Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Mercutio]

What am I gonna say to this?

It's like if we're discussing walking, and someone mentions the physics of the foot pushing off from the ground, and someone chimes in with "My feet don't touch the ground -- they hover a couple inches above it".

What can you do but say "Well, lucky you" and move on?

It might be like that. It very well might, and I would be the one mistaken. It may also be like a former colleague of mine who, completely seriously, discussed the purple hue of a woman's aura, indicating undiagnosed problems with her liver. She appeared every bit as certain as you do.

I was sincere in asking if you had some source you were referring to; I assumed that you were speaking of something more than just your personal experience, when making such blanket statements of fact. Around here, of course, to be asked for evidence should not come as any surprise.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

What am I gonna say to this?

It's like if we're discussing walking, and someone mentions the physics of the foot pushing off from the ground, and someone chimes in with "My feet don't touch the ground -- they hover a couple inches above it".

What can you do but say "Well, lucky you" and move on?

Is it possible that we experience it behind our eyes because we learn socially that the brain is the seat of thought, emotion, etc.?

I could easily imagine feeling it in my liver as an Elizabethan or in my heart. I fear it may be more projection than anything else.

Most of the time I have to say that I don't have an experience of a place in which any of it occurs I'm afraid.

When I think about a problem for a long time I furrow my brow and experience muscular tension there. Is that what you mean?

 

[blobru]

...The examination of awareness -- and I am not convinced that I haven't left something important out -- was actually of something that I think is unconscious, or subconscious. So, yes, Skeptigirl I do think that we can be aware of things of which we are not conscious. In fact, I think the lowest level of -- or simple -- awareness is a subconscious process. My favorite example is of driving on the freeway while your mind is otherwise engaged -- you continue to attend to the road and the process necessary to keep you on the road, but you do it automatically. Most of perception fits this mold -- it is done automatically. But for percepts to have any meaning they must be linked in some way to previous memories, both declarative and emotional, probably with some bits of motivation thrown in.

The example of having a word "on the tip of your tongue" might be instructive here. You're aware of aspects of the word, the semantic net around the word, the "context", without being aware of its hub, the word itself. Yet you are aware that you're unaware, of the deficit in your "understanding". It seems to me the flipside of the driving phenomenon, where you're unaware that you're aware. Anyway, maybe a sidetrack; still interesting, though.

So, in my view, the four typical aspects of awareness -- attention, intentionality, perception, and understanding -- are subconscious processes. But they are of the type that can become conscious.

So, roughly: attention (the full context of what I'm doing); intentionality (the part of the context I'm trying to do something with); perception (changes in the environment...); understanding (...related to changes in context)? -- just to break it down into simpler terms (tho' "context", as in background and reason, isn't simple), which are, hopefully, easier to agree on.

So, what is consciousness? I think, simply speaking, that one part of it is just awareness of awareness. Largely this is an attentional process -- attention to the processes that are carried out subconsciously -- but also including the other components such as understanding within a 'larger theater'. This is where the 40 Hz potentials and the ideas behind the global workspace hypothesis, which probably represents reverberant loops involving parietal (directed attention), frontal (working memory amongst many other things including attentional states), hippocampal (recreations of declarative memory), and limbic systems so that 'we' act as aware of our awareness and can therefore alter behavior -- which is the whole point of consciousness anyway.

I think "awareness of awareness" might be getting at it -- aware of a mobile locus of attention as a context, not as a concept (which would be "self"-consciousness). I'm trying to sort your description out into my pop philosophical approximation of the beast: a mediation between immediate gut feelings, chronic sense input, postponed rational understanding, and remembered experience: the 4 r's -- reflex, recognition, reason, and recall: two processing systems (reflex and reason) for two sorts of information (recognition and recall). Likely not the best division, but towards an understanding of how the pieces work together...

Two of the big issues become -- what exactly is 'feeling', 'emotion', 'motivation'? And does this adequately explain semantic content?

Back to the paramecium (actually, I don't know much about paramecia; let's posit a simple blob of protoplasm that is photophilic: 'likes' light and seeks it out as a source of energy): I also wonder in what sense it is "aware", if at all. There is a difference between light and dark, and it recognizes and responds to it at some level. Is its organic response just the automatic sum and sequence of its physical parts being stimulated by changes in light and each other, or is there an 'affect' there? Is the blob 'feeling': aaaaaaaaa (normal state, in the light), then AAAAAAAA (distressed state, loss of light)? Maybe more: aaaaa (increasing energy from light); aaaaaa (rest state, adequate energy); AAAAAA (loss of light, loss of energy); AAAAAA (almost out of energy). Is the 'feeling' coming from the movement associated with the blob's relation to the light: increasing movement with increasing energy; passive movement with adequate energy; active searching movement with decreasing energy; frantic searching with near depletion (sort of "James-Lange" applied to proto-blobs)? What is the difference between the blob's reaction to light and say a glob of phosphorescent chemicals (or even an electron in an atomic orbital)? They absorb light and change in response; however, their 'response' isn't about maximizing their energy level, which it is with our energy-seeking blob. We don't think of inanimate things as feeling; at some level we ascribe it to animate things. At what level does bodily agitation produce an 'affect'? How, and even why -- maybe the problem of consciousness reduces to the problem of feeling which reduces to the difference between inanimate and animate systems -- literally a matter of life and death?

I obviously haven't a frikkin' clue... just uncluttering, tossing junk out for thought, or not.

 

[Jeff Corey]

So... you're telling me that you don't have a sense of your own center of awareness that's above your feet but not, say, ten meters above your head?

I'm with Merc on this. I have a sense of where my body is, and it isn't ten meters above my head. Center of awareness is a meaningless phrase to me, wherever "me" is.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

The example of having a word "on the tip of your tongue" might be instructive here. You're aware of aspects of the word, the semantic net around the word, the "context", without being aware of its hub, the word itself. Yet you are aware that you're unaware, of the deficit in your "understanding". It seems to me the flipside of the driving phenomenon, where you're unaware that you're aware. Anyway, maybe a sidetrack; still interesting, though.

Oooh, that's good. I had forgotten that aspect of it. Yes, clearly important; I can't claim to know what it means either but it certainly looks like being aware of the semantic content without being aware of the declarative memory.

I think "awareness of awareness" might be getting at it -- aware of a mobile locus of attention as a context, not as a concept (which would be "self"-consciousness). I'm trying to sort your description out into my pop philosophical approximation of the beast: a mediation between immediate gut feelings, chronic sense input, postponed rational understanding, and remembered experience: the 4 r's -- reflex, recognition, reason, and recall: two processing systems (reflex and reason) for two sorts of information (recognition and recall). Likely not the best division, but towards an understanding of how the pieces work together...

Yes, yes that is an important issue. I don't want the whole idea of awareness of awareness to be viewed as self-awareness. It is a form of self-reflective information processing, as Pixy would have it, but it is not self-awareness. Self-awareness is a special category of this sense of consciousness.

And, yes, that is another way of putting the beast in your own terms.

Back to the paramecium (actually, I don't know much about paramecia; let's posit a simple blob of protoplasm that is photophilic: 'likes' light and seeks it out as a source of energy): I also wonder in what sense it is "aware", if at all. There is a difference between light and dark, and it recognizes and responds to it at some level. Is its organic response just the automatic sum and sequence of its physical parts being stimulated by changes in light and each other, or is there an 'affect' there? Is the blob 'feeling': aaaaaaaaa (normal state, in the light), then AAAAAAAA (distressed state, loss of light)? Maybe more: aaaaa (increasing energy from light); aaaaaa (rest state, adequate energy); AAAAAA (loss of light, loss of energy); AAAAAA (almost out of energy). Is the 'feeling' coming from the movement associated with the blob's relation to the light: increasing movement with increasing energy; passive movement with adequate energy; active searching movement with decreasing energy; frantic searching with near depletion (sort of "James-Lange" applied to proto-blobs)? What is the difference between the blob's reaction to light and say a glob of phosphorescent chemicals (or even an electron in an atomic orbital)? They absorb light and change in response; however, their 'response' isn't about maximizing their energy level, which it is with our energy-seeking blob. We don't think of inanimate things as feeling; at some level we ascribe it to animate things. At what level does bodily agitation produce an 'affect'? How, and even why -- maybe the problem of consciousness reduces to the problem of feeling which reduces to the difference between inanimate and animate systems -- literally a matter of life and death?

I obviously haven't a frikkin' clue... just uncluttering, tossing junk out for thought, or not.

Very possibly, yes. One of the problems is that we don't have a very good word for what paramecia do, so we use words like "they are aware of the light" or the concentration gradient, or whatever. Very probably this is just anthropomorphisizing, but I'm not sure where to draw the line. Paramecia clearly seem to have some form of attention, intentionality and perception. But they do not have behavioral tendencies through which they sift; they have receptors that respond in an all-or-none fashion (at least as far as I know). So they do not have feeling. Whatever 'awareness' they have, it is not the same as what we have.

I think the thing that riles so many feathers when anyone says that paramecia or automobiles are conscious is because they lack the network of associations -- feeling and motivation -- that create semantic content. We all know that cars don't know what they are doing; and we all know at some level that consciousness and awareness has to include "knowing what we are doing" to use Geoff's phrase. The upshot of Searle's objection in the Chinese Room argument is that the room does not include any semantic content, but we do. He does not argue that computers can't do this, only that simple, purely cognitive (and perhaps I misuse this word), syntactical systems cannot.

It's also possible that I have the whole idea of semantics wrong.

 

[Jeff Corey]

As to emotion and feeling..............

Magda Arnold -- and this is all extension from William James, through Damasio and Schachter -- that emotion is the product of unconscious evaluation of a situation as potentially harmful or beneficial (I think Searle has argued that emotions are just agitated states of desire, which isn't very descriptive). She feels that 'feelings' are behavioral tendencies -- conscious reflections of an unconscious appraisal.

I think I might stretch this a bit in a slightly different direction because I think that some of the things we might label 'feelings', at least if they are 'behavioral tendencies', are unconscious.

But let me back up a bit. Our nervous system consists of two basic 'arms' -- sensory and motor. When we speak of things like emotion and feeling we have a tendency to view them as parts of perception, I think, in part because we also use the word 'feeling' to refer to somatosensation. I think this view is wrong; I have recently begun to view emotion and 'feeling' as part of our motor response to perception.

It might be wrong to use the word 'feeling' in so many different ways, but here is the way I try to piece some of this together. I'm gong to leave attention and intentionality on the side.

When we perceive something we do so under some aspect of ongoing mood, ongoing pleasure and pain, ongoing motivation. But all of those percepts also bring forth earlier memories which also include mood/emotion/feeling, pleasure and pain, motivational state.

All that other 'stuff' is 'tagged' to the percept and give it a 'feeling' and give it a 'value' -- which is a large part of what we seem to mean by 'meaning'. But what is this 'feeling'? I think it is actually not a perception perse but a behavioral tendency (not a motor action but only a tendency toward some action) attached to the perception. I like blue means something along the lines of I want to experience that again. That is essentially what pleasure is all about.

If you think about it, the point behind all our perceptions and all our feelings is to figure out how to navigate a complex environment. We are able to do what we do, I think in large part, because we do not have set programs for action -- like an insect -- but only slight behavioral pushes in particular directions. If this is correct -- that we are set up to experience 'behavioral pushes' -- then those behavioral pushes have to show up somehow. For them to affect our behavior they actually have to push us to some degree in a particular direction. So, they do. The way they 'do it' is what we call 'emotion' and 'feeling'. I happen to think 'feeling' is just a less dramatic push than the things we call 'emotion'. I think both originally occur subconsciously, but both are eventually available to conscious reflection.

So, what is conscious reflection? -- those same processes at a meta-level; awareness of awareness. When we become aware of awareness it is easier to see 'feeling' as part of the conscious reflection on subconscious processes -- it is a way for 'us' to sift through the various behavioral pushes in a complex situation to decide on a course of action (and, yes, I am aware that I have fallen back into dualistic language). We don't, after all, decide -- oops, time to become conscious again in order to decide on some course of action -- but rather consciousness seems to 'pop up' when unconscious processing 'deems it necessary'.

If we were to view 'feeling' as unconscious behavioral pushes in a particular direction I think it might be easier to see a way that we could program a computer to perform that sort of task (Data's emotion chip). That computer would become unpredictable, and it would probably promptly argue that it had free will; but I don't see why any of that is not computable, not IP.

At this point someone will object -- but sometimes I just want to feel; it isn't a behavioral push since I don't want to do anything but experience. Which misses the point entirely -- that is, in itself, a behavioral response, if you think about it. But the real objection to that is -- you are describing a meta-reflection on emotion and feeling that is bounded by your desire not to act but to feel. But the feeling itself -- the original unconscious processing is a behavioral tendency as far as I can tell.

ETA:

Sorry, left out motivational states, which I think are analogous to emotion -- strong behavioral pushes -- but from internal rather than external concerns. Motivational states -- the ones we refer to most often -- seem to concern things like hunger, thirst, sex, internal desires (or person to world fit; and this includes more complex constructs) while emotions seem to depend on external information that is perceived and reacted to.

As to the spectrum of the intensity -- if this helps to see emotion, motivation, feeling as behavioral pushes -- think of the most intense 'emotion' we experience: the flight or fight reaction. Fight and flight are clear motor behaviors, the emotion being a very strong push toward those motor behaviors (and there is obviously cognitive processing involved in the process).

This is a very poetic nineteenth century description that doesn't help me understand what you're getting at.
And you are clearly wrong about some of it. Motivational states are not only from internal concerns. Hunger results from the external cause of not having food. Fear can result from the external cause of being hurt.

 

[AlBell]

I doubt many did, but they would certainly have been looking for it.

Many? Evidence?

Thank you.

Um... since you can't share what it feels like, how do you know that it is the same thing Piggy was talking about? Do you know what it feels like to him?

I don't, and no.

Nor do I suspect a FMRI will be of assistance. Behavior? No to that either.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

This is a very poetic nineteenth century description that doesn't help me understand what you're getting at.
And you are clearly wrong about some of it. Motivational states are not only from internal concerns. Hunger results from the external cause of not having food. Fear can result from the external cause of being hurt.

True about the motivational states and emotions -- I was merely trying to draw a distinction that probably isn't warranted.

As to the rest, we don't have very good words to describe feelings. That is ultimately what I hoped this thread would help do -- arrive at a better vocabulary. Clearly, discussion of 'behavioral tendency' is vague beyond belief. I hope you get some sense of it, though.

Don't you guys have a literature discussing what emotions and feelings are? I was hoping that you and Merc might happen along to help better define these terms.

 

[AlBell]

What am I gonna say to this?

It's like if we're discussing walking, and someone mentions the physics of the foot pushing off from the ground, and someone chimes in with "My feet don't touch the ground -- they hover a couple inches above it".

What can you do but say "Well, lucky you" and move on?

Is it possible that we experience it behind our eyes because we learn socially that the brain is the seat of thought, emotion, etc.?

Anything I suppose is possible. You also contend you have no locus for awareness of awareness?

I could easily imagine feeling it in my liver as an Elizabethan or in my heart. I fear it may be more projection than anything else.

Interesting. Neither my liver nor heart seem to have any part of it.

Most of the time I have to say that I don't have an experience of a place in which any of it occurs I'm afraid.

Ok. Another p-zombie declares.

When I think about a problem for a long time I furrow my brow and experience muscular tension there. Is that what you mean?

Can't speak for Piggy, but for me. No.

In fact, lol.

 

[Mercutio]

Many? Evidence?

The majority of the science of psychology prior to Watson. The methodology was introspection (both the structuralists and functionalists), both the beginnings in Germany and America (Wundt and James, respectively). They were looking at a science of conscious thought, and published hundreds if not thousands of articles trying to analyze consciousness. Yes, many, and the evidence fills entire shelves of your local university library, assuming it is a half-decent research library.

I don't, and no.

Thank you.

So... so far we have two data points, and no way of knowing if they refer to the same phenomenon.

Nor do I suspect a FMRI will be of assistance. Behavior? No to that either.

Faith, then.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Anything I suppose is possible. You also contend you have no locus for awareness of awareness?


Interesting. Neither my liver nor heart seem to have any part of it.


Ok. Another p-zombie declares.


Can't speak for Piggy, but for me. No.

In fact, lol.

Um, what? The locus for various aspects of human thought and emotion has clearly differed through the ages with some societies thinking that the brain had nothing to do at all. Those societies clearly didn't localize their sense of awareness to behind their eyes. Think of the Egyptians and certainly of the Elizabethans who localized different mental activities (not awareness, though) to the liver.

How can you possibly know that this is not all a social construction?

And when I mentioned that I did not experience awareness in any particular locale it is because unless I focus on the thought of localizing it there is no reason when I am aware that I should localize it at all.

When you are focusing your awareness on learning a new task do you mean to tell me that you are aware that your awareness is localized behind your eyes? When I'm doing something that requires focused attention I'm generally focused on the task at hand. There is no sense of it occurring anywhere in particular -- that only seems to occur on further reflection.

But if you want to toss around what you might perceive as insults, be my guest. It's your reputation after all, if that's how you want others to think of you.

 

[Piggy]

Is it possible that we experience it behind our eyes because we learn socially that the brain is the seat of thought, emotion, etc.?

In a word, no.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that you seriously propose such a notion.

 

[Mercutio]

Anything I suppose is possible. You also contend you have no locus for awareness of awareness?

Interesting. Neither my liver nor heart seem to have any part of it.

There was a past thread here where someone mentioned the liver in this manner. A French person, I think, and claimed that it was just what everyone knew.

Ok. Another p-zombie declares.

You have already said that you don't know if yours is the same as Piggy's. Even supposing his is consciousness, the only reason you have to suppose that yours is... is... ? what?

Can't speak for Piggy, but for me. No.

Hmm... just how is it that you learned that what you claim to sense is "sense of awareness" and not something else? Just curious.

In fact, lol.

Hey, he tried to describe it. More than you have.

 

[Mercutio]

In a word, no.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that you seriously propose such a notion.

How, then, did you learn to label this feeling? I assume no one was able to point it out to you, nor point out the equivalent sense in him/herself. How, exactly, did you figure out that this was "sense of awareness" and not what Ichy is suggesting?

 

[Piggy]

How, then, did you learn to label this feeling? I assume no one was able to point it out to you, nor point out the equivalent sense in him/herself. How, exactly, did you figure out that this was "sense of awareness" and not what Ichy is suggesting?

The linguistic question of how we learn to associate words with things, concepts, and experiences is utterly irrelevant.

And frankly, it gets very tiresome to have you drag that out at every turn like a camera at a family reunion.

 

[Mercutio]

The linguistic question of how we learn to associate words with things, concepts, and experiences is utterly irrelevant.

Clearly, I disagree. You and AlBell clearly have no shared experience (by definition!) you could possibly have associated with this term you both use. I think it is fair to ask why you think it must be the same thing.

And frankly, it gets very tiresome to have you drag that out at every turn like a camera at a family reunion.

So just answer once, and be done with it. If you can.

 

[Piggy]

So just answer once, and be done with it. If you can.

No, Mercutio. I will not chase irrelevencies. Not even for you.

 

[Mercutio]

No, Mercutio. I will not chase irrelevencies. Not even for you.

Too bad; I would have liked to know how you knew. Sorry it is irrelevant for you. I assure you, it is not for me.

eta: Any chance you could expand on precisely why it is irrelevant?

 

[Jeff Corey]

Um, what? The locus for various aspects of human thought and emotion has clearly differed through the ages with some societies thinking that the brain had nothing to do at all. Those societies clearly didn't localize their sense of awareness to behind their eyes. Think of the Egyptians and certainly of the Elizabethans who localized different mental activities (not awareness, though) to the liver.

How can you possibly know that this is not all a social construction?

And when I mentioned that I did not experience awareness in any particular locale it is because unless I focus on the thought of localizing it there is no reason when I am aware that I should localize it at all.

When you are focusing your awareness on learning a new task do you mean to tell me that you are aware that your awareness is localized behind your eyes? When I'm doing something that requires focused attention I'm generally focused on the task at hand. There is no sense of it occurring anywhere in particular -- that only seems to occur on further reflection.
...

That's my experience, too. I'm localized wherever I'm sensing, sort of. This thing of "behind the eyes" seems too simplistic to me. Like DesCartes and the pituitary gland.

 

[Hokulele]

I wonder why most people point to their chest when they are referring to themselves. Wouldn't AlBell's and Piggy's claim suggest that it would be more natural to point between the eyes?