Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Piggy]

But remember, many of the actions that you do effortlessly and unconsciously you first had to do awkwardly and consciously when you first learned them. When a student driver first takes the wheel just about everything they do must be done consciously and with deliberate effort. The better they learn the various sets of behaviors, the farther into the periphery of their awareness it can be relegated. By that point, the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the behaviors they developed to consciously perform those set of actions become a complex habit that they can draw on with minimal effort.

Indeed, and in this example we can see processing, storage, pattern matching, and strength of response in action.

When you're learning to drive, at first the set of inputs associated with a certain amount of pressure on the gas and brake pedals don't mean anything, because those patterns have no association with other patterns.

As you learn, those patterns become more and more strongly associated with other patterns, such as the visual cues of motion, and feedback from the speedometer, so that with practice you get to where you can effectively adjust your speed smoothly by changing the pressure on those pedals.

There are some patterns that we're hard-wired to respond to from birth. For instance, flinching when something quickly approaches our eyes.

Other things we learn through association, but they can become equally strong. Military training, for example, is designed to instill new associations and responses, and combat cements them in, often so strongly that they persist even when they are dysfunctional.

 

[yy2bggggs]

That's certainly true, but pattern matching is at the core of all of it, just as natural selection is at the core of the much messier and more complex process of speciation.

Oh I agree to some extent. The entire thing could be described as pattern matching, to some extent. However, there's a bit more that's going on in the interactivity of the thing.

For example, I see a cup on a desk here. That's pattern matching, right? Well, sort of. If you dig a bit deeper in time, something else is going on. My eyes don't merely look at the cup, and my brain doesn't merely recognize it from the scene, but rather, my eyes scan the cup--they are affected by shape recognition, miniature models of the environment, etc, and through saccades, they sweep the environment, keeping minimalistic models, and the entire process picks out an "object" as a percept, which is then recognized later on as a cup. At first cut it looks like I'm pattern matching a scene, but under the hood, I'm not really looking at a frozen "scene" per se--there's an interactive process going on that analyzes what's before me.

As an analogy, "pattern matching" is something like "collect the data, find a pattern" in the scientific model. But I think what we're really doing is going through the whole process... "collect data, form hypotheses, test hypotheses".

 

[yy2bggggs]

No, I don't think so.

I'm not sure that "attention" is a very useful concept, actually, unless you want to get more specific about what you mean by it.

...

The main issue here is that I don't think there's such a thing, at this level of description, as a "conscious process". Go back to my driving the car. That's an "unconscious process", because "I" am not "conscious" of it. But if I pay attention to it, suddenly it becomes a conscious process. I don't think anything really changed in terms of how I drove the car. The thing that changed is simply that other modules are chained into the process--they're collecting information about it, and maybe they can interact with the process to change it.

Would you say it's different than this assessment? That I'm doing a different kind of thing when I drive the car and go through a shopping list in my head, than when I drive the car and simply focus on the details of driving the car?

 

[blobru]

... As an analogy, "pattern matching" is something like "collect the data, find a pattern" in the scientific model. But I think what we're really doing is going through the whole process... "collect data, form hypotheses, test hypotheses".

Problem-solving is the frame within which pattern-matching, pattern-refinement, and new pattern-forming, have meaning. Even when we don't have a specific, pressing problem -- drive to the store to get groceries -- to solve, there is always the general problem of what to do next, how to avoid boredom [potentially depression], stay entertained, energetic, etc.

Of course, that's the hard problem of AI, the "frame problem": how to translate the general goal of solving problems into specific problem domains. Part of what human intelligence does is solve the frame problem, somehow: handle experience in ways that abstract within domains and even translate across domains. Does consciousness have a role in this, allowing us to 'feel' our way through new domains less automatically, to play with new ways of representing problems, new associations of patterns, for entertainment?

As you say, consciousness seems as much about hypothesis-forming and -testing (and -selection, I would add) -- problem-solving -- as the incessant pattern-matching that goes on to that end.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

No, I don't think so.

I'm not sure that "attention" is a very useful concept, actually, unless you want to get more specific about what you mean by it.

(One problem we run into when talking about consciousness is that we invent a lot of short-cuts to make things easier to discuss at a high level of abstraction, and it's easy to start thinking of these short-cuts as actual things or processes in the brain, but really we can only take them so far, as conveniences.)

Again, I'll go back to perception and processing, and see if maybe we can work our way toward "attention".

I'm sitting here in my office, typing at my computer. There are sounds coming from the street, radio news playing in another room, sunlight from outside and fluorescent light from the ceiling, my animals are around somewhere, my body is registering the temperature, air currents, odors, the chair and the keyboard and my clothing, the painful crick in my neck and upper back that I woke up with and the too-large breakfast I'm digesting, and of course my brain is doing God knows what.

At all times, non-conscious processing in my brain is handling input from all these sources and more, routing, matching, and storing.

As I'm typing this, my train of thought -- which is a continual interplay between what I'm thinking of consciously, on the one hand, and supporting processes that I'm not conscious of, on the other -- leads me to want an example of a sensation that I'm not aware of unless I "think about it".

The uneven contour of the chair cushion comes to mind, so I use that as an example.

Now, what has just happened here?

The consciousness function of my brain, for lack of a better term, obviously has some role in this task of composing and typing this reply.

But the idea "I could use an example of something that I sense but am not aware of unless I think about it" doesn't come from that function. It's "pushed" into that process, so to speak by non-conscious processes that are working hand-in-glove with conscious processing to perform this task.

So... which set of processes moved its "attention" to the contour of the chair cushion?

Well, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the non-conscious processes did so first.

Once the task "find something I'm not aware of unless I think about it" is OK'ed, it's the non-conscious processes that go scanning around for candidates and start pushing them over to the conscious processes.

So these things "occur to me" and I start directing conscious attention to them and deciding (again with the help of the NCPs) which one is the best to use.

I think a better way to look at it is that (pre-processed) information is moved over into conscious processing because it's needed there, in order to do whatever it is that those processes are handling at the moment, or because signals are strong enough to indicate that this stuff is likely part of something that conscious processing should be handling.

For instance, while I'm absorbed in typing, most of the smells that I perceive go unnoticed, including the faint scent of woodsmoke from the fireplace. They get a 3 in the triage hierarchy. But and equally faint scent of burnt food, or burning wire, will be given a 1, and I'll become consciously aware of them.

From an evolutionary point of view, it must be the case, then, that responding to burning food or electrical fires (which I have, through experience, come to associate with those smells) is something that is most successfully handled with the aid of consciousness. Which gives us some insight into what consciousness is, in terms of what it's designed to do.

Compare that to, say, something which looms up quickly near me, or a projectile headed rapidly at my eye.

In those two cases, my body handles the situation non-consciously first. I duck and look toward the looming thing, or I flinch and put up my hand to block the projectile.

Only then do conscious processes join the game for such tasks as figuring out what the wider situation is and what the longer-range response should be.

And I think ultimately that's going to have to be the focus of answering the question "When does information get moved into conscious processing?"

It goes there because pre-conscious modules determine that it's needed in order to do the kinds of things that consciousness helps us to do.

And these types of things tend to involve quickly coordinating very high-level (not finely granular) information, assessing social situations, planning for the future, guessing what other people's (and animals') intentions are, balancing emotional response with intellectual analysis, and so forth.

Consciousness is likely to be something like the hand -- a very useful tool which doesn't have a single purpose. In fact, it's probably only worth the high maintenance cost precisely because it's so flexible and useful for so many tasks that give us a survival edge.

That's why I find the new research on simultaneous activation of spatially separated areas of the brain so intriguing. It fits with what consciousness seems designed for functionally -- to rapidly process big chunks of different kids of highly processed info. In other words, to do what the modularized neural network isn't that good at doing by itself.

And if it does turn out that those global signature waves are the hallmarks of conscious activity, we may also get an answer to why we feel this locus of awareness behind our eyes even though there's nothing in our brains that produces the kinds of physical sensations we get from, say, cricks in our necks.

OK, but I'm hearing the same thing again. You seem to be describing once again roving attention -- directed mental focus to a previously subconscious activity. You've given another very good description of the process but the description still seems to be -- attention to that percept now. At the same time you invoke the global workspace model, which to me seems to concern more than simple attention to a percept or task. One of the aspects of global workspace is that it is global, so that one consequence is that percepts are evaluated within a greater context, which is what understanding (semantic content) essentially is.

From all of your descriptions what I am hearing is the same thing I am saying using different language.

And, yes, there are clear problems with using these terms since clear distinctions between say perception and semantic content will necessarily need to be arbitrary. The neural processes don't care about our arbitrary distinctions. But that is why we need to work out a vocabulary we can use to discuss the processes in the hope that we can then work out some way of operationalizing the concepts.

I don't pretend to have answers, which is why I am asking the question -- what are the underlying processes at a subconscious level, and what is different about conscious processing?

The evolutionary function is one thing -- very important -- but the question I want to ask is "what is the underling process or processes?"

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I'm not sure I understand the question.
Same thing... don't know if I understand the question . This is actually a huge stickler point for me... people generally toss around words like "same" and "different", and whenever I hear these words, I think of something along the lines of "equivalence class", which requires some sort of context. When the context is undefined, it can be difficult to assess whether or not "sameness" has meaning. They absolutely must be the same in some sense, because they are neural. They also must be different in some sense, because they're doing different things.

Not surprising since I find it difficult to formulate the question in a meaningful way. Perhaps let it go for the time being until I can arrive at a better way of asking. There is a more fundamental issue, though, which is the origin of the thread "what is awareness?" Can we label the unconscious processing responsible for driving on autopilot 'awareness'? If so, are there more basic components of this process, or is awareness not definable in simpler terms? If not, what terms do we use?

But just working from the sort of thing that has to be going on, given merely that we pull off the types of feats that we do, information has to be flowing inside our heads, and made available to other facilities. I don't see a reason for suspecting that our reporting on our mental states is fundamentally different than our reporting on nature--how else could it be?

Yes, agreed. My question is: what kind of information processing is doing the job?

Probably, but I don't believe this is the case the way I'm drawing a line around the concept, and I think there's a pragmatic reason for saying that if something inside me is able to know there's a "blah-thing" that has a particular "purpose", then that thing should be described as aware. If, say, I were to build a functioning robot that were automated enough to handle ordinary ambiguities (as opposed to a factory robot that doesn't have to "know" where things are), modeling the environment is a necessary first step to doing something useful at all.

Right. That seems to include both attention to 'whatever' and some form of semantic content -- understanding the purpose of 'whatever', both of which I think are necessary components of what we call 'awareness'.

But drawing the lines this way, no... I don't think attention would be entailed by awareness.

But how could we be said to be aware of something to which we do not attend?

The way I draw the lines, perception would be distinct, but related to awareness. Perception would be a process that at some point leads to awareness. That process is by no means trivial in itself--and in some forms it involves the entire set of interactions.

OK. We can always separate them, but I'm not sure that perception can be so easily separated. I suppose we could simply call perception a necessary but not sufficient condition; that might make more sense. One reason I include it is because, as Geoff and many others define it, awareness is "knowing that something is going on", which seems to include perception of ongoing activity in some sense as well as the meaning of that activity.

Understanding should probably include the aspect that takes what we're aware of, and recognizes what its purpose is. Purpose in this sense is related to the utility of an abstraction in terms of how it can relate to achieving goals. I would also say that there perhaps may need to be some agreement as to whether or not the term should be limited further--say, to only include the higher level abstractions.

By all means, yes.

I'm not sure why it must involve attention, unless by attention you're just meaning that something "focuses" on the information.

More or less, yes. Focused mental activity that falls along some spectrum of the amount of mental effort -- we can focus considerable mental effort or little depending on the value ascribed to 'whatever'.


I'm not sure that gets us anywhere. What is 'awareness'?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Problem-solving is the frame within which pattern-matching, pattern-refinement, and new pattern-forming, have meaning. Even when we don't have a specific, pressing problem -- drive to the store to get groceries -- to solve, there is always the general problem of what to do next, how to avoid boredom [potentially depression], stay entertained, energetic, etc.

Of course, that's the hard problem of AI, the "frame problem": how to translate the general goal of solving problems into specific problem domains. Part of what human intelligence does is solve the frame problem, somehow: handle experience in ways that abstract within domains and even translate across domains. Does consciousness have a role in this, allowing us to 'feel' our way through new domains less automatically, to play with new ways of representing problems, new associations of patterns, for entertainment?

As you say, consciousness seems as much about hypothesis-forming and -testing (and -selection, I would add) -- problem-solving -- as the incessant pattern-matching that goes on to that end.

Completely agree. Ultimately the function of consciousness is problem-solving and the frame problem is a central issue.

 

[Piggy]

The main issue here is that I don't think there's such a thing, at this level of description, as a "conscious process". Go back to my driving the car. That's an "unconscious process", because "I" am not "conscious" of it. But if I pay attention to it, suddenly it becomes a conscious process.

No, actually, it doesn't.

What you're doing when you're driving a car involves both "types" of processes (which is actually not an accurate way of looking at it, though, when you get down to it).

When you're driving, you're using all sorts of brain functions that go on outside of any conscious awareness of them.

But there's also information being fed into conscious awareness, and presumably there is a feedback mechanism which allows information to be fed from there back into the system -- because if your conscious awareness served no purpose in what you were doing, evolution would not have bothered with it.

So there's this continual interaction between what's going on inside and outside your awareness, so to speak, all the time.

If you, for whatever reason, bother to think, "I am driving" and begin to really pay close attention to what you're doing, it simply changes the mix of information that is being handled by the processes in your brain that enable conscious awareness.

And chances are, it might actually induce mistakes in your performance.

ETA: When I'm talking about conscious processes, I'm not talking about the tasks we're accomplishing while we're conscious; I'm speaking of the biomechanisms in the brain that all us to be conscious of whatever it is we're doing.

 

[Piggy]

Oh I agree to some extent. The entire thing could be described as pattern matching, to some extent. However, there's a bit more that's going on in the interactivity of the thing.

For example, I see a cup on a desk here. That's pattern matching, right? Well, sort of. If you dig a bit deeper in time, something else is going on. My eyes don't merely look at the cup, and my brain doesn't merely recognize it from the scene, but rather, my eyes scan the cup--they are affected by shape recognition, miniature models of the environment, etc, and through saccades, they sweep the environment, keeping minimalistic models, and the entire process picks out an "object" as a percept, which is then recognized later on as a cup. At first cut it looks like I'm pattern matching a scene, but under the hood, I'm not really looking at a frozen "scene" per se--there's an interactive process going on that analyzes what's before me.

As an analogy, "pattern matching" is something like "collect the data, find a pattern" in the scientific model. But I think what we're really doing is going through the whole process... "collect data, form hypotheses, test hypotheses".

What I'm referring to is what's going on at a mid-level.

When you get way down deep, it's just neurons firing (and perhaps something else going on in the case of consciousness, but that's another matter).

You have to take it up another couple of levels of granularity to get to the point of pattern matching.

When you're looking at that cup, the patterns that are triggered match up with all sorts of other patterns you've already experienced, which fits right in with what you're describing.

Of course, there are some very basic processes going on which allow you to distinguish foreground from background, perceive a consistent color and shape when what's actually hitting your eyes is something of a cacophony of planes, angles, edges, and tones, etc.

Once all that physical jumble is sorted out into a stable image of the world, then what you perceive might be "I've never seen that mug before, why is it in my cubicle?" or "Darn it, I forgot to empty my mug on Friday and now it's got a layer of mold on it", or some other bundle of associations that hits you all at once.

And a key mechanism that bridges the space between the fundamental sorting out of the raw image, on the one hand, and those ideas that bubble up in your awareness, on the other, is the process of matching sensory patterns you're experiencing now with others you've experienced before.

 

[Piggy]

Would you say it's different than this assessment? That I'm doing a different kind of thing when I drive the car and go through a shopping list in my head, than when I drive the car and simply focus on the details of driving the car?

Well, if you pay too much attention to your shopping list, you risk passing over too much of the task to non-conscious processing.

When that happens, in order to do a very complex task which NCPs aren't particularly good at, the NCPs compensate by making assumptions in order to keep up. In particular, they're likely to fill in the blanks, so to speak, with schema (patterns) from memory.

If you're driving on a route you travel frequently, and nothing unexpected happens, you can likely do fine "on autopilot".

But if you're driving along and you're thinking, "Ok, I've got to get mustard, now what kind of mustard did Kim want, oh hell was it the brown or the dijon, **** she's going to make that asparagus sauce for the church supper tonight and if I don't get the right one it'll ruin it and I won't have time to come back to the store and **** why didn't I bring the phone with me, she told me I'd forget and now I've forgotten and I'll never hear the end of it...." then if something unexpected does happen, you may not even notice until you've hit the car in front of you.

I remember once when I was very emotionally upset about something, playing things over in my mind, and I took a left turn in a parking lot, right in the path of a truck, which I was looking straight at but literally did not see until the driver honked his horn.

There was no way that my eyes could have missed it, but I was using up too much of my conscious processing power with my thoughts, and wasn't aware of it at all until the horn sounded.

ETA: Another driving example.... You can drive from work to home while chatting with a friend just fine, without really paying attention to what you're doing. But if you're going someplace unfamiliar, even if you've thoroughly memorized the directions, you can't do it without a much greater proportion of the task being handled consciously. Which is why we turn down the radio when we're looking for an address -- we literally need the processing power that's being taken up by the radio.

 

[Piggy]

OK, but I'm hearing the same thing again. You seem to be describing once again roving attention -- directed mental focus to a previously subconscious activity. You've given another very good description of the process but the description still seems to be -- attention to that percept now. At the same time you invoke the global workspace model, which to me seems to concern more than simple attention to a percept or task. One of the aspects of global workspace is that it is global, so that one consequence is that percepts are evaluated within a greater context, which is what understanding (semantic content) essentially is.

From all of your descriptions what I am hearing is the same thing I am saying using different language.

And, yes, there are clear problems with using these terms since clear distinctions between say perception and semantic content will necessarily need to be arbitrary. The neural processes don't care about our arbitrary distinctions. But that is why we need to work out a vocabulary we can use to discuss the processes in the hope that we can then work out some way of operationalizing the concepts.

I don't pretend to have answers, which is why I am asking the question -- what are the underlying processes at a subconscious level, and what is different about conscious processing?

The evolutionary function is one thing -- very important -- but the question I want to ask is "what is the underling process or processes?"

I'm going to need you to clarify "semantic content", which you seem to be using in a way that I wouldn't use it.

But in any case, there's a simple answer to the question about the details of the underlying processes -- nobody knows. We don't know yet how it's done.

But what is different about consciousness is simply that it's consciousness.

In other words, the mechanisms haven't been unlocked yet. And I think it's a safe bet that there will be a great deal of sharing. But there's certainly something going on in the brain (because it's not magic) which allows some highly processed information to be used by whatever the mechanism is that generates this sensation of awareness.

There's a lot that can already be teased out about how that works, on a pretty high level of abstraction, but for now we're dealing with rather vague hypotheses as to the mechanism.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I'm going to need you to clarify "semantic content", which you seem to be using in a way that I wouldn't use it.

But in any case, there's a simple answer to the question about the details of the underlying processes -- nobody knows. We don't know yet how it's done.

But what is different about consciousness is simply that it's consciousness.

In other words, the mechanisms haven't been unlocked yet. And I think it's a safe bet that there will be a great deal of sharing. But there's certainly something going on in the brain (because it's not magic) which allows some highly processed information to be used by whatever the mechanism is that generates this sensation of awareness.

There's a lot that can already be teased out about how that works, on a pretty high level of abstraction, but for now we're dealing with rather vague hypotheses as to the mechanism.

Right, right, but I'm not asking about mechanisms here' this isn't a neuroscience seminar. I don't expect any one to have a basic mechanism. What we need to do first is arrive at a common vocabulary so that we might discuss this without passing each other in the night.

As to semantic content -- that refers to the nexus of connections occurring through the limbic system and the hippocampus/parahippocampus/inferior temporal lobe that control emotional and declarative memories that constitute meaning. Say you look at a blue car -- the perception of blue in part depends on prior memories of blue that give that perception a deeper sense and most of those connections are emotional. We construct through our perceptual system the lines and curves that we perceive as 'car' but it lacks meaning without memories concerning its function, etc. There is much known about the processes involved and the specific locations for much of this processing; and some of it seems to occur at subconscious levels, though it is critical to conscious processing as well.

We could delve deep into theory of meaning, but I'm not sure how many want to go there.

 

[Piggy]

Right, right, but I'm not asking about mechanisms here' this isn't a neuroscience seminar.

Then I am confused.

What else could this be...

The evolutionary function is one thing -- very important -- but the question I want to ask is "what is the underlying process or processes?"

... other than a question about the mechanism?

The "underlying process or processes" must be the same as the mechanism(s), no?

 

[Piggy]

As to semantic content -- that refers to the nexus of connections occurring through the limbic system and the hippocampus/parahippocampus/inferior temporal lobe that control emotional and declarative memories that constitute meaning. Say you look at a blue car -- the perception of blue in part depends on prior memories of blue that give that perception a deeper sense and most of those connections are emotional. We construct through our perceptual system the lines and curves that we perceive as 'car' but it lacks meaning without memories concerning its function, etc. There is much known about the processes involved and the specific locations for much of this processing; and some of it seems to occur at subconscious levels, though it is critical to conscious processing as well.

Ok, I understand you better now (although I don't understand why the words "semantic" and "meaning" in particular should be associated with that).

But, I disagree that prior experience is required to see blue. I don't know of any evidence to support that position.

Also, I disagree that perceiving the color blue has anything to do with emotions.

So the "perception of blue" does not "depend" on those things.

Rather, the perception of blue is associated with those things through experience, as you say, so we all have slightly different responses to seeing particular shades of blue.

In some Asian colors, red is a good luck color, so, for instance, my response to a bright red carpet is likely to be different from my Thai neighbor's response to a bright red carpet. (To me, it looks garish, but she loves it.)

Or consider the smell of a particular perfume that one of my former girlfriends used to wear. Before I met her, I wouldn't have particularly noticed it on someone else. Now, when I smell it on a woman, if I find the woman attractive I'm filled with longing for my ex. If I smell it on a woman I find unattractive (such as a cashier at the store where I buy my animal food) I get angry at her for wearing it.

I have trouble with your use of the word "meaing" here, especially when it's coupled with "semantic" -- for me, semantics doesn't encompass all of this -- but we have to use some sort of language to talk about all this, so that's ok.

And you're right, we do know some of what's going on.

It's pretty clear that various parts of the brain handle different bits of the package -- emotions, language, color, shape, episodic memory, etc.

And there certainly appears to be a network of associations, so that any one bit can trigger all of the associated bits.

When I smell that perfume, my brain goes searching for associations, and I experience emotions, episodic memories, recollections of my girfriend's face and body, etc.

You smell that perfume and you think, "Oh, that smells nice" (or perhaps not).

We look at an apple, and again, our brain scans for associations -- the word "apple", memories of eating it (and therefore the knowledge that it's food), the taste and smell we expect from it, and so on.

Now, I would not call that "meaning". To me, that gets things quite muddled, but that's another issue.

As far as conscious awareness, all this is upstream. That work gets done before the bundle of associations is pushed over into conscious awareness.

If we ask, "how does this happen", I think we're stuck at "Who knows?"

If we back up and ask "What is awareness?" then I think we're back to the functional definition I proposed earlier.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Then I am confused.

What else could this be...



... other than a question about the mechanism?

The "underlying process or processes" must be the same as the mechanism(s), no?

Because I'm not asking for the processes at a neural level, but what underlies awareness. There are easily several processes at play as mentioned earlier -- attention, etc.

It is also possible that the word cannot be defined any further than simply 'awareness'.

If by mechanism you meant the same thing, then I think we agree; but I had the impression you were referring to the actual neural underpinnings. There we have much to do before we can even begin to ask the right questions.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Ok, I understand you better now (although I don't understand why the words "semantic" and "meaning" in particular should be associated with that).

But, I disagree that prior experience is required to see blue. I don't know of any evidence to support that position.

Because we are discussing two different processes. When I mention emotion and prior experience I am not referring to bare perceptual processing such as color recognition or line detection but to the experience of perceiving blue, which does depend on emotion and memory. Without prior experience we don't even have the concept of 'blue' to which to refer -- which is why discussions about 'do you perceive the same blue as I" are fairly silly. We discuss it through language because language is a public behavior; and blue has meaning based on our experiences and interactions with others.

That there is basic color recognition I think goes without saying and doesn't require much comment.

Also, I disagree that perceiving the color blue has anything to do with emotions.

So the "perception of blue" does not "depend" on those things.

I didn't say it depends on those things, but that it depends in part on them -- to the extent that we have experiences of blue and share those experiences with others through language. Bare color recognition is not part of consciousness; it is probably not even available to consciousness.

Rather, the perception of blue is associated with those things through experience, as you say, so we all have slightly different responses to seeing particular shades of blue.

In some Asian colors, red is a good luck color, so, for instance, my response to a bright red carpet is likely to be different from my Thai neighbor's response to a bright red carpet. (To me, it looks garish, but she loves it.)

Or consider the smell of a particular perfume that one of my former girlfriends used to wear. Before I met her, I wouldn't have particularly noticed it on someone else. Now, when I smell it on a woman, if I find the woman attractive I'm filled with longing for my ex. If I smell it on a woman I find unattractive (such as a cashier at the store where I buy my animal food) I get angry at her for wearing it.

All of which concerns the the experiential and public aspects of these experiences and is available to conscious awareness.

I have trouble with your use of the word "meaing" here, especially when it's coupled with "semantic" -- for me, semantics doesn't encompass all of this -- but we have to use some sort of language to talk about all this, so that's ok.

OK. I'm asking for all the help I can get here so if you've got better vocabulary to offer please chime in.

And you're right, we do know some of what's going on.

It's pretty clear that various parts of the brain handle different bits of the package -- emotions, language, color, shape, episodic memory, etc.

And there certainly appears to be a network of associations, so that any one bit can trigger all of the associated bits.

When I smell that perfume, my brain goes searching for associations, and I experience emotions, episodic memories, recollections of my girfriend's face and body, etc.

You smell that perfume and you think, "Oh, that smells nice" (or perhaps not).

We look at an apple, and again, our brain scans for associations -- the word "apple", memories of eating it (and therefore the knowledge that it's food), the taste and smell we expect from it, and so on.

Now, I would not call that "meaning". To me, that gets things quite muddled, but that's another issue.

As far as conscious awareness, all this is upstream. That work gets done before the bundle of associations is pushed over into conscious awareness.

If we ask, "how does this happen", I think we're stuck at "Who knows?"

If we back up and ask "What is awareness?" then I think we're back to the functional definition I proposed earlier.

So, what is meaning? Where does semantics come from? It cannot be mere syntactical content and must include some other type of processing. There is much that can be said about theory of meaning -- I was trying to bypass all the linguistic arguments because at the level we are discussing meaning does not have any linguistic representation.

Yes, conscious awareness is far upstream. But, the subconscious processing seems to encompass one of the ways that we use the word awareness. Do you have another word you would like to use in its place -- meaning for the congress of processes that occur subconsciously? Or are we left with huge descriptions of the many processes?

If we are back at the functional definition, then we are basically back at 'we are aware when something emerges into conscious awareness' which basically tells me that you do not think the word can be further defined. That is OK with me, but there isn't much else to be said if that is your perspective. I don't agree.

 

[blobru]

... I'm not sure that gets us anywhere. What is 'awareness'?

Yes, we're dancing all around it, aren't we?

Okay, another approach, via intentionality.

Let's say one prerequisite for 'awareness' is something, at some level, to be aware of. Consciousness could be thought of as the integration of discrete sense and memory inputs to generate "a big picture" output, a sort of personal 'map': an unlabeled map of where you are and how you feel. Awareness is the interrogation of this personal map: "here I am, and here's how I feel about it... so how do I make the best of it?" It constantly scans the temporary map, affixing labels where helpful, for features that answer that question, that improve one's situation, that change the 'inner' map of the 'outer' world for the better.

If that makes sense at all, I think awareness as "the interrogation of the map of consciousness" might be a workable definition, or starting-point at least. Broad enough to encompass problem-solving, pattern-matching, status-monitoring and the rest; narrow enough to establish it as a directed process within consciousness, for further discussion. (probably leaves out the simple organisms like paramecia discussed earlier though; hmm...)

Anyway, another mighty cut: I must be on about strike seven by now; hard to get ahold of that darn awareness pitch, y' know (without knocking your head clean off).

 

[LightningStrike]

Ok just a little addition from me. I see it like this, awareness is of the senses, it is the way we perceive existence and is akin to a beam in that it focuses on a small part of the whole. Got that , like the sound of the washing machine ... and then the bird... and then something else. It is always moving around. That is awareness.
Consciousness can be experienced when "I" no longer move with awareness. All the senses then report to a centre of sense located in the body where the solar plexus is. The awareness sees nothing there, and as it is used to seeing something can't stay there, but once awareness is 'relaxed' consciousness is perceiving all the senses at once without any effort.

So to summarise, awareness is of existence which is the senses and going into the body, and consciousness is the place of inner space. Somewhere along that line "I" am.

 

[Piggy]

Because I'm not asking for the processes at a neural level, but what underlies awareness. There are easily several processes at play as mentioned earlier -- attention, etc.

Well, I do think you're on the wrong track if you attempt to understand awareness in terms of "attention" and other high-level abstractions.

I don't think it can be done. It's barking up the wrong tree.

The only way to understand awareness in terms of process is to understand the biomechanics.

That's why I went on for so long about the attention problem.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I'm going to be in New York for the next few days, so I won't be on here.

Piggy, that's fine, and I appreciate your perspective. My view is that if this is reducible to biomechanics, then it should be reducible to simpler processes that we can identify through introspection and psychological inquiry. Neural processes don't arise in a vacuum; within global workspace not all of the brain is involved. 40 Hz event related potentials arise in one area and involve others; I think we need to more of the psychology before we can direct the neurobiology. I could be wrong though.

Blobru, very interesting and a great start. I think I need more time to think about that.

Lightening Strike, yes that fits fairly well with many of my own ideas, though I'm not sure about all of it. I think I'll need to think about it a while more as well.