Chapter 1: The Consciousness of Consciousness

  • Consciousness is “self-evident”, but the more closely we look at it, the harder it gets to define
  • The extensiveness of consciousness
    • Reactivity: responding to stimulus
    • Consciousness: more fuzzy term; self-knowledge and introspective knowledge of mental processes and reactions to the world
    • Our brains to all sorts of information processing below the level of consciousness
    • Consciousness cannot even detect the presence of (much less control) many subconscious processes
    • Consciousness is also probably not a continuous process - brains knit over spatial and temporal gaps to present the illusion that we’re always conscious
    • Too much consciousness can be detrimental - playing piano is impossible if you consciously think about what your fingers are doing
  • Consciousness is not a copy of existence
    • We can recognize facts about the world even when we can’t consciously recall them
    • We can only consciously recall what we’ve consciously stored
    • Conscious recall is not the retrieval of whole images
      • Recall specific details
      • Pattern match to fill in gaps
    • Conscious recall works in narrative form - we recall experiences and then model ourselves to determine what sensations and emotions we would have felt
    • Many people have “third person” memories, even though experiences always take place in the first person
  • Consciousness not necessary for concepts
    • Many animals display the ability to generalize even though they don’t display signs of consciousness
  • Consciousness not necessary for learning
    • Conditioning takes place without any conscious input whatsoever
    • Conscious recognition can hinder conditional learning
    • Even in “conscious” learning, our conscious minds seem to set goals and then let our unconscious figure out how to achieve those goals
  • Consciousness not necessary for thinking
    • The process of comparing and rendering judgement is largely carried out by the unconscious
    • Thinking is an automatic process where the conscious mind sets up a “struction” and the unconscious carries it out
    • struction: The target or constraint for the unconscious mind’s search or association process
  • Consciousness not necessary for reason
    • Most of the “work” in reasoning appears to be carried out by the unconscious mind
    • Conscious mind sets up an elaborate struction, lets unconscious mind work on it, results come back as a “flash of insight”
  • The Location of Consciousness
    • We have a notion of a specific mind space in which conscious thought takes place, but no such physical space exists
  • Is consciousness even necessary?
    • Not needed for the performance of skills
    • Not necessary for learning
    • Not necessary for reasoning
    • No location save an imaginary one
    • So does it even exist? Or is it an illusion?
    • Is it possible to have a group of people who behave exactly the same way that we do, but are not conscious?

Chapter 2: Consciousness

  • Metaphor and language
    • Metaphor: The use of a term for one thing to describe another thing
    • Two terms in a metaphor:
      • Metaphrand: thing being described
      • Metaphier: the thing or relationship being used to describe
    • Metaphors consist of a known metaphier working on an unknown metaphrand
    • Metaphors allow us to bootstrap abstract descriptions by generalizing from concrete phenomena and objects that we observe in the world
  • Understanding as metaphor
    • When we seek to understand something, we’re trying to find a model that accurately describes that thing
    • That model is a metaphor for the thing it’s trying to describe
    • We use model and theory interchangeably, but we should not
      • A model is a particular simplified representation of the world
      • A theory is the mathematical relationship that asserts that the world behaves as the model predicts
      • Theories can be proven correct or incorrect, not models
      • Theories are metaphors where the data is the metaphrand and the model is the metaphier
    • If understanding a phenomenon means coming up with a metaphor for it, we will have trouble understanding consciousness – difficult to find anything to compare immediate experiences to
    • Analog:
      • Specific kind of model
      • Generated by thing that it’s an analog of
      • Descriptive, rather than predictive
      • Example: a map is an analog of a particular piece of territory
  • The metaphor language of mind
    • Subjective consciousness is an analog of the real world
    • Build up a vocabulary whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the real world
    • We describe the state of mind-space with the same visual and spatial terms we use to describe physical spaces
    • So, we’re using reality as a metaphier, but what is the metaphrand?
  • Paraphiers and paraphrands
    • Paraphier: associations or connotations of the metaphier
    • Paraphrand: associations or connotations of the metaphrand
    • In many metaphors, similarities between paraphiers and paraphrands are more important than similarities between metaphiers and metaphrands
    • Consciousness is the metaphrand that is generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions
    • We use consciousness as a metaphier to compare the present state of the world to world-states we’ve encountered in the past
  • The features of consciousness:
    1. Spatialization
      • We grant features spatial separation and characteristics, even when they are completely abstract concepts
      • Time, for example, is not spatial, but we treat it as if it was (e.g. timelines, clocks)
    2. Excerption
      • We observe parts and instinctively combine those observations to form a model of the whole
      • When we recall, we don’t recall holistically – rather, we recall excerpts and combine them to generate an abstract model of our experience
    3. The analog ‘I’
      • We have a metaphor of ourselves that we can use to explore the consequences of particular actions before we take those actions
    4. The metaphor ‘me’
    5. Narratization
      • Our minds take our past experiences and turn them into a narrative
      • We choose future experiences that are congruent with that narrative
      • We narratize everything that we perceive, not just ourselves
    6. Conciliation
      • We edit excerpts and images to make them compatible with one another
      • Example: When asked to imagine a tower and a meadow, one imagines the tower rising from the meadow
  • Conclusion
    • Consciousness is a process rather than an object or location
    • Operates by way of analogy
      • Constructs an analog space that reflects the real world
      • Constructs an ‘analog I’ to explor that space that reflects yourself
    • Excerpts relevant memories and uses them to construct a narrative
    • Conciliates and generates meaning from excerpts
    • If consciousness is dependent on language, then it must have arisen after language