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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#11

Post by roceasta »

justinpombrio wrote: post #7

I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms. The article asks this question: > Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were…

Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was).

I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#12

Post by hathawsh »

Expanding on the breathing example in the article, could we say there are at least three distinct systems in the brain that control breathing? They are:

- Conscious breathing: I follow a chosen breathing pattern with no immediate awareness of the breathing process.

- Meta-conscious breathing: I choose to be fully aware and in control of multiple aspects of breathing. I control my diaphragm and lips directly, I listen to and feel air passing, I consider how the position of my body affects breathing, etc. I also may choose an appropriate breathing pattern: deeper for hiking, more rhythmic for aerobic exercise, or slow for contemplation. After I have chosen a new pattern, that new pattern soon becomes conscious rather than meta-conscious; although the special breathing continues, I am no longer immediately aware of my new behavior. A change in activity reverts my conscious breathing behavior back to normal without any meta-conscious choice.

- Unconscious breathing: What I do when I sleep. It's clearly different from conscious breathing because I may snore, and many people even suffer from sleep apnea, which means they momentarily stop breathing while sleeping. Neither snoring nor sleep apnea are part of the experience of breathing consciously, so unconscious breathing must be very different somehow.

Am I using the terms correctly?

Curiously, many activities like speaking, eating, and swimming interrupt normal breathing yet do not necessarily invoke any meta-conscious decision making. If I had to think about when to breathe every time I wanted to speak, my meta-conscious mind would be overloaded with that task alone and I would forget what I wanted to say.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#13

Post by dwaltrip »

My interpretation of "meta-consciousness" as described by the article:

It is simply a brief period of intent, focused replay/study of the experience that just occurred, while it is very fresh in the mind/short-term memory. One is closely reviewing what happened, looking at the experience from different angles, replaying it, etc. This could all happen in the span of a second or less.

It is a matter of focus and proximity. It isn't a special layer of consciousness. It may seem qualitatively different, as the mental model of the experience is so deep & rich in the moments immediately during and after, if one is focusing closely. But I don't see the argument for this becoming some sort of "meta-consciousness".

In short, the concepts of "consciousness" and "being conscious of [something]" are related, but they aren't the exact same thing.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#14

Post by dontreact »

I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#15

Post by xelxebar »

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.

We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much.

What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness?

At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans.

How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#16

Post by hasenj »

dontreact wrote: post #14

I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".

Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#17

Post by ars »

justinpombrio wrote: post #7

I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms. The article asks this question: > Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were…

> Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?

And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself.

Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you feel that ability. But when you wake up, while you remember dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.)

That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.)

If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#18

Post by erikpukinskis »

My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much.

Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat.

Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem? The cells that make us vomit? The bacterial colonies in our sinuses?

I just think the answer to all of these questions when all is said and done will be yes. And we'll be sad how much life we killed because we didn't think it was conscious enough.

And maybe if we're lucky when we die we get to watch our consciousness grow to include all things. Maybe that's why we have circuits in our brain that seem to respond that way to mushrooms.

Maybe there's a genetic advantage to harboring the illusion that you are a separate consciousness, but it's just there to make you want to struggle to hold up your tiny corner of a collective consciousness.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#19

Post by language »

mannykannot wrote: post #10
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings b…

> But our consciousness goes beyond simple self-awareness: having a theory of mind is a step beyond (and is realizing that others have a theory of mind a step beyond that?)

That [and this] whole space [of considerations, here] appears to be fraught with circularities like this:

Step 1. Draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness.

Step 2. "From what vantage point, and with what 'machinery' do we make a distinction?"

Step 3. Go back to Step 1.

> .. that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.

I think I agree, otherwise I'm tempted to think that we would have already arrived, trivially, at some clearer kind of agreement about it.

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