Consciousness

Rather than talk about what consciousness is, I'll tell you there are two necessary things for consciousness to arise:

wakefulness and awareness.

It goes like this:

wakefulness --> awareness --> consciousness

Which means that you need to be awake to be aware and you need to be aware in order to be conscious.

If someone has a disorder affecting wakefulness, such as being in a coma, then he/she can't be aware and therefore cannot be conscious. If someone is awake but is in a vegetative state, he/she can't have awareness and therefore cannot be conscious either.

There are two purposes of consciousness:

• Monitoring: to keep track of mental processes, behavior, and the environment; to maintain self-awareness.
• Controlling: we plan based on information received from monitoring process.

There are several levels of consciousness:

Preconscious - level of consciousness that comprises information that could become conscious readily, but is not continually available. For example, what you're your bedroom look like? You are able to recall this information, and yet you were not thinking of it until asked to do so. Also, this explains the tip of the tongue phenomenon; you know you know something, and yet you are unable to recall it from your preconscious.

Subconscious/Unconscious - material too difficult to handle at conscious level is repressed, and is unavailable to us consciously.

Altered States of Consciousness - awareness is somehow changed from our normal waking state. Some common characteristics of altered states of consciousness are:

• cognitive processes are different
• perceptions of self and world man change
• normal inhibitions and level of control over behavior may weaken

There's something queer about describing consciousness. Whatever people mean to say, they just can't seem to make it clear.
          - Marvin Minsky

When it comes to consciousness, only one thing is clear.

There exists no test, no procedure, no method, that can objectively identify the presence of consciousness in something.

This may be a difficult statement to comprehend, especially because it can quite possibly throw someone's assumptions about the world into chaos. We all go around, secure in the belief that every person we interact with is conscious, just as we are. There is no conclusive evidence that exists, or can be found, to show this to be the case.

Determining consciousness can only be done by the entity doing the testing. I can determine for myself that I am conscious. This is not because I define the word to fit whatever I am, but because I am the only entity that can completely understand and comprehend my awareness and self-awareness, that can truly realize that mental processes are occuring, doing the thinking and the remembering and the debating and the daydreaming. Though, to be honest, it's fairly difficult to even describe how I know I'm conscious.

Testing another entity for consciousness would of course be more difficult, relying on examining the "output" of the entity, interpreting its actions and sounds that it makes, and determining if they are in line with what we'd expect from a conscious entity. So, why can't a machine be built to emulate all these, all in a purely functional way from a highly complex set of instructions? Would such a machine be conscious? It would be no more conscious than how much the man inside Searle's Chinese Room understands Chinese.

Part of the difficulty may even be due to the fact we can't even properly DEFINE consciousness. All these writeups in this node, and there's not a single one that anyone can point to that completely and authoritatively defines consciousness. In many ways, it is sort of like trying to define life. We can't really come up with a complete definition, we just sort of "know it when we see it". As stated in the Marvin Minsky quote, I would bet every person who's added a writeup here would state that they're not happy with what they wrote, that they know it's not adequate, that it is not quite what they meant, but they can't even SAY what they mean. I even feel that way about this writeup.

This definitely has repercussions when discussing artificial intelligence. If we can't properly prove that a human being is conscious, how will we know when a machine is? Is there some specific test we can do to consider it conscious? If so, then we can program one to pass the test, but that doesn't mean it's conscious. When a machine can learn? already done. When a machine can observe and react? Done, in many ways, depending on the defeinition of "observe".

So, when it comes down to it, the only reason we accept that other human beings are conscious is because of assumptions. A person feels they are conscious themselves, seems no reason to believe that it is any different for other humans, and thus is willing to accept they are conscious. Whether or not consciousness is assigned to non-human creatures, such as dolphins, elephants, or cats, isn't even consistent among people. However, should technology keep progressing, we're going to have to evaluate whether or not to consider something conscious much more carefully, as should consciousness not depend on a "soul", a "spirit", something beyond the body that we can't duplicate, there's a good chance we'll soon enough have something man-made, exhibiting behaviors that make the question very important.

Consciousness is equivalent to self awareness, coupled with the ability to act with reference to the self.

Saige is correct in pointing out that we cannot test whether or not other people or things are self aware, or are acting with reference to a self. This is because we cannot test whether or not they have a self.

This has led some to suggest that there is no self at all. Which is quite obviously rubbish, in fact, about the only thing we know for certain at all, through every waking and dreaming moment is that there is a self.

The logical positivists, amongst other spoilsports, have suggested that the perception of the self is simply a lie caused by complex things happening in the mush in our heads. This is also quite obviously rubbish, but for a different reason; if the self is a deceit, something must be being deceived, and this thing we can call the self.

Consciousness is self evidently not explicable through a mechanistic/deterministic view of the world. It is something else.

If conscious things exists, and consciousness cannot be explained by determinism, then the totality of things cannot be wholly deterministic.

An excellent node-- I'm glad I stopped by. I deeply admire the lines of attack that many in the cognitive science community have led on this subject over the past few decades, and I only wish more poets would join the fray, though places like Everything, dominated as they are by left-brainers, discourage poetry as a rule, (c.f. fuzzy and blue' s note in the editor log: "poetry always gets down-voted".) Maybe the syntactical logic types scare off my poetical comrades. If true, it's too bad and ultimately the poets' lookout, since the fray is well worth joining for artists and scientists alike.

Of course, any investigation of consciousness is a more or less meandering stroll through a vast minefield of tautologies, contradictions, mutual exclusions and circular conclusions. The word itself is an intrinsically stacked tautology: when we say "consciousness", what we usually mean is "consciousness-consciousness" or "self-consciousness"'. In a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung called it, "... reflected consciousness (i.e. 'I know that I am conscious')." (In my own short-hand, I've taken to writing this as "C²" , not to be confused of course with the speed of light squared.) Happily, as an artist, it's not my job to sweep the logic minefield or even step past the individual booby-traps, but rather to guide unsuspecting theatre-goers directly to the points of possible explosion. I'd just like to blow a few minds in the myriad ways mine has been blown over the past 12 years that I have been reading, thinking, talking and planning theatrical lines of attack on this subject.

Recently, what has struck me most profoundly is how often great thinkers like Jung fall to the theatre for images and ideas to elucidate notions of consciousness. (For me this is a little like digging through an extremely important archeological excavation--one in which all the great anthropologists are involved-- and finding potshards from your own goofy, disinherited family.) This from Jung describing the mechanisms of the collective unconscious:

...You go to the theatre: glance meets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that all those who are present are caught up in an invisible web of mutual unconscious relationship....

Mankind has always formed groups which made collective experiences of transformation--often of an ecstatic nature--possible. The regressive identification with lower and more primitive states of consciousness is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life... .The inevitable psychosocial regression within the group is partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cult ceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacred events the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd from relapsing into unconscious instinctuality... The ritual makes it possible for him to have a comparatively individual experience even within the group and so remain more or less conscious. But if there is no relation to a centre which expresses the unconscious through its symbolism, the mass psyche inevitably becomes the hypnotic focus of fascination, drawing everyone under its spell. That is why masses are always breeding-grounds of psychic epidemics, the events in Germany being a classic example of this.
--Concerning Rebirth circa, 1940

In all these current discussions of constructed consciousness too little consideration is given to the unconscious, either as Freud formulates it in the strictly individual sense, or as Jung expands it to the collective. (Obviously as a theatre artist, Buddhist and all-around woo-woo-theory-connoisseur, I lean towards Jung.) I suspect that this is because cognitive scientists and modern philosophers--natural born enemies--are united in their suspicion of anything so resistant to analysis as the big U. It's vaguely amusing that over the last fifty years, with the advent of the cyber revolution, Western thinkers have opened up the toy box of cognitive paradox and begun tinkering naively as if they were the ones who discovered it. Only the bravest and most honest of them will look beyond Descartes and Plato to admit that Zen masters and sages of all stripes have been taking the toys apart and putting them back together in playful, evocative ways for millennia. I think of a particular koan with one of my favorite commentaries by Mumonkan:

MUMONKAN CASE 29
THE SIXTH PATRIARCH"S 'YOUR MIND MOVES'

The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argue back and forth but could not reach a conclusion. The sixth Patriarch said, 'It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.' The two monks were awe struck.

MUMON'S COMMENT: It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is not the mind that moves. How do you see the patriarch? If you come to understand this matter deeply, you will see that the two monks got gold when buying iron. The patriarch could not withhold his compassion and courted disgrace.

MUMON'S VERSE: Wind, flag, mind moving, All equally to blame. Only knowing how to open his mouth, Unaware of his fault in talking.

During some research on this subject for a potential play I'm writing, I was told by author Richard Rhodes to check out www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html which contains a paper by philosopher David Chalmers called "Facing up to the Problems of Consciousness". It's ironic that Chalmers spends nearly a quarter of his paper listing the many pitfalls of solving the "hard problem", then goes on to spend at least another several pages tripping right into the very same traps. He rationalizes this as setting appropriate constraints on an ultimate nonreductive theory, but I can't help but suspect some of these academic types get paid by the pound of shit they shovel. His long postponed proposition is that consciousness, or "experience" as he calls it, is a nonreducible fundamental component of the universe, like mass or space-time (I'm listening, I'm listening), and it is related to the 'double-aspect' nature of information-- physical as well as phenomenal. (Hmmm, sounds like we've circled back to tautology again.) Still, if information is intrinsically "phenomenal", as Chalmers seems to hope, this takes us into territory that I, as the artist-Buddhist-ne'er-do-well, am gratified to finally arrive in. Says Chalmers:

The other possibility is that... experience is much more widespread than we have believed, as information is everywhere. This is counterintuitive at first, but on reflection the position gains a certain plausibility and elegance. Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience.

Or as Siddhartha Gautama more succinctly put it 25 centuries earlier, "All things are Buddha things." So when Dick Rhodes says, "...Both the self and the mind are social in origin and in function.... Selves are not given. They are constructed..." I would agree somewhat and generally, but I'd restate it in slightly fruitier terms (embracing rather than skirting tautology as I go): Consciousness emerges within the nurturing presence of...wait for it... consciousness--reflective, fundamental, indivisible, borderless. (The 'self' might have borders, more or less fuzzy, but the irreducible, fundamental element of consciousness that imbues the self, does not.) To use woo-woo metaphysical terms, consciousness is one circle, containing an infinite myriad of circles, all identical to it. {I just got a whiff of Bertrand Russell's set of all sets that are not members of themselves, but I'm not sure it means anything.} (Sometimes I wish I were smarter. Most times I'm glad I'm not.)}

Many in the A.I. community doubt that it's necessary to solve the problem of human consciousness in order to design a system capable of emulating it. They're probably right; but given humankind's recent history of technology outstripping its moral development, I wonder whether such an attempt is wise or even ethical. In the Buddhist framework of the Four Noble Truths, #1 is simply "Suffering".{Often confusingly mistranslated as "Life is suffering," or "Existence is suffering," thus causing a lot of unnecessary and completely inaccurate associations of Buddhism with Nihilism.} Suffering attends consciousness, to lesser or greater degrees, wherever you find it. Before we human's go implementing our clever architectures for sentience, we'd be wise to contemplate the possibility of creating something capable of suffering in whole new ways we've never dreamed of. As an artist (and a Buddhist for that matter), it's my job to help heal suffering, confusion, loneliness, wrong-headedness and narrow-mindedness as best I can, where and whenever I can. It might be nice if some of the scientists and modern philosophers of the world added this responsibility to their duty roster as well. Sure, we may not need to really understand human consciousness before we start hacking at designs, but would it be such a bad idea to try? The same imperatives that attended the Manhattan project do not apply here. It would be hateful to imbue a suffering monster with the blessing/curse of "self-hood" merely because we thought it might be neato.

There's a quote which I've kept on the wall in my office, more or less continuously for the last 14 years. It's from Joseph Campbell (I know, I know--Igor to Jung's Dr. Frankenstein, and subsequent high-priest to woo-woo thinkers everywhere), but this has always held great contemplative value for me, and I think it relates well to subject at hand:

Creative artists... are mankind's wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

What has this got to do with Consciousness?

I propose an experiment