Explain Consciousness to the Layman
Ok, well, I’ll tell you what I know about it, and that should be understandable to the layman, seeing as how I understand it and I’m not a biologist.
I’ll lay out some of what is widely known and some of what is still unknown. In a later post (or posts) I’ll get around to common errors in popular ways of thinking about the brain and consciousness, as well as the question of whether or not you can program a computer to be conscious, and even the implications for free will, but we’ll tackle this first.
Be prepared... this is not a bumper-sticker question, so this post might end up being the length of an article.
What is consciousness?
When we talk about consciousness, we’re talking about something the brain is doing which everyone can observe.
It’s what happens when you wake up in the morning and your body starts having – or, more accurately,
performing -- certain experiences, for example an experience of the color of the ceiling, or an experience of being hungry, or smelling coffee.
This wasn’t happening before.
Light was bouncing off the ceiling onto your head (let’s suppose you sleep with your eyes open), and your stomach was secreting chemicals, and little molecules from the coffee beans were bouncing around in your nose, and all of that was causing very complicated things to happen in your brain – more on these later – but there wasn’t a
feeling of hunger at that spot in the universe before you woke up, or a
smell of coffee, or the
brownness of that damn spot from the roof leak you still haven’t painted.
You can examine coffee from top to bottom, and you got no way of knowing what it smells like to a duck... depends on the duck’s brain entirely. Same for your brain.
We know that the brain is causing the experience because we can manipulate experiences by manipulating the brain, and we can observe (or receive reports of observations, depending on whether you’re the patient or the doctor) how brain injury and malformation changes experience, and we’re building an increasing body of observation about precisely how this works.
Now that you’re awake, your body is performing one of its bodily functions, which is the very experience you’re “having”.
But to say that “you” are “aware of” an experience is redundant. When an experience is going on, whatever it is,
you’re going on too, and when one's not, you ain’t either.
Experience can include a sense of self or not, btw. Optional but not required.
What we need to explain is this:
1. What is the brain doing when experiences are going on which it is not doing when experiences are not going on?
2. Whatever that turns out to be, why does any particular activity of the brain produce any particular experience (the smell of cinnamon, for example) and not some other experience (like the color of a clear sky) or none at all?
The second question is currently beyond our means to answer.
But we’re making progress on the first one.
What is going on in my body when it’s having an experience, which is not going on when it's not?
Before answering that, we should probably dismiss some obvious candidates which might not be so obvious to most folks.
What about attention? When I’m dead asleep, I’m not paying attention to anything, right?
Turns out you are. Your brain is constantly shifting attention, which is not surprising since the body is extremely vulnerable to predators and injury while dead asleep, so you need attention working in case consciousness needs to be kick-started, for instance.
Not only that, but while you’re awake your brain is shifting visual attention all over the place, but that attentional mechanism isn’t part of our experience.
What about memory, using and forming memory? What about learning?
Turns out, our brains learn and use memory just fine without needing consciousness to be engaged or involved.
One odd thing about experience (which I’ll explain later when we get to the mechanics of it) is that it can only be so brief. If an event happens too quickly, we can’t be aware of it.
For example, if you look at a pair of lights, and one blinks after the other one, and you make the time difference shorter and shorter, there will come a point at which you will experience the blinks as being simultaneous when they’re not.
And it seems that way precisely because what happened in the meantime simply had nothing to do with your experience, had no effect on it. (The reason why will have to wait.)
But the rest of your brain is effected by what happened in the meantime between the two blinks!
We can demonstrate this by showing people slide shows, and timing some of the slides so they’re only visible for a time span that’s too short for them to have an experience of.
This experiment has been done thousands of times, with many types of reporting methods from the subjects, and we know that people looking at the “subliminal” slides have no experience of seeing them.
But if you show a group of people some slides of geography or buildings or random geometric shapes, for example, and then ask them to name any animal whose name begins with A, you’re going to get “Ape” as an answer much more frequently from a group who has viewed subliminal slides of gorillas, and “Aardvark” or “Anteater” or “Ant” more often from a group who viewed subliminal slides of aardvarks.
When asked why they came up with that answer, they will all have reasons, but none of them to do with the activity of their non-conscious brains, which was the actual cause.
We can also make associations between images by pairing them subliminally with others, and these pairings will be learned by the brain in a way that the person will act on later. So you don’t have to be conscious to learn.
What about imagination? Gotta be conscious to imagine, right?
Nope, not that either.
In fact, our “conscious minds” work in tandem with a process of non-conscious imagination all the time.
When we’re imagining something... let’s say we’re imagining a room in the house where we used to live... we’re using the same circuits of our brain that would be engaged if we were standing in such a room and looking at it and listening to it and smelling it.
That’s not all we’re doing, obviously, or we’d be hallucinating the experience, but those circuits are indeed engaged.
As it turns out, our brains are doing the same thing constantly while we’re awake (but apparently not in the same way when we’re dreaming!) even though it forms no part of our experience in the way that conscious imagination does.
At any given moment, your brain is (non-consciously) imagining what it expects to happen next and comparing that with the actual cascade of impulses that does happen. But you are not aware of it, until a mismatch occurs that triggers the involvement of experience.
So when you forget that you hung your coat on the end of the door, and you get up in the night and go to the kitchen in the dark, and scare the living daylights out of yourself, that’s because your brain wasn’t imagining a coat there and the clash between how those circuits were lit up and how the incoming circuits lit up created an experience of HOLY****THERESSOMETHINGLOOMINGTHATMIGHTBEAPERSONWHERENOPERSONSHOULDBE!
And if the elevator doors open and you start to move forward and see there’s no elevator, the clash between the patterns also frightens you, this time because something wasn’t there which was expected, and the empty space was scary.
How this happens is quite complicated and not very well understood, but we do know that the non-conscious imagining and pattern-matching is going on by observing the brain in action, so that you can have the same sort of reaction from something being there or not being there, depending on what you expected. (If you were there to fix the elevator, for example, the empty space would not have scared you.)
So we know that consciousness is not the same as attention, memory, learning, or imagination.
Ok, then what is it?
It turns out that what’s going on is a coordination of activity among different parts of the brain.
This can be detected by interfering magnetically with different areas of the brain when people are deeply asleep and when they are awake.
If you’re awake and this happens, effects of this disturbance start popping up all over the brain in different ways.
If you’re asleep, the magnet affects the area it’s physically near, and that’s all.
This is important because it explains one of the most salient features of experience – it coordinates events that are going on in many different parts of the brain at once.
For instance, you can search YouTube for videos on the McGurk effect, which demonstrates that the sound we hear when someone is speaking can depend on what we see.
If the sound of someone repeating the sound “fa” is played over a video of someone mouthing the sounds “fa” and “ba” in various sequences, what you hear will change back and forth, even if you’ve already heard the soundtrack and know that it’s being replayed.
And there’s the example of folks with synesthesia, who see numbers as having colors, or who taste words, and so forth.
And there are any number of visual illusions that work even when you know how they work, even after you prove to yourself they’re illusions.
By the moment of experience, activity that’s going on in different areas of the brain – the patterns of activity that result from hearing, for example, and those resulting from seeing... or those involved with response to motion and those involved with response to temperature – has been merged into a single pattern which consciousness itself cannot untangle.
Then what’s doing the coordinating?
The answer comes from research done on a group of people who have had to have implants surgically placed deep in their brains for medical reasons.
Some of these folks have generously allowed scientists (and us) to observe what’s happening deep in the brain.
These observations have led to the discovery of “signature” brain waves of consciousness.
They can be observed as a brain falls asleep, dreams, wakes up, is anesthetized, comes out of anesthesia, and so forth, and they can be seen to gain coherence as a person wakes up, and they lose coherence and fail (in observably distinct ways) as a person falls asleep or is anesthetized. They also operate when we dream.
These brain waves cross many different areas of the brain, and the electrical activity of those areas will affect the overall wave.
If these waves are the mechanism by which binding is accomplished – which allows us to see “our friend James” rather than a barrage of sound, color, motion, and heat – that would explain why we are not conscious whenever they’re not up and running and coherent, and simultaneously why the magnetic disturbances don’t spread when we’re not conscious.
It would also explain why experience is “temporally granular”, which is to say why there are "blind spots" in our experience of time (if experience is based upon repetition, in which case a deviation in a single sub-wave cycle would have no impact.)
Of course, it’s possible that these waves are “noise” like the sound made by my truck’s engine or the heat coming out of my computer, but if so, we have to ask “Noise made by what... and what is
that thing doing?” At the moment, the waves themselves are our best lead.
The conscious choir
Think of it this way....
Your brain is an astonishingly dense and intricate and complex coil of little things that bounce chemicals and electrical charges around.
There’s something like a hundred billion of these little guys in there, humming away.
The shapes that they form in their dense little bundles, when the electrochemical activity is going on, create a very real electric environment inside your skull. Each little shape is humming away, forming its own electric pattern in space.
But space doesn’t particularly care.
You can imagine it like a vast and complex choir of voices humming – be warned, this is just a metaphor! – but with no air in the room.
Without the air, the vibrations don’t leave the choir members, and they remain separate.
Put air in the room, now the vibrations have something to bounce around in, and you get harmonies and fugues and everything else.
The waves cutting across the brain are like air in the room for the humming electrical shapes in your skull.
Now they mix in all sorts of ways to produce new shapes which did not exist before the air was there, and which will cease to exist if the air is removed.
Look around
Stop and look around for a moment.
Look at the color of paint on the wall. Or the color of the leaves of a plant.
Inhale and smell. Listen.
This experience – which, after all,
is you, isn’t it? – is somehow performed by those waves in your brain as they are warped by the electrical humming of the various shapes of different parts of your brain.
And, of course, the humming of the choir is affected by feedback from the waves.
But that’s where the greenness of the grass is, and the coldness of the ice, and the sweetness of the smell of the back of your lover’s neck when you wake up in the middle of the night.
And these things – these experiences – are little pockets that go floating and crawling and sliding around in the universe. They are, after all, simply shapes that the universe takes in its vast silent explosion.
Now think about it....
Imagine yourself at a football game, maybe the local pro team, maybe your kid’s school team.
The place is full of these little pockets, where experiences are happening... and nothing in the light bouncing around the place, or the heat, or the crashing molecules that bounce off our ears and go up our noses... nothing about any of that stuff can predict the smell of hot dogs, or the sound of a shoe hitting a ball, or the taste of a drink, or the emotion of watching your team win (or lose).
All of that is something that the human brain does.
What it
is to be human is to have the kind of body we have. What it
means to be human is to have that body’s kind of experience of the world, which exists entirely within it, because of the way it is shaped.
Questions to be answered
If the brain waves are the air and the electrical shapes formed by brain activity in the various sub-organs are the choir... who’s listening?
(You see, I
told you it was only a metaphor!)
We still don’t know
why this particular physical arrangement creates experience, much less why it leads to the particular experiences it does.
It’s tempting to think that the mere fact of interaction does the trick by itself, but as we’ve seen from our examples of non-conscious attention, learning, and imagination, the interaction of brain patterns is happening all the time, including those which we would identify as “representative” of something outside the body or elsewhere in the body, but most of them don’t have an effect on experiences.
And if the interaction of patterns in a medium is the cause, then why isn’t the real air conscious when it is the vehicle of real vocal harmonies?
So that’s the next step.
Why does having a brain shaped like ours make our body perform the experiences it performs?
And why does a brain shaped like ours perform any experience at all?
