eye evolved
because it was useful, and it evolved in such a way as to be useful. Therefore
it does not deliver a one-to-one picture of the brain's activity, but a
selected, abridged and biased one, as useful to survival as possible. Consciousness allows me to perceive the
state of my brain as conscious states. The US philosopher William
Lycanis a proponent of consciousness
as "internal monitoring", an idea that reaches back to the British
philosopher John Lockeand the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Lycanemphasizes that most of our mental life is unconscious, that we
are conscious of only part of it. A possible explanation is that consciousness is a perception of our own
psychological state, of what is going on in the mind (Kant's "inner sense"). The British
neurophysiologist John Ecclesbelieves that consciousness
resides in a psychological world that transcends the physical. Eccles believes
that the mind is an independent entity that exercises a controlling role upon
the neural events of the brain by virtue of its interaction across the
interface between World 1 (the physical world) and World 2 (the mental world).
The mind is continuously searching for brain events that are interesting for
its goals. The US linguist Ray
Jackendoffbelieves that there are three
main entities that account for our mental life: the physical brain, the
computational mind (cognition) and the phenomenological mind (consciousness).
The computational mind is the one that really "thinks", whereas the
phenomenological mind only "feels" superficially a subset of the
"thoughts". Most of "thinking" is actually unconscious. We
are never conscious of the outer world, but only of the shadows of some of the
processing that the computational mind does on the outer world. Consciousness
arises from a level of representation that is intermediate between the
sense-data and the form of thought, at the border between the representations
of the inner and of the outer worlds. The US psychologist Owen Flanagandoes not believe in "one"
consciousness, but in a group of "conscious" phenomena. Some of the
processes of our body are unconscious and non-perceived (e.g., the heartbeat),
while some are unconscious but perceived by other processes (sensors), and some
are conscious, perceived by themselves. Consciousness is a heterogeneous set of
processes, not a substance or an object. Flanagans theory is,
de facto, a variation on William James stream of
consciousness: there is no Minds i that thinks and is conscious, there are
just thoughts that flow. Consciousness is not: consciousness flows. The
thoughts themselves are the thinkers. I do not think thoughts, thoughts think
me. There is no i: there is conscious activity. This conscious activity
differs from the neural activity only in kind, but the mind is the brain. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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