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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Uncentered Consciousness Based on the fact that brain
lesions remove consciousness only when they remove performance, the Austrian
psychologist Marcel Kinsbourne(Integrated Field Theory of
Consciousness, 1988) reached the conclusion that consciousness "is"
performance, and developed an "integrated cortical field theory" of
consciousness. Kinsbourne criticizes the
idea that consciousness sits at the top of a pyramid of cognitive faculties and
that it is produced by the neural activity of a specialized region of the
brain. Kinsbourne believes that
consciousness is not a product of neural activity: it is the neural activity
itself. The brain does not generate consciousness: it is conscious. There is no
need for a special region to manufacture consciousness. Kinsbourne criticizes the idea that for some
information to become conscious it has to be input to a special region of the
brain, which is in charge of "transducing" neural activity into a
conscious feeling. Kinsbourne believes
that it is not the region that matters but the state of the circuit. Any region
of the brain can be conscious when its circuits are in the appropriate state. There is no central site for
consciousness: any site can host consciousness. In this model there is no need for binding. And the model admits the possibility of more
than one consciousness. Kinsbourne's
model is "heterarchical", i.e. highly distributed. The US neuroscientist Denise
Ingebo-Barthbelieves that consciousness is
a stream of discrete conscious events, just like a film is made by a stream of
frames. The nervous system operates based on its own programming and its
input. An operation of the nervous
system results in a "trajectory" of neural events in the brain.
Whenever that trajectory crosses the thalamus, a conscious event is generated.
That trajectory could be coming from the senses (and result in a sensation) or
the cortex (and result in a thought) and could be going to the cortex (and
result in a memory). Trajectories
evolve through a series of possible "fluctuations" and
superimpositions, and, when they cross the thalamus, result in feelings. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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