Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Ichneumonwasp]

But I didn't look it up in a dictionary. I just told you what I believed that word means to me.

And I certainly hope you know that doesn't matter.

When I say "knows something in going on", I specifically did not mean "is capable of responding to an external stimulus".

OK, that's fine. I don't think don't think many people do mean bare stimulus-response when discussing awareness. I can't think of any who do (and please don't reply to this by invoking Pixy because he doesn't believe that either).

I'm not convinced we are talking about a "process" at all, nor that it can be broken down. The underlying process could be happening without any awareness. When we say "awareness" or "consciousness" we are refering to an internal awareness of neural processes, not the processes themselves.

"Awareness" is the difference between a car alarm and a brain.

OK, if your answer is that the process is not reducible, then you've made your opinion known and there is nothing else to contribute. I thank you for your contribution. You may be correct. You may not. But the only way we can decide is to give it a try.

 

[Dancing David]

Quick question. Where does the unconscious mind fit in? Is it 'aware'? Is the conscious mind 'aware' of the unconscious mind and its contents?

The mind is redundant? There are the events labels as 'conscious' and then there are all the others. The 'unconscious' has so much baggage that most people in the SMT forum use other words like preconscious or nonconscious.

Emotions are something people are aware of, but that does not make them unconscious, there is a lot of association in the human brain, some is conscious, some is not, there are lots of habits as well, they can be part of consciousness or not.

Many things people label as 'unconscious' are not, some are: like digestion.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

I don't think that we will ever have a clean definition for awareness, it requires a wiki.

UCE, what would you like scientists who wish to study awareness to do?

Pretty much what they are doing right now. I don't believe the problem here is cognitive science or what cognitive scientists are doing. The problem is that some of them, most notably Dennett, are saying things which aren't supported by any science. So what I want them to do is actual science instead of poor-quality speculative philosophy. I also want them to concentrate a bit harder on what they don't know and why they don't know it, instead of claiming that they do know it (or could in the future) thereby ignoring the reasons why they can't.

There is a term in cognitive science: "Explanatory Gap". Cognitive scientists simply have to admit that this gap cannot be bridged by science, get on with stuff on their own side of the gap and leave the gap itself to be tackled by philosophers. Proper philosophers (i.e. not Dennett, who lacks the guts and intellectual honesty to admit the gap exists.) And yes that was indeed a personal attack on Dennett. I don't just think he is a bad philosopher. I think he is a complete [rhymes with punt].

I don't think that anyone, even pixy, would deny that awareness is experienced subjectively. What you have to consider, is that whatever gives rise to that experience is also happening objectively in the brain.

I'm happy to agree that there are things happening in brains which determine the content of awareness.

Why should we not try to figure out what exactly happens in the brain that gives rise to that experience?

I have no problem with people trying to figure out what is happening in the brain, what I object to is the claim that we already have enough evidence to support the claim that whatever is happening in the brain is sufficient for an explanation of consciousness/awareness.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain this on this board: When I deny that brains are a sufficient explanation for awareness I am NOT claiming that brains have nothing to do with awareness or that science shouldn't try to investigate such things. What I am claiming is that regardless of how good an explanation we have of what is going on in a brain, we still won't have the full story and we already know already that we won't have the full story.

Why should we not try to reproduce that outside of the brain? What would make this fundamentally impossible??? I fear that you would want scientists to just "stop looking into it", or use techniques which we will learn nothing useful from, that have been demonstrated for thousands of years to not produce results(philosophy/metaphysics).

I am not trying to stop scientists from doing anything which is recognisable as actual science. I am trying to stop them from going further than this and making claims which are (a) unsupported by science and (b) philosophically problematic.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I think that the common usage is that 'awareness' is a recognition of somesort of perceptions, in other words another layer that recognises the perceptions. say the verbal cognition "I am hot."

Yes, that may be correct in some sense. Many have wondered if a set of mirror neurons may be at play -- sort of a second layer of mirrors to "look at" the function of an initial set of these neurons.

Since mirror neurons provide a means for us to recognize and empathize with another individual, could another set of neurons that perform the same function but work for the entire perceptual system act to provide what we call awareness?

Keep in mind that this is a garbage description since "mirror neuron" refers to a neuron that receives input from a wide variety of other cells, the wiring diagrams being completely unknown to us at this time.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

And I certainly hope you know that doesn't matter.

It matters if I am being criticised for giving a dictionary definition rather than what I believe the word should mean.

OK, if your answer is that the process is not reducible, then you've made your opinion known and there is nothing else to contribute. I thank you for your contribution. You may be correct. You may not. But the only way we can decide is to give it a try.

I don't agree. From my POV, this is just a means of delaying the inevitable admission that it is not reducible. My position is that we already know it is irreducible and that a large proportion of the scientific community refuses to acknowledge this is the case, and that the reasons for this refusal are ideological and not scientific. From my POV, I see no difference between what you've just said and a creationist telling me that he believes that one day science will prove creationism is true and that my rejection of this is caused by pessimism - that I've "given up" without trying. There's no point in continuing to try to do something if you already have enough information to KNOW that it is impossible. That's not "giving up". It is "accepting reality."

Consciousness CANNOT be reduced to brain activity and this debate can go nowhere until the scientific community collectively admits that this is the case instead of preventing further advances in understanding by insisting that there is still some possibility that one day there will be a proper materialistic definition of consciousness. What I see at the moment is an attitude which says "either we provide a materialistic definition (however inadequate) or we will dig our heels in, do a mule impression, and make sure that the debate goes absolutely nowhere." And so the debate goes nowhere. It has gone nowhere for 400 years - for the scientists that is. Meanwhile, unnoticed by most scientists, philosophy has been busy making progress on this issue for at least the last 200 years. Whilst the scientists flap around going nowhere, unable even to agree on a definition of the thing they claim they can one day explain, this topic has been explored exhaustively by philosophy. Why aren't the scientists interested in that philosophy? Answer: partly because it requires a whole load of hard work they aren't interested in doing (understanding Kant and Wittgenstein is harder than science), and partly because it leads to philosophical/religious positions which they mistakenly believe have already been destroyed by science. Why do a load of hard work to lead you in a direction you don't want to go in when you can instead simply claim, incorrectly, that "one day science will nail this" and go on believing whatever you fancy?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

It matters if I am being criticised for giving a dictionary definition rather than what I believe the word should mean.

I'm not criticising you for giving an improper definition. I guess I did not make clear that what I am interested in is the underlying processes that give rise to what we call awareness. What are its component parts? Attention? Intentionality? Perception of perception? That sort of thing. Dictionary definitions are fine as far as they go, but they don't move the discussion I would like to have forward.

I don't agree. From my POV, this is just a means of delaying the inevitable admission that it is not reducible. My position is that we already know it is irreducible and that a large proportion of the scientific community refuses to acknowledge this is the case, and that the reasons for this refusal are ideological and not scientific. From my POV, I see no difference between what you've just said and a creationist telling me that he believes that one day science will prove creationism is true and that my rejection of this is caused by pessimism - that I've "given up" without trying. There's no point in continuing to try to do something if you already have enough information to KNOW that it is impossible. That's not "giving up". It is "accepting reality."

Point noted. Others do not agree that we already know that awareness is irreducible. So, your contribution is appreciated and some of the rest of us would like to move on now.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Point noted. Others do not agree that we already know that awareness is irreducible. So, your contribution is appreciated and some of the rest of us would like to move on now.

Fair enough. There's little else I can contribute to this thread. As far as I am concerned you are "moving on" in no particular direction, having not actually arrived at the beginning yet. Good luck.

 

[epeos76]

All I have to add is an anecdote and my speculation.

I'm epileptic, and this one time I was "coming to" from a gran mal, and was fading from "nothingness" to perception, and was hearing someone saying "my tongue is numb." Over the course of a few minutes (or maybe 10 seconds, I dunno), I realised MY tongue was totally numb. Then I realised the voice was my own. I was the one saying it. Then I was seeing where I was, and noticing that I was talking to a nurse. I had no idea what about. She apparently noticed a new look on my face and asked me "Are you really here now?" and I said "yes".

There was another person in the room, too. Someone I didn't recognise, but seemed to be an old, frail, non-threatening female. Over the course of 30 minutes or so, I realised this person was my mom.
The whole thing was really, really bizarre. My mom says I was semi-incoherently "talking to" the nurse for quite a while before I really came to. She says I was frustrating the nurse because all I would say to her questions about allergies and whatnot was "my tongue is numb".

So...my speculation...
I think consciousness is multi-layered. It's a matter of perception. If you perceive nothing you're fully unconscious, if you're "awake" you're fully conscious, and between those two extremes is a bunch of grey area, where it's a scale. How one defines it depends simply upon where one wants to draw their line in the sand.

You might really like this episode of "Radio Lab" if you haven't already heard it. It recounts several different cases where less reflective, automatic systems are at odds with the self-aware layer we usually think of as consciousness.

 

[!Kaggen]

That is what is at issue. What is awareness? We can always provide simple answers to such questions -- I am conscious from the time I arise from dreamless sleep until I return to that state (though it is very unclear that any bit of sleep is dreamless).

"Awareness of something" was brought up here already

In humdrum talk, awareness is awareness of something-or-other. It makes no sense to say " I'm aware, but I'm not aware of anything".

Awareness does not require attention to what one is aware of. I am, for example, aware of traffic noise outside, but I am not paying any attention to it ( nor am I ignoring it — that's something else again). That, I suppose, is an implicit definition of attention.

Indicating that it is superfluous to talk about awareness as if it was an isolated event.

I went further and brought up space and time occupied by this something as also essential components of awareness here

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=5406832#post5406832

I also introduced the concept of the self as being contrasted to this something of which we might be aware.
So this awareness is directed from the self to the something in space and time.
What is interesting is the way this awareness of something is modified by the self depending on figuration.

Why do you suppose I have a "need" for a physical explanation? I am asking for surcease from the merry-go-round of equivocation where these words live in current philosophical discourse.

We all have the need for one, the difference being whether we can justify looking for one or whether we blindly accept one. It is only a merry-go-round when we fail to recognize our own contribution to the subject under discussion and talk about it in the third person.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Now that some of the preliminaries are out of the way, there are a few issues to which I would like to return.

I mentioned two possible aspects of awareness in the initial post -- that it seems to involve attention in some sense and intentionality (that awareness is always awareness of something).

Most seem to agree with intentionality being one component. There is some controversy over attention.

Two issues -- one is that I replied earlier that the fact that intentionality and attention being also present in unconscious states was a problem. But, of course, this is not a problem at all. One would not expect the components that comprise consciousness to themselves be consciousness. If they were, they would not be components of the greater process.

The other issue is whether or not we are aware of things that occur unconsciously -- as in, are we really, properly aware of the things in our visual field to which we do not direct attention -- and does this discount attention as a more primitive component to what we call awareness?

I am not sure that we can be said to be aware of anything to which we do not attend. There are certainly streams of info that impinge on our nervous system to which we do not attend, but are we properly speaking 'aware' of this information when we do not pay attention to it? This issue arises with beliefs as well -- can I be said to believe that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States when I am not actively thinking about it? The sentence "He believes Barack Obama is president" is correct grammatically when I say it of someone who is asleep and is obviously not thinking about the issue. I can't say at the time that the person is asleep that he is conscious of the fact that Barack Obama is president of the United States, however or that he is aware of that fact. While asleep (and I want to leave out issues of consciousness and awareness during sleep for purposes of the discussion here) he can't properly be said to be aware of anything.

In the same sense, I don't think it is really proper to speak of us being aware of things to which we do not direct attention. Those bits of sensory data are clearly "there", but we only become aware of them if there is some change in the environment that directs our attention to them.

Or do you think this is wrong-headed?

 

[yy2bggggs]

Bah, maybe I'll fully migrate to this thread for the awareness discussion... but I've added something on this to the other thread.

I think it's arbitrary. I'm not sure the English word "aware" can be said to "rightfully" refer to one form or the other (speaking in terms of "consciously aware" or "subconsciously aware").

But I'd be very careful to suggest that we're "subconsciously aware" of the entire visual field. That's speculative. You don't know that you are.

You would know that you're subconsciously aware if you're actually performing some high level task that reasonably cannot be performed without knowing that some particular thing is there. In the other thread, I mentioned as an example that I changed lanes while daydreaming because I saw a car signaling and moving in front of me; or, as another example, my grabbing a blanket and rolling into it when I'm asleep.

But you're only speculating that you're aware of something in your visual field that you aren't attending to. It might be true that you are, but it may not be.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...

Is it proper to say that we are aware of things in our visual field to which we do not attend? Many say yes. Others, including what I take William James to have meant, disagree. The information certainly seems to be available to us, for us to attend to it when necessary.

And yet what surrounds the thing I am attending to is not blackness or blank. The optic nerve retinal blind spot attests to that. In the middle of our visual field is a black spot, but the brain fills it in unless we make an effort to see it. So the brain is aware of the entire visual field yet isn't focusing attention to every square cm. of it.

...Is there no possible definition of awareness? Is awareness, then, not what is central to consciousness, as is often claimed?

I don't think you can simplify it to just active consciousness, but rather, you need a definition relative to something else.

The brain is so fascinating. But we must be careful not to assume something just because it seems instantly logical. Can a plant be aware? It has no central brain yet plants do react to threats by sending chemical signals to other plants. That would all seem purely reflexive. But it is possible there is another mechanism of awareness besides a brain? It wouldn't resemble our awareness which does occur somewhere within the brain, but can we say definitely no other form of awareness exists? Blind sight as you referred to it suggests awareness goes beyond conscious awareness.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Though if it's a weird enough tree, there can be a pause, then a laugh, then my goodness, that's a tree. Pattern matching is usually very quick - it needs to be, so that we don't all suffer horrible accidents on a daily basis - but when the match isn't obvious the search can take a noticeable amount of time.

Regardless, that isn't relevant to my point. My point is some brain functions are so fast as to occur without conscious awareness that brain activity was necessary to know the new tree was a tree. You are indeed aware it is a tree, but you were unaware the brain sorted through the evidence and its data base to conclude that fact.

Now that I discuss it further, it seems like a side track to this discussion, so never mind.

 

[quarky]

I may as well annoy someone:

Awareness is background radiation.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

And yet what surrounds the thing I am attending to is not blackness or blank. The optic nerve retinal blind spot attests to that. In the middle of our visual field is a black spot, but the brain fills it in unless we make an effort to see it. So the brain is aware of the entire visual field yet isn't focusing attention to every square cm. of it.

There are so many interesting issues at play in this. First, when it comes to the visual blind spot, it is not that the brain "fills it in" so much as there is simply nothing there. People with visual field deficits don't tend to report an area of blackness or blankness (strange thing is, sometimes they do). They simply cannot respond to what they cannot perceive in the absent visual field.

We talk in terms of "filling it in" and that is an easy metaphor, but from my experience things are a bit more complicated.

The same thing can happen with inattention syndromes from parietal damage, as I know you know. Sometimes patients confabulate something else (that's an alien's arm, not mine) in the absence of incoming information, but most of the time they simply do not attend to the left half of space.

The memory version of the same process is Korsakoff's syndrome. We call it Korsakoff's when patients confabulate new memories, but the amnesia is more common -- the absence of input.

I don't think you can simplify it to just active consciousness, but rather, you need a definition relative to something else.

The brain is so fascinating. But we must be careful not to assume something just because it seems instantly logical. Can a plant be aware? It has no central brain yet plants do react to threats by sending chemical signals to other plants. That would all seem purely reflexive. But it is possible there is another mechanism of awareness besides a brain? It wouldn't resemble our awareness which does occur somewhere within the brain, but can we say definitely no other form of awareness exists? Blind sight as you referred to it suggests awareness goes beyond conscious awareness.

Yes, I agree. We are stuck in a pool of confusion without much of a guide. I agree completely that we need to avoid simple definitions and knee jerk reactions. If any group of people can find a way out this morass I think it might be the people here.

The more we delve into 'awareness' the more confused I become.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Now that I discuss it further, it seems like a side track to this discussion, so never mind.

I'm not so sure that it's a side track. It very well might end up as a central issue. Who knows?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

You're right. It was a moment of snarkiness.
I apologize to you and the other participants in this thread, as I did to PixyMisa above.

(Not that this is an excuse, but I was watching an episode of House MD just before making that post. You could say I was influenced by bad company.)

See, that's why I like you so much.

I also think you have a lot to offer this conversation.

 

[yy2bggggs]

First, when it comes to the visual blind spot, it is not that the brain "fills it in" so much as there is simply nothing there.

Are you so sure of this? There actually is a phenomenon where our brain fills in information:
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2008/

Furthermore, our visual cortex has areas corresponding to locations in our visual field, and there are areas there that correlate to the blind spot.

I'm not so convinced that there is no filling in across the blind spot. The only arguments against it that I've seen were philosophical.

 

[quarky]

I don't really see any thermodynamic violation in the possibility of the whole she-bang being self-aware, and we being bit-part receivers and processors.

I'd even weakly argue the point, if I have to.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Are you so sure of this? There actually is a phenomenon where our brain fills in information:
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2008/

Furthermore, our visual cortex has areas corresponding to locations in our visual field, and there are areas there that correlate to the blind spot.

I'm not so convinced that there is no filling in across the blind spot. The only arguments against it that I've seen were philosophical.

Wait, I just gave several examples of ways in which the brain does fill in with "false information" so I am clearly not arguing that there is no filling in of information, only that the process is more complex than it is commonly portrayed. With the blind spot there simply "isn't" -- it's just missing information that is glossed over in the processing of the world. If we "filled in" with something else then we would never be able to find the blind spot. When you examine people to demonstrate it what you see is -- "No, I don't see your finger any longer", not "I see x". We do not confabulate information in all situations.