Paradigm blog under construction.

While I elaborate my thoughts on how consciousness fits into nature, and vice versa for publication, I encourage those interested in this topic to read my chapter in Mind that Abides : Panpsychism in the new millennium (Chapter 7 on the UNCC), edited by David Skrbina. More accessible, read Time, Consciousness and the Foundations of Science, a short statement about this subject published in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research (Vol I, Number 5, p580-584). What follows is a place holder until I publish in more detail.

Most scientists believe that consciousness is a property that arises in complex living systems, perhaps including some insects, but probably not bacteria, and certainly not elementary inanimate objects like electrons, stones or artifacts like chairs. This conclusion is a direct result of how we experience ourselves, how we project consciousness into other humans, and how we balk at attributing consciousness to other kinds of nonliving natural systems unlike us. I have for almost 20 years been trying to convince colleagues that our human self awareness or sentience along with multimodal qualitative phenomenal experience is a special case in a natural continuum. It is an advanced form of consciousness, the best we know of unless and until some extraterrestrials arrive and make us look not so special. But there are many other ways to have self-reference and experience of the world.

A lot follows from how one defines consciousness. Unfortunately, few researchers venture to hang their hat on a particular definition. This results in people presenting conflicting ideas and not hearing each other because they are often not talking about the same thing due to their differing preconceptions and nuances of linguistic use. The usual phrase people use about consciousness is that “There is something it is like to” see, hear, feel, smell, taste, or just exist. This goes back to a paper by Nagel in 1974 entitled “What is it like to be a bat?” After 50 years, I suggest we need to move on to a better definition, and not just an operational definition such as anesthesiologists use every day in the operating room.

If one pays close attention to the phenomenology of consciousness, it is possible to detect and hopefully agree on some features that do fully characterize it. That has been my own starting point. Consciousness is experienced sometimes as if not fully embodied or with intentions in conflict with bodily needs or desires. For centuries spiritual leaders, inspirational speakers, and socio-political leaders have used that disidentification to promote the idea of a soul, or mind over matter, free will, and all manner of arguable mental constructs. Modern neuroscience and its precursor in psychoanalysis has been slowly chipping away at these misconceptions for over a century. But belief in a transcendental self, or the ‘I’ of ‘Me’ still pervades our daily personal experience.

The first step in understanding consciousness is realizing who and what we are free of illusions, especially what we are not. This alternate personal view conflicts with our socialization which evolved to make us feel like decision making agents who can be trained for ethical contribution to the cultures we live in. Our individual personas are stories we have been taught to tell ourselves, a socially condoned hypnotic illusion, that works for social order. We are all hypnotized (including me) for our daily social interactions. Even if we realize this ego is an illusion through reflection, meditation, and philosophical analysis, the daily self-experience persists. In addition, using nouns and pronouns to refer to ourselves while referring to our bodies as if we inhabit, possess, and control them raises the level of self-deceit such that we tend to believe we are something extra and almost tangible inside our bodies that exists and persists. All that makes it harder to think of death as a real end of the self. For all these reasons, the following definition of consciousness will be hard for most people to relate to without lots of reflection.

CONSCIOUSNESS is a process of interpreting sensations for their meaning using memory and remembering the interpretation in turn for a nominal time.

There are a lot of terms here to unpack. Let me take that definition apart. First, it is a process that is running during waking hours, it is not a substantive physical thing like a soul, although it depends on physical events and is a real process. Second, it involves phenomenal qualitative sensations. The sensations are interpreted in order to react either appropriately or not. Third, in humans with complex memories, we learn and recognize familiar sensation patterns using our memories, and we update our memories as we learn more new patterns. We also often save episodes of new sensation interpretations such as what we last ate or did at work yesterday. Memories give us a kind of behavioral continuity or inertia. We develop habits and a personal train of thought no one else has. When we identify without conflict with these habits and memories it contributes to a sense of integrated self and helps propagate the illusion. In a very real sense we do not exist other than as a point of view driven by brain-based habits that are accompanied by a unique memory history. When feeling at home in this illusion without felt conflicts, identification makes us feel free as if in charge of our personal thoughts and choices.

Meditation experts often refer to the ‘monkey mind.’ Monkeys have a much shorter attention span. Our working memory and ability to focus on something for lengthy periods partially characterizes what makes us different and arguably why we are at the top of the food chain. What working memory enables us to do is entertain multiple options and explore associated consequences (reinforcers) until one wins and suppresses the others. The better working memory is and the better calibrated our emotional reactions, the more rational we may seem to be. We are less ‘shot-gun’ reactive like apes and lower mammals. This allows us to be conditioned as social animals, but conditioned nevertheless. We do not know where our rational thoughts are going from one moment to the next. They just arrive in the order they do. They are served up by our unconscious. But by virtue of the process of personal identification with our memories and the voices in our heads, we quickly feel ownership of our own thoughts and we feel we direct them. This breaks down in schizophrenia.

Think of driving and coming to a stop sign. We are often driving without thinking about how to move each muscle. We learned those skills long ago. Without such memory detail, we are often unconscious of the means by which the car is controlled. As the stop sign looms with its red octagonal outline and white letters, our conscious process usually gets triggered to attend and interpret it as a message to brake and look around until safe to move on. If it is a very familiar stop on a regular route, it may not even register. We stop automatically without attending or remembering, perhaps being lost in the plans regarding where we are going. That message to apply brakes is the interpretation of the stop sign’s configuration of sensations using our trained memory. If we did pay attention, we will remember the stop hours to days later.

This example illustrates how attention and memory are used to interpret sensations and update memory with episodes. It also illustrates the difference between being fully conscious of what is happening in contrast to being unconscious by virtue of not holding the interpretation in working memory long enough to make a lasting impression. When our attention goes where we want it to, we think of ourselves as deliberately attending. It seems to take effort. This effort we feel is really just the experience of the internal conflict that gives rise to where we eventually end up attending. It is part of that hypnotic narrative we tell ourselves about being agents who master our souls. The ‘I’ that attends is little more than another chapter in the memory narrative we are socialized to use in our daily social lives and identify with.

Another aspect of the definition of consciousness is the meaning. I use ‘meaning’ here in its full semiotic sense. What something means to a living individual is all the associations they have to it that are triggered and held in working memory. In the stop sign example, beyond the obvious need to stop, associations might be triggered to a prior accident there, injuries, an emotional reaction, perhaps injuries to others and liabilities that followed. These memory associations are all part of what that stop sign means to that individual. The conventional meaning of a stop sign is a social construct of usage convention that one can find in a DMV manual or a dictionary. But the full meaning to an individual is more complex including expectations, feelings, and counterfactuals. For example, the stop sign meaning includes the fact that if one did not stop, and there was oncoming cross-traffic, it could be catastrophic with negative consequences. If someone disagreed with this counterfactual, we could infer they did not fully understand the stop sign. All these associations are based upon how our sophisticated associative memory works to anticipate or find consequences.

Much of the above is arguably nothing new to many if not most cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and meditation practitioners. However, I will argue that if we take this process of sensing and interpreting with memory to its logical conclusion, and drop some medieval baggage from our scientific thinking, we find that a kind of panpsychism (panconsciousness?) makes perfect sense. This requires a couple more key insights, and therein lies the real paradigm shift.

Stay tuned.

P.S. A friend pointed out a recent book published by Annaka Harris entitled Conscious. From the reviews and summaries I found online it seems to agree with many of these points that I have expressed differently here. I have ordered it for arrival 09/03/2023, and when published it will surely be among the many references that I have spared you here.

Last edited 9/02/2023

Still Brainstorming