Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Piggy]

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

Well, this is precisely what I'm trying to tease out with you.

We don't need a "concept of blue" to refer to.

What I'm proposing to you is a different way of looking at the question. I believe you'll find it a much more efficient, productive, and accurate way to approach the problem.

"Meaning", for example, isn't anything that our brains appear to be at all concerned with. All that seems to matter to the brain are associations among patterns, and the strength of those associations.

Which comes out time and again in the kinds of mistakes we make in everyday life. If an idea triggers a sufficient number of strong positive associations, we're likely to believe it, even if these associations are entirely irrelevant to the question.

"Meaning" is something that we deal with on a very high level of abstraction, but our brains don't appear to care one whit about it.

So let's go back to blue.

Not only do we not need a "concept of blue", I don't believe we even have one, unless we take the time to do some very high-order thinking about it, which most people don't.

What does happen, though, is that as we live our lives, different shades of blue gain and lose associations of various strengths. So our reaction to blue changes.

And we don't need any notion of "meaning" in order to understand that. In fact, it's best if we don't try to drag "meaning" into it.

Sure, colloquially we can talk about what a shade of blue "means" to us, but when we're doing that, what we're talking about in terms of the brain are the associations that exist in the network that includes that shade of blue.

But an actual "concept of blue" is entirely superfluous.

 

[Piggy]

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.

Well, you did, in fact, say that, which is what I was responding to, but if you meant that it "depends in part", then I accept the clarification.

But let's get clear here. Our perception of blue -- just that, by itself -- doesn't depend on experience or language. We are able to dinstinguish colors before we have words for them. Our experience of color is biological.

I think what you're saying is that our mental experience, when we see blue, involves past experiences and includes language. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But sharing experiences with others through language isn't what I'm talking about, and I'm not really sure what you're getting at by mentioning it.

When we see blue, one of the patterns triggered is the sound "blue" and another is the string of letters "b l u e". Those associations are built up through experience. And depending on the shade of blue and the context, there will be many other associations triggered. Perhaps the blue in a shirt makes me think of neon signs, for example.

Perhaps what you're getting at is "recognizing blue as blue", but the thing is, I don't believe that this is something that we actually do most of the time that we're consciously aware of blueness.

 

[Piggy]

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.

I'll await your return, because I'm enjoying this conversation.

But I disagree with you entirely that it should be reducible to simpler processes that we can identify through introspection and psychological inquiry.

I can't see any reason why that should be the case, especially when it comes to introspection.

To me, that's like saying we should be able to understand how a car operates by listening to it and driving it.

Anyway, I'll wait for you to get back, and in the meantime I'll finish commenting on your posts thus far.

 

[Piggy]

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

It's what I'm trying to do, you know... but in doing so, I'm necessarily offering a different perspective in with the package.

It seems to me that these concepts you're referring to with some of your vocabulary aren't actually useful in answering these questions, and in fact are stumbling blocks.

 

[yy2bggggs]

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).

Okay, so why is it not accurate?

Some of this may be labeling, and if it's labeling, there's no real conflict. My point is that when I'm driving my car while going through a shopping list, the same brain parts are involved in doing the driving as the parts involved in doing the driving when I'm paying attention to it. The difference isn't that there's a "conscious way" to do it and an "unconscious way" to do it--the difference is, rather, that when I'm paying attention to it, the information is getting fed to different modules.

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

Yes.

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.

But I never claimed that conscious awareness served no purpose. Those other modules that get the information when I'm conscious of it can also play a role in changing what happens--redirecting things. Furthermore, even if they don't, they can do things with the information--like, report on it.

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

Agreed, except for the fact that the interactions only occur when they need to occur. So "continual" I take with a grain of salt.

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.

Sure, but this changed "mix" is, in essence, a communication line being drawn to other processes.

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.

Sure, but no single module is responsible for this thing.

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

The problem here is that this "stable image of the world" just plain does not describe what we do when we look at things. The overall mechanics of vision are known. We have a tremendously complex visual cortex. We use the environment itself to cheat (hence, inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the like). We don't actually chew on a "scene" that we form in our heads--what we do, instead, is an interactive process.

The phrase sounds alright... "once all that physical jumble is sorted out into a stable image of the world"... it just simpy turns out that this doesn't describe what actually happens.

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.

I'm not denying that pattern matching happens. I'm just pointing out that it's more complicated than that--what happens is interactive. It's a lot closer to hypothesis formation and testing than it is just pattern matching applied to a scene. Part of the "testing" process involves triggering eye movements--saccades--in particular directions, to bring other portions of the scene into focus.

Well, if you pay too much attention to your shopping list, you risk passing over too much of the task to non-conscious processing. ...
If you're driving on a route you travel frequently, and nothing unexpected happens, you can likely do fine "on autopilot".

But there are things I do on "autopilot" even when driving in unfamiliar areas. And there are times when I become aware of those things. In particular, I drive a stick shift, and I'm almost never concentrating on the details of shifting gears. Even if I'm trying to find something and I'm completely lost, trying to scan for landmarks and what have you, figuring out whether I want to turn at the next right, and so forth, I don't focus on the gear shifting. That's autopilot. Even less often do I focus on how and when I squeeze my hand while moving from the wheel to the gear shift in order to get a hold on it.

And as a gvim user, I may strategize about how I'm going to edit a piece of text (especially when I process data), but I very rarely think about which key sequences I need to type in order to carry out the particular commands. Those are autopilot as well.

So even when I'm fully focused on a task at hand, the subtasks can be disconnected from my conscious processing. All I care about is going from here to there, turning right to see what's behind that building--or all I care about is making this stuff line up with that stuff so I can yank out this block of text, and shoving it to the left so I can sort it. These things that I care about are generally all that registers in my "conscious" mind--the rest "just happen".

And even when I'm asleep, I might feel a chill, and grab the blanket and roll into it. That's nearly about as minimal as it gets. But something inside me is able to perceive the blanket, and is aware that in order to solving the problem of the chill, I can roll into that blanket.

What I'm arguing is that this is ubiquitous in the brain--and when we become "aware" of something, there's not a different thing taking over. Rather, the same thing is in control, and a different thing is "hooked in", which can utilize the information--to either do something else with it, or interact with it. And these things communicate certain levels of information with each other--the same sorts of information that the original modules need to accomplish the feat in the first place (blankets, blocks of text, gear the car is in, gear-shift-controls-the-gear, etc).

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.

Then again, if you were less focused on the emotional upset, you could have avoided the truck without ever remembering that you did it. But that's because you'd have the resources necessary to see the truck: ...

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.

Well, your eyes aren't involved in the first place. Your brain is--it's not your eyes' job to recognize the truck, but your brain's. And your brain does that by registering something about the scene, scanning it, forming hypotheses, testing them, feeding them back into the low level processing, etc, until you register that the truck is there. And if you didn't go through the work, as shocking as it may be to hear this, you may not ever see the truck, even if you're staring right at it.

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.

Sure, and if there's a snowy slush on the road, I become very aware of what gear I'm in. But otherwise, even when I'm lost, I'm typically not paying attention to that.

 

[Piggy]

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.

When I talk about "meaning", I'm speaking of specific learned associations with a linguistic or symbolic sign, or a subset of the gamut of associations elicited by (or intended by) linguistic or symbolic signs.

For instance, a # sign at certain spots on a manuscript triggers the idea "add a space" in my mind.

We can also talk about much more complex meanings of utterances. For instance, a teenage boy walks into a house, leaves the door open, and walks by his father -- who's sitting in a chair reading the paper -- without saying anything. The father says in a deep, flat tone with slow and clear enunciation, "The door."

We can say that the meaning of that utterance is "Go shut the door, and I'm not happy with you".

But you see that in these cases we explain the meaning in terms of longer strings of symbols and signs.

It's all very high level stuff.

But if you try to look into what's happening in the brain when all these interactions go on, meaning goes out the window.

Oh, sorry, my wrist is starting to hurt. Time to lay off the posting. I'll pick up here again tomorrow sometime. Cheers -Piggy

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Well, you did, in fact, say that, which is what I was responding to, but if you meant that it "depends in part", then I accept the clarification.

But let's get clear here. Our perception of blue -- just that, by itself -- doesn't depend on experience or language. We are able to dinstinguish colors before we have words for them. Our experience of color is biological.

I think what you're saying is that our mental experience, when we see blue, involves past experiences and includes language. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But sharing experiences with others through language isn't what I'm talking about, and I'm not really sure what you're getting at by mentioning it.

When we see blue, one of the patterns triggered is the sound "blue" and another is the string of letters "b l u e". Those associations are built up through experience. And depending on the shade of blue and the context, there will be many other associations triggered. Perhaps the blue in a shirt makes me think of neon signs, for example.

Perhaps what you're getting at is "recognizing blue as blue", but the thing is, I don't believe that this is something that we actually do most of the time that we're consciously aware of blueness.

Of course our simple perception of blue doesn't depend on earlier experience. I've never said that nor thought it. I don't think it is really worth discussing.

We aren't talking about simple perception here, but awareness.

The word perception has many meanings and when discussing awareness/consciousness the issue of qualia always arises. I am trying to cut off that discussion at the onset.

I take it for granted that everyone here knows something about perception so we needn't talk at that level.

As to the issue of "meaning" at a subconscious level -- that is where we are still discussing things, correct? -- I specifically said that language was not involved (most likely). I am not talking about linguistic based theories of meaning (at higher levels of analysis) but the greater context in which experiences occur and are understood at a simple level -- and that is based in the associations, both emotional and declarative (likely stored in some form of mentalese) that surge through the limbic and hippocampal systems.

This is about how simple perceptions become experiences -- through that nexus of associations that provide context and some sense of meaning. When you get down to brass tacks meaning always seems to refer to something greater than a mere perception -- it involves putting a perception within a bigger context. It is unlikely that this involves any complex linguistic input when we are talking about the subconscious level, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing up higher level analysis.

I don't think we can get to higher level analysis until we deal with these lower levels.

I specifically did not label this thread, "what is consciousness". It is labelled "what is awareness". Again, there is a sense in which we use the word awareness to refer to these subconscious processes -- that is where the analysis begins.

But I'm sorry, I'm going out of town, so this will be it for me for a while.

 

[Piggy]

The problem here is that this "stable image of the world" just plain does not describe what we do when we look at things. The overall mechanics of vision are known. We have a tremendously complex visual cortex. We use the environment itself to cheat (hence, inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the like). We don't actually chew on a "scene" that we form in our heads--what we do, instead, is an interactive process.

The phrase sounds alright... "once all that physical jumble is sorted out into a stable image of the world"... it just simpy turns out that this doesn't describe what actually happens.

I'll have to respond to the rest of your post later, but we're actually saying the same thing here. I'm talking about exactly these interactive processes you mention, and the cheats and fills, which take a jumble of information and create a stable image (and by "image" I mean something like "There's a red car driving by").

When we see this "red car", our eyes are actually getting hit by a wide range of tones that are continually shifting and changing, but we see it as a stable color. Ditto for the shape of the car.

What we're consciously aware of is a stable "red car" even though we don't actually "see", in raw terms, anything like that.

 

[Piggy]

As to the issue of "meaning" at a subconscious level -- that is where we are still discussing things, correct? -- I specifically said that language was not involved (most likely). I am not talking about linguistic based theories of meaning (at higher levels of analysis) but the greater context in which experiences occur and are understood at a simple level

But this is what I'm getting at. I don't think experiences are understood at a simple level. They don't even exist at that level, because they don't have to.

 

[Piggy]

I'm not denying that pattern matching happens. I'm just pointing out that it's more complicated than that--what happens is interactive. It's a lot closer to hypothesis formation and testing than it is just pattern matching applied to a scene. Part of the "testing" process involves triggering eye movements--saccades--in particular directions, to bring other portions of the scene into focus.

We don't disagree here at all. I thought I was clear that I was referring to the pattern matching process that underlies these higher-level processes and which, in turn, depend on lower-level processes.

If I wasn't clear about that, then hopefully this post clears that up. We are in agreement here.

 

[Piggy]

But there are things I do on "autopilot" even when driving in unfamiliar areas. And there are times when I become aware of those things. In particular, I drive a stick shift, and I'm almost never concentrating on the details of shifting gears. Even if I'm trying to find something and I'm completely lost, trying to scan for landmarks and what have you, figuring out whether I want to turn at the next right, and so forth, I don't focus on the gear shifting. That's autopilot. Even less often do I focus on how and when I squeeze my hand while moving from the wheel to the gear shift in order to get a hold on it.

And as a gvim user, I may strategize about how I'm going to edit a piece of text (especially when I process data), but I very rarely think about which key sequences I need to type in order to carry out the particular commands. Those are autopilot as well.

So even when I'm fully focused on a task at hand, the subtasks can be disconnected from my conscious processing. All I care about is going from here to there, turning right to see what's behind that building--or all I care about is making this stuff line up with that stuff so I can yank out this block of text, and shoving it to the left so I can sort it. These things that I care about are generally all that registers in my "conscious" mind--the rest "just happen".

And even when I'm asleep, I might feel a chill, and grab the blanket and roll into it. That's nearly about as minimal as it gets. But something inside me is able to perceive the blanket, and is aware that in order to solving the problem of the chill, I can roll into that blanket.

What I'm arguing is that this is ubiquitous in the brain--and when we become "aware" of something, there's not a different thing taking over. Rather, the same thing is in control, and a different thing is "hooked in", which can utilize the information--to either do something else with it, or interact with it. And these things communicate certain levels of information with each other--the same sorts of information that the original modules need to accomplish the feat in the first place (blankets, blocks of text, gear the car is in, gear-shift-controls-the-gear, etc).

We are, of course, in total agreement... perhaps up until the last paragraph.

I can't be reading that last paragraph correctly, because you seem to be saying two contradictory things.

When you say "there's not a different thing taking over", you appear to be saying that there is not any distinct mechanism involved in conscious awareness which is not in play during non-conscious processing.

But then you say "the same thing is in control, and a different thing is 'hooked in', which can utilize the information--to either do something else with it, or interact with it."

At this point, I lose you. I can't follow your vocabulary.

What precisely are you saying is "in control" and what "different thing" is "hooked in" and what do you mean by "hooked in"?

I suspect that we actually agree with each other all the way through, really.

 

[Piggy]

Well, your eyes aren't involved in the first place. Your brain is--it's not your eyes' job to recognize the truck, but your brain's. And your brain does that by registering something about the scene, scanning it, forming hypotheses, testing them, feeding them back into the low level processing, etc, until you register that the truck is there. And if you didn't go through the work, as shocking as it may be to hear this, you may not ever see the truck, even if you're staring right at it.

Of course my eyes are involved. My eyes are part of my brain, wired right in. And anyway, try seeing something without them.

And I'm surprised you'd think that I'd find it shocking to hear that I might not see a truck that I'm staring right at, since that's exactly the experience I used as an example there.

 

[Piggy]

Sure, and if there's a snowy slush on the road, I become very aware of what gear I'm in. But otherwise, even when I'm lost, I'm typically not paying attention to that.

Do you realize that we're arguing the same points?

Ok, my wrist hurts. And it's time to go to bed.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Do you realize that we're arguing the same points?

I recognize the possibility, but that's what the dialog is for! That's what I meant by, if this is just labeling, then there's no disagreement.

When you say "there's not a different thing taking over", you appear to be saying that there is not any distinct mechanism involved in conscious awareness which is not in play during non-conscious processing.

Actually, yes. On a simplified level, a group of modules, A, is doing driving when I'm not focused on the task.

When I am focused on the task, A is still doing the driving. B, C, and D come into play as well, and they may or may not become back seat drivers. But A's still there.

But then you say "the same thing is in control, and a different thing is 'hooked in', which can utilize the information--to either do something else with it, or interact with it."

Well, sure. Let's split this out, for example. I'm driving, completely on autopilot. So A is doing the driving. But my passenger reports hunger, and notes a cool restaurant I've never been to before... just turn right when I get to this light. Okay, and I oblige.

I turn right, and it's not long before everything becomes unfamiliar. Now I'm paying close attention to the road. Something else hooks in... B is paying attention to the directions of my passenger, C is scanning road signs, trying to figure out what exactly she means by "the one with the yellow roof", etc.

But A's still there. And a subset of it, A₁, is shifting gears. I'm not focused at all on gear shifting. So even though I'm aware of the process now, it's really the same exact modules doing it. Other pieces are patched in and interacting with it, but they're just being told certain things about this action--in particular, just the things they care about. And they feed it back to A, which notices that we're going up a hill, and decides to shift to second gear. All B and C are worried about are where to go.

So the difference between these two processes is that something else is patched in, and only at certain levels of detail.

I suspect that we actually agree with each other all the way through, really.

It's possible... but then again, it's also possible we have a core disagreement and are working towards it.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

But this is what I'm getting at. I don't think experiences are understood at a simple level. They don't even exist at that level, because they don't have to.

Yes, badly worded on my part. I'm not intimating that we can understand experience at a subconscious level. That would make no sense. We can't experience at a subconscious level by any definition of experience that I know.

What is important is the idea that the nexus of associations in the limbic and hippocampal systems is available at a subconscious level (as well as at a conscious level); and that these associations constitute the ground on which meaning can be built. There is certainly some work on subconscious semantic priming to suggest that some level of what we call awareness seems to occur at these levels.

Now, one of the issues that I raised on the first page and wish to raise again, because I am not sure that everyone can get on the same page about definitions is this: does it really make sense to use the word 'awareness' for subconscious processing?

Perception and some type of attention and intentionality seem to occur at subconscious levels. But can we say that there is any sense of meaning or understanding that occurs at that level? I initially said 'no', then decided to play the game as though it did. I am hearing you say 'no' as well.

I'll raise the issue of blindsight again, since it is often used in these discussions. It is true that we can feature-detect without being aware of doing so in the absence of information directly reaching the occipital cortex, but does the type of feature detection in blindsight amount to anything more -- such as understanding the stimulus at some level? For the most part all that can be identified are simple percepts such as color, line, orientation, etc. with no complex forms identified (which makes sense because the information cannot travel to association cortices).

Can we label that 'awareness' or simply perception? Since such subject guess better than chance when presented with simple stimuli in their visual field, and if we want to say that they are aware of those stimuli, does that make awareness into simple perception? Does awareness include any sense of understanding -- or what has been called, once again, "knowing that something is going on"?

There are many definitions for the word 'aware'. First we have to decide how we are going to use it. What does it include?

 

[yy2bggggs]

Ichneumonwasp:

I'm still confused about what it is you're after here.

We could define awareness to include what we call "consciousness". Or we could define it to exclude it.

But I don't think from a set of definitions that don't explicitly mention "consciousness", and define what that means, you're going to wind up with something that includes consciousness.

I remain confused because it looks like this is a discussion where you're just chasing your own tail.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Ichneumonwasp:

I'm still confused about what it is you're after here.

We could define awareness to include what we call "consciousness". Or we could define it to exclude it.

But I don't think from a set of definitions that don't explicitly mention "consciousness", and define what that means, you're going to wind up with something that includes consciousness.

I remain confused because it looks like this is a discussion where you're just chasing your own tail.

OK, I'll come completely clean.

First, I wanted to stay away from the word consciousness because it is so loaded with baggage. It could be that awareness maps completely into/onto consciousness and it may not. I am glad that we can avoid the simple equivocations over levels of arousal when discussing consciousness because we all know what we are referring to in this discussion (at least I think so).

Awareness seems a less loaded word -- at least it hasn't been discussed quite to the same degree. I fear that there are so many definitions of the word, however, that we are just going to get caught in the same equivocations that always drag down discussions about consciousness -- as Mercutio basically warned. I was hoping that by concentrating on that word that we might get a little better sense of the processes at play.

I have been playing (devil's advocate) with the idea of us being aware at a subconscious level since that idea was introduced early in the thread, but I think it's pretty clear that I don't really believe it -- since I can't make sense of it. I am certainly open to the idea, and willing to consider it, but I don't think I can make it work.

I don't think we should use the word awareness to discuss what occurs at a subconscious level. I know there is a sense in which the word can be used in that situation -- as with blindsight -- but I think that potentially creates more confusion than help. We perform an amazing amount of pre-conscious processing, but that is probably best viewed as pre-conscious processing and not 'awareness'.

I think we are probably much better off using the word awareness to refer to higher-order processing -- basically what Piggy has been arguing -- in part because I don't think there is much that we can really label 'understanding' or 'knowing what's going on' at those lower levels. Yes, there is some degree of subconscoius priming that can be demonstrated, but most of that data is a bit 'iffy' as to what it really means in my opinion.

I haven't been following the 'driving on autopilot' discussion closely -- at least not what you guys argued last night -- so I don't know if this point has already been made, but I don't think it is entirely proper to speak of the subconscious placeholders we keep in memory while driving as 'things of which we are aware'.

So, let me explain what I mean by that. When we drive on autopilot we perform actions that were once conscious when we learned them but needn't be conscious any longer -- we can perform them automatically because we have motor programs constructed in our frontal lobes and cerebellum to do what needs to be done without attending to the actions (as Aku mentioned). In the same way, when we drive on autopilot we don't start that way as far as sensory information is concerned. No one is already on autopilot as they enter a freeway or long highway. We scan the scene, look for oncoming traffic, etc. By the time we go on autopilot we have already constructed a "map of our environment" and that map does not change much -- at least in terms of objects that are important (e.g. might kill us). We were conscious of all that information earlier in the drive and we maintain that info in memory, but as long as it doesn't change appreciably (and this generally occurs on drives through familiar scenes only), it won't 'rise to the level of our attention' largely because signal strength isn't high enough. Sensory neurons have a tendency to decrease their firing rate to a basal level when the same stimulus is applied (of course it depends a bit on which receptors and which relay neurons are being discussed).

I'm not sure that I am comfortable using the word 'awareness' to refer to the way that sensory information is held in memory in situations such as this. I agree fully that we were once aware of it and it's still there in our representation. I am also a bit suspicious that we 'refresh' those short-term memories from time to time by becoming briefly aware of our surroundings before returning to our reveries while driving, but that we don't remember this fact very well when discussing the matter.

I think we may need another word than 'awareness' when we refer to how we deal with subconscious information of which we were once aware -- however briefly -- yet hold in memory.

As to 'what is awareness', I'm still a bit mystified. I've seen plenty of descriptions of the process, but I'm not sure I have a good definition in mind. We define words in terms of other words, other concepts. We may be stuck with: awareness is what happens when 'things' pop into awareness, or 'knowing what's going on', but I hope we can do a bit better than that.

I actually took a definition akin to 'knowing what's going on' in the first place and tried to analyze what goes into that phrase -- that is how I came up with the initial tetrad of attention, intentionality, perception, and understanding (the latter word is not quite right, so I need to work on that).

I agree with you that perception is not really a part of awareness; I think it is one of the many pre-conscious processes that permit awareness to occur, and I'm not sure what word should replace 'understanding' -- that particular word is far too loaded with other meanings. What really seems to be going on, as far as I can tell, is looping information from several different domains, constantly updating over time (as Hokulele pointed out) tied both to a body map in the parietal cortex, emotional information from the limbic system, and autobiographical memory from frontal and temporal structures (along with the arousal system and pain/pleasure system from the ventral tegmentum to orbitofrontal cortex).

Subcortical processing occurs in much more limited domains, not including all of these other factors, though some of them are obviously either involved in subcortical processing or occur at the same time, though they are likely not linked in the same relay loops.

With that, I'll see you guys Friday or Saturday.

 

[AlBell]

The reason I do like consciousness as "awareness of awareness" is that it seems a rational progression, awareness and perhaps cognition (demonstrated by life and computers) to awareness of awareness, that is, consciousness (so far only life certainly possesses the last one).

 

[Third Eye Open]

The only way for something to get done right is for me to do it. Therefor I am god.

 

[rocketdodger]

I just made a thread on the science and mathematics forum that explains my model of consciousness. If you are interested in learning or discussing actual science please take a look.

Particularly you, Piggy, since you seem to want to know more details than usually gets discussed in the R&P forum.