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Ten Empirically Testable Properties of Consciousness

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Ten Empirically Testable Properties of Consciousness Ten Empirically Testable Properties of Consciousness Christopher W. Tyler, Ph.D., D.Sc. [email protected] City University of London Northampton Square London EC1, U.K. Abstract Many thinkers have provided analyses of the properties of consciousness, though not generally in the context of framing the putative properties in terms of their specific testability. To avoid the criticisms of untestability leveled against the 19th century phenomenologists, the goal of the present overview is to identify the specific properties of consciousness that provide the foothold of empirical testability in physiological terms. Of course, the properties of consciousness are, of their nature, subjective, but they may gain a measure of objectivity by consensus agreement on their validity. After proposing a working definition of consciousness and related terms, a representative range of proposals as to its properties is reviewed and elaborated into a larger set of testable properties of consciousness. Potential procedures for the specific implementation of relevant tests are then delineated. Keywords Consciousness; brain; mind; neural substrate; hard problem; testability; working memory Quote from Sadia Sadia: Aesthetic experience can convert the experience of alienation into an experience of transcendent epiphany. Robert Fludd (1619) ‘The triple essence of the visual process.” from De Triplici Animae in Corpore Visione. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RobertFuddBewusstsein17Jh.png. This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.) 1. Consciousness The first goal is to attempt a working definition of what is meant by the term “consciousness”. This term is intended to refer to the domain of human thought, or mental operations incorporating knowledge and experience. As such, the terminology used to specify this overall domain can be distinguished into various subdivisions. In this framework, perhaps first articulated by Leibniz, consciousness (or ‘apperception’) is conceived as the domain of operation of thinking, termed ‘working memory’, to be distinguished from simple awareness (or ‘perception’), which is ‘the internal state of … representing external things’ Leibniz (1714, p. 208) (now known as qualia) without reaching the level of operational intentionality implied in consciousness. Thus, awareness would be the most basic form of consciousness that humans experience. In Gibsonian terms, elaborated consciousness is a state of basic awareness in combination with ‘affordances’ of what will or may happen under an available set of operations, while simple awareness is the primary registration of sense data prior to the assignation of the affordances. This distinction raises the possibility of further distinctions, so to clarify the domain of enquiry we may provide a diagram of their basic relationships in a hierarchical table in which basic awareness is symbolized by A* and elaborated consciousness by C* (where the * represents the quality of being an experiential process, as opposed to a non-experiential physical process). Properties ascribed to each of the four states are those of being experiential (as opposed to operating below the level of awareness) Table of Forms of Consciousness A* C* Self-A* Self-C* Experiential Ö Ö Ö Ö Representational Ö Ö Operational Ö Ö Reflexive Ö Ö Each of these terms has been used in multiple different ways in the literature, including as synonyms for each other, but it seems illogical to compress them in such a manner when there is this set of distinctions that need to be made. Thus, the representational property (or what is confusingly termed “intentional” in the philosophical literature) is the sense that the experienced qualia derive from an external object. There are schools of philosophy that consider all qualia to have this property (even in dreams), but one simply has to close one’s eyes to realize that this is not the case. Under the darkness of the lids, we experience all kinds of flowing shapes and colors that are clearly internal to our visual processes rather than deriving from external objects. The third property is that of operationality, the will (or ‘conation’), here treated as attention - the dynamic, operational, self-guiding nature of consciousness captured by the verb ‘think’ in Descartes’ famous aphorism. In this way, thinking is a complex operational process involving the manipulation of conscious entities and the relationships among them. Although much of this thinking may be accompanied by the qualia of visual and auditory imagery, the qualia do not constitute the logic of the stream of thought per se. They may do so in certain states such as reverie, but the processes of asking questions and solving the problems that occupy much of operational thought processes have a logical, inferential flow that constitute an abstract aspect of consciousness that does not constitute the qualia- specific characterization of basic awareness. The fourth level in Table I is that of reflexivity, which is whether the state incorporates a representation of the self in its experience or operations, as further delineated in the following. This table is by no means exhaustive of all the consciousness terms that have been mooted, but is intended to define the usage of the most common terms for the purpose of the present paper. On this basis, operational consciousness per se is to be distinguished from self-consciousness, which involves not just a functioning process, but one in which the self is incorporated as a component of the process. The corresponding term for non-intentional awareness is self-awareness, which may thus be distinguished as the awareness of the self as a component of the array of qualia, without operational manipulations being involved. An example would be the experience of oneself as a runner when long-distance running (as opposed to the experience of the environment passing as one progresses forward, which would be non-self-awareness). Thus, according to this scheme both awareness and consciousness are experiential, involving qualia of some kind, but awareness is the basic state while consciousness is the intentional process of operating on mental entities. If the qualia involve some further mental representation of the self that is performing the operations, they are the ‘self-’ variety of the respective experiences. In this sense, self- awareness and self-consciousness are reflexive (or reflective), involving a double representation of both the object of the simple awareness or operational consciousness and an awareness of that each process is taking place. The distinction between the two is that self-awareness is defined here as the process of having a perceptual viewpoint or perspective of the self that is the receiver of the awareness, and of the potential effects of changing this viewpoint. Thus, if I am looking at a red ball, I am aware that if I look away, or attend elsewhere, I will become aware of something else, and that ‘I’ am the agent of that decision. These are simple operation properties of the essential fact that the awareness does not simply exist, but is a component of an operational receiver or operator that has agency with respect to that awareness. The simple self-representational aspect of self-awareness may be contrasted with the complex self involved in self-consciousness, which is a far more elaborated process. here the self is a structured entity constituted of the memories, emotions, aspirations and conceptualizations of the individual involved. Thus, just as consciousness involves the manipulative operations of working memory and the cognitive interpretations in terms of meaning of each configuration of sensations to the individual, self-consciousness brings to bear these interpretative aspects of the perceptions in relation to the structured array of information that constitute the historical self. Not just “what does it mean?”, but “what does it mean to me?”. This flickering red quale means fire in general, but to me it means I am about to lose my house and life’s work stored in it. This second-level ‘self’ representation itself seems to be of the simple variety, as it is difficult to conceive of ‘working memory’ types of operations taking place within either the awareness or consciousness levels of mental experiences as the objects of such operations. The ‘I’ that is the agent of the attentional focus experiences itself as a simple spotlight, with the complexity in what it focuses on, not in itself. Thus the reflexivity of either awareness or consciousness is considered to be at the simple level of secondary awareness. 2. The Neural Substrate of Consciousness The preceding analysis does not address the origin of the experiential quality of consciousness, which has been dubbed the “Hard Problem” of conscious experience (Chalmers, 1997). In this sense consciousness may be considered as a process that is emergent from brain activity. As is made clear by Tyler (2015), however, emergence is a property of many levels of physical reality, whereas consciousness is unique in being the form that we, as humans, use as mode of thinking (i.e., the process that generates the form of behavior that produces the present document, for example). What is it that makes this particular emergent process unique? It is not simply the complexity of its structure. The broiling infernos of the interactive processes that constitute the activity of the sun, for example, are enormously complex and highly structured, but we do not consider them to be conscious. What makes consciousness unique is that it is the only process that we know from the internal perspective of what it is like to be that process (Tyler, 2015). It is this internal perspective that entails Chalmers’ hard dualism, since we cannot take the internal perspective of anything but our own brain processes. In principle, one could imagine that all neural activity gave rise to consciousness, so that it was not a special emergent property of some subset of neural activity but a general property of neural activity per se.
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