Consciousness

Consciousness is strange when you stop and think about it. And thinking about it is consciousness trying to understand itself.

The dictionary says consciousness is “the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.” But that is a tautology. What is “awake and aware” if not the state of being conscious?

We all have consciousness so we all know what it feels like to be conscious. Still, that’s different from knowing what consciousness is and how it arises out of the brain’s billions of neurons. I define consciousness as a phenomenon that allows us to know what we are thinking and, in fact, that we are thinking.

When we are awake, we are aware of ourselves and the world around us. When we are asleep, we are not. And yet, people may perform surprisingly high-level tasks while asleep and unaware. They may sleepwalk, remove food from their refrigerator, eat, and return to bed. They may even operate a motor vehicle while asleep. This requires open eyes, coordination, reflexes, and some kind of mental access to driving rules, all while asleep. Obviously, some parts of the brain can be awake even while the part of the brain that gives us consciousness is asleep.

Something similar happened to me. In a blog post called Losing My Mind I described how all the clocks in my house were mysteriously changed from Daylight Time to Standard Time one night while I was asleep. It was mysterious because I was alone in the house.

Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella and co-workers have spent over ten years developing the "Passive Frame Theory" of consciousness (published online June 22 by the journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences). According to this theory, consciousness is “a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control.” In the Passive Frame Theory, unconscious mental processes make decisions and impel our actions, not the conscious mind. Although it seems to us that our conscious minds are processing information, making decisions, and acting on them, that is an illusion.

Consciousness seems to be something that observes. The brain receives nerve signals from our retinas and assembles them into pictures but it is consciousness that sees the pictures. The brain receives nerve signals from our inner ears but it is consciousness that hears the sound.

We could build a robot and give it an advanced computer programmed to mimic human reactions, and it will appear to be conscious. But it won’t be conscious, it will only be a machine running a very complex program. Consciousness is more than a very complex program. Consciousness is the internal observer that views the output of this very complex program.

The problem I have with the Passive Frame Theory is that it removes free will. It says we don’t choose our actions in life, we merely have the illusion that we are doing so. That may be how our brains work, but I suspect consciousness is vastly more complex than we have imagined. So far we’ve only scratched the surface of understanding consciousness.