Many philosophers are still in disagreement of whether the concept of attention is a real thing or not. The very familiarity of the concept of attention can make it hard to think about clearly, but perhaps we should start with how it feels. The metaphor of the ‘spotlight of attention’ comes easily to mind because paying attention feels this way – like directing a light on some things and not others. Perhaps it feels as though attention makes things or thoughts brighter, more prominent, or more focused.
Attention feels like something extra. Hamilton, for instance, described it as, ‘Attention is like concentrated consciousness.’ It feels like the intensity of things increase when you focus attention on them.
And while we shouldn’t thing of attention’s metaphors – such as the spotlight – as something real, experiments have found that the metaphor of ‘lighting up’ has an almost realistic equivalent: a real attentional ‘spotlighting’ effect in visual perception. Participants kept their eyes fixated on the fovea, where spatial resolution is highest, and were shown textures in the periphery, where it is much lower. When they attended to the textures, they could more easily distinguish them. It was as though their spatial resolution had improved. Crucially, in tasks where enhanced resolution actually makes the task harder, the same effect was found for focused attention too: participants’ performance got worse. Later experiments found that the same effect for brightness, contrast, and colour saturation, but not for differences in hue. It seems that, as in James’s notion of focalisation and concentration, attention actually increases the spatial resolution of what we see. It may also change visual and other sensory experience in different ways depending on context, so it seems that attention can qualitatively shape the kinds of conscious experiences we have – even if, as James also pointed out, we know how to adjust for these effects so we are not misled into thinking the light actually just got brighter.
The image of the spotlight of attention is well known, but perhaps, looking at your own experience, there might be a couple of different metaphors applicable too. This is one way for what we call ‘first-person practice’ to relate to consciousness and one reason why we ask you to devote time and energy to the ‘exercises’ suggested in each chapter: we cannot hope to understand consciousness in general unless we are familiar with our own personal version of it. And the idea of ‘paying careful attention to experience’ implies that attention itself is at the heart of all such practice. We will begin with a basic element of our everyday experience of attention, the directing of attention, and ask what basic facts we can establish about it.
Imagine you are sitting somewhere, and you turn to face a noise. What has happened? If someone asked you, you might say, ‘I heard the sound so I turned to look.’ Then, the causal sequence seems to be: 1) consciously hear sound; 2) turn round to look. It feels as though our conscious perception of the noise, possibly followed by a conscious decision to pay attention, is what caused us to turn around and pay attention. Is this right? Does conscious perception or conscious will cause attention to be directed to a specific place? If it does not always do so, can it ever do so?
We know that conscious effort and perception are not always required. Attention can be involuntarily grabbed or intentionally directed, and these processes each have different brain systems to them. Attention is drawn involuntarily when we react quickly to something like a loud noise, or our name being called, or an email notification on our phone, and only realise afterwards that we have done so. Such involuntary attention depends on the ventral attention system, which includes alerting and vigilance systems and is found mainly in the right hemisphere in frontal, parietal, and temporal areas. By contrast, when we deliberately pay attention to someone speaking, or try to ignore an annoying noise to concentrate on reading our book, this uses the dorsal attention system.
An example of involuntary attention is the ‘bottom-up’ control of eye movements (if you don’t remember the difference between bottom-up and top-down, look it up). Our eyes constantly jump around from one fixation point to another. These movements are called saccades and happen several times a second, whether we are aware of them or not. We can also control saccadic eye movements voluntarily. If a bright, salient, or moving object is detected in the periphery, the eyes quickly turn to bring that part of the visual world onto the fovea. This must be done very fast to be useful to a moving, acting animal and, not surprisingly, much of the control is coordinated by parts of the dorsal visual stream, in particular the posterior parietal cortex. In what is called ‘smooth pursuit’, the eyes can track a moving object, keeping its image on roughly the same part of the fovea. This kind of eye movement is hard to make without an actual moving target and is affected by drug use and by conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and post-traumatic stress. It can continue without conscious awareness, as was shown in experiments with a man who was cortically blind. He could not consciously see movement at all, and when surrounded with a large moving stripe display he denied having any visual experience of motion. Yet his eyes behaved relatively normally in tracking the moving stripes, making slow pursuit movements followed by rapid flicks to catch up. This showed that although movement may be necessary for accurate pursuit, awareness of this movement is not.
Directing the eyes towards a particular object is not equivalent to paying attention to it though. First of all, it is perfectly possible to be blind to something we are looking right at, just because we are not attending to it, such as the inattentional blindness of chapter 3. Other kinds of blindness are an integral part of paying attention too. Attention always has costs as well as benefits. Not only does directing attention to one thing mean you have to neglect another, but there may be a short ‘attentional blink’ afterwards. For example, in an experiment, a series of letters are rapidly flashed and participants asked to look for a given target letter. If they successfully detect one, then they are less likely to detect another shown within 200–500 msec after the first, as though their capacity to attend ‘blinked’ for a moment, even though they were looking right at the relevant stimulus.
Generally speaking, as Helmholtz long ago demonstrated, it is perfectly possible to look directly at one object or place, and pay attention somewhere else, a skill now called ‘covert attention scanning’, as opposed to overt scanning, in which you pay attention where you’re looking. You can try this now by keeping your eyes on the page and attending to a location off to one side.
So as mentioned before, attention can be involuntarily grabbed as well as deliberately directed, and that attention and gaze sometimes operate together and sometimes not. But this does not necessarily tell us anything about consciousness. We might feel we have consciously chosen where to place our attention without consciousness actually playing a causal role – for example, the feeling of acting consciously might be a by-product or a later effect of the brain processes that selectively direct attention.
In the nineteenth century, Helmholtz, Hering, and Wundt were among the physiologists and psychologists who experimented with attention. In the 1950s, many experiments were performed with a method called dichotic listening, in which two different streams of sound are played to each ear. Remarkable on this is that, with people attentively listening, most didn’t even notice the messages have swapped ear. This raised the question of whether selection operated early on or after much processing had already taken place, leading to the early versus late selection debate which has never really been resolved – although more recently, as we will see in a moment, it has been sidestepped by the concept of perceptual load.
For a long time most theories treated attention as some sort of bottleneck, with preconscious sensory filters needed to decide what should be let through to the deeper stages of processing .This makes sense because clearly the brain has a limited capacity for detailed processing, and is a massively parallel system which produces serial outputs, such as speech and sequential actions. So somehow many parallel processes have to be brought together, or selected, to ensure that a sensible serial output occurs. The main problem with such theories was that to cope with the evidence, the proposed filters became more and more complicated, until the pre-attentive processing began to look as complex as the deeper processing to which it was supposed to give access.
The spotlight of attention was then seen as less like a narrow beam or single bottleneck and more like the outcome of many mechanisms by which the nervous system organises its resources, giving more to some items than others. At some point in its history, the science of attention arguably began to study – or create – something that bears little relation to the intuitive idea of attention as a sharpening of focus. Scientists have redefined attention as a perceptual filter, a feature-binding mechanism, a broadcaster to working memory, or a competitive bias process, so many that it is hard to keep up, really.
Perceptual load theory was proposed by psychologist Nilli Lavie as an attempt to return to the intuitive idea of a bottleneck of attention, and to rethink it in a simpler way. In this theory, perceptual processing has limited capacity, and when a task involves dealing with a large amount of information (high perceptual load), that capacity is fully exhausted by the processing of the attended-to information.
It retains the idea of awareness or consciousness as a location or container which things can get into only if they meet certain attentional criteria. It also relies on the idea of a ‘perceptual processing stream from unconscious to conscious levels.
What it comes down to is that there are many theories, spanning all the prior chapters yet.
Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues in Parma, Italy have suggested a ‘premotor theory’ of selective spatial attention in which attending to a particular position in space is like preparing to look or reach towards it.
However, there were some experiments with findings like these suggest that not all areas involved in motor preparation are involved in covert attention, and not all regions involved in covert attention have motor functions. Regions may be involved in both, but in the weaker sense of creating a ‘priority map which signals the location of behaviourally relevant stimuli’. Hence perhaps why dissociations between eye-movement preparation and attention allocation have been found for both overt and covert attention. So the proposal that attention and motor control use the same neural circuits, as well as the stronger claim that motor activation is both necessary and sufficient for spatial attention, may be going too far.
There are six main possibilities for how consciousness and attention relate to one another. Here are all six listed;
The basic problem is that whether and how something forms part of someone’s conscious experience can be determined only by either report (what people say) or other explicit decisions (what people do). But reporting on what we see requires us to attend to it. So too do many of the decision-making tasks that are used as criteria for consciousness. So, as philosopher James Stazicker puts it, ‘the failure to report an object of visual consciousness might reflect a failure to attend to the object, rather than an absence of visual consciousness of the object’ (2011, p. 163). In this case, how can we ever even begin to work out how consciousness and attention relate to or differ from each other? In Stazicker’s terms, how could we ever test whether their relationship is one of dependence or independence: whether the spotlight of attention falling on things is what makes them conscious, or whether it illuminates episodes of consciousness without constituting them?
But maybe we are making unnecessarily complicated assumptions about people’s illusions about their own experience. Maybe we can take people’s reports about their consciousness at face value, Stazicker suggests. What the cueing did was not make accessible some portion of an already conscious experience; instead, it made more determinate some information in that experience. This is not the same as claiming that, as in multiple drafts, attention exerts retroactive effects on our conscious experience, or what we think of as that experience. In this intermediate view, attention exerts effects on consciousness as it happens.
It is easy to assume that consciousness is an all-or-nothing kind of deal: we are conscious of something or we are not, there is no in between. But this may be one of the errors that prevents us from accurately assessing its relationship to attention. So where does this leave us? Searching for the neural correlates of consciousness might still sound like a nice idea: if we could find out what neural activity correlates with (say) visual consciousness, we could determine whether this activity ever occurs without those processes which correlate with attention. But this takes us back to problems we encountered in that chapter; how do we establish these correlates without first knowing whether or not one occurs without the other? Some people, like the philosopher Hilary Putnam, conclude that there is simply no way of answering the question of whether there is unreportable consciousness, however, this seems like an easy way out.
Meditation seems to be the ultimate training of attention. There many different forms of meditation, but the first step in nearly all of them is calming the mind. This skill can take many years to master, but then it becomes easy to sit down and let the mind settle. Everything that arises is let go, like writing on water. Nothing is met with judgement or opinions, and as reactions gradually cease, clarity appears. The sounds of birds, the sight of the floor, the itch on the hand, they are just as they are: suchness. Sounds easy, right?
Many traditions claim that in this decluttered state, insight into the mind can spontaneously arise. Those who practise certain kinds of meditation claim that they awake from illusion and see directly the nature of mind. If they are right, their claims are important both for the introspective methods they use, and for what they say about consciousness. But are they right?
Most methods of meditation have religious origins. In particular, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism have long traditions of disciplined meditation, but comparable methods of silent contemplation are found within the mystical traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Within these traditions, people meditate for widely different reasons and in many different ways. The more religious may want to gain merit, get to heaven, or ensure a favourable reincarnation, while others sit for insight, awakening, or enlightenment. Some fast, some kneel and some pray.
Despite their different origins, the basics of all types of meditation might be summed up in the words ‘pay attention and don’t think’. It is hard to believe that such a simple practice could create the kinds of transformations and insights claimed by some meditators, yet this is essentially the task undertaken. It is surprisingly difficult, as you will know if you have tried, and the many varieties of meditation can be seen as different ways of easing the task. If you have never tried it, do exercise 2.
Common to all forms of meditation are two basic tasks: paying attention and not thinking. Both raise interesting practical and theoretical questions. What do you pay attention to then? How do you maintain concentration? How do you not think? Is it even possible to not [ay attention to anything at all, not even your thoughts? The different methods outlined below give different answers, but almost all techniques share common methods for dealing with unwanted thoughts.
There are two types of meditation, open and concentrative. Open or receptive meditation means paying attention equally to everything that is happening, whether that is perceptions, feelings, or thoughts, but without responding. This is usually done with the eyes open or half-open. Concentrative meditation means paying focused attention to one thing without distraction, rather than remaining open to the wider world, such as focussing on the breath.
But how are these two related? The book really does not provide a concrete answer. Yay.
7.1 As many times as you can, every day, ask yourself ‘Did I direct my attention or was my attention grabbed?’ Was it you who consciously made the decision or did something else do it?
7.2 Sit down comfortably and close your eyes. Try not to think about anything. If that is hard, just focus on breathing. Do this for a minute.
Introduction to ConsciousnessHi!
This book is subdivided into six parts, each with 3 corresponding chapters. Here is an overview of the components;
Consciousness, or consciousness, is a confusing concept. This book is therefore not made to resolve this confusion - in fact, it will make the probable worse.
The majority of this confusion is caused by the fact that there is no fixed sense of explanation for the concept of "consciousness," despite the many attempts made by philosophy and science. Consciousness can be used as a sign of unconsciousness, but also as the concept of understanding science of something. In other words, words fall short for this concept.
Moreover, the study of consciousness is a relatively young branch of science and therefore not much is known. This book tries to teach you to take a different look at the world around you. As you read this, you are probably so aware that you are aware of the world around you, but is that so? When are you really aware? What are you currently aware of?
Chapter 1: What is the Problem?The problem of awareness is related to a few of the well-known philosophical questions. Why do we exist? What is the world made of? Who of what am I? Do I think I am actually doing that?
Over the last century, people have only become comfortable using the term "consciousness" and it is no longer always synonymous with the mind. We know how the brain works and how things develop, how the body reacts to drugs and alcohol and sadness - and yet we are not a step further to a definition for consciousness.
What it always seems to come down to is a kind of philosophical twofold. Are we our body of our thoughts, Are we subjective of objective? We come down to a sort of dichotomy, and the question of consciousness is spiritual is simply a scientific phenomenon that we cannot yet explain.
You can think about things or so many different ways, and that is then only your subjective experience. For example, think of a dog you are stroking - the fur, the warmth that the animal radiates, etc. And then think of the same dog, but now it is waiting for you at a distance. The same animal, two very different images.
For years, philosophy has been arguing about the concept of consciousness, and you can roughly divide their opinion into monism and dualism. Most people therefore agree with dualism, which says that there is a distinction between your body and the "self" (also known as the mind, the consciousness). However, nobody knows for sure where this separation is and what it is. (This entire book would be a lot shorter if we knew that.)
An example of a dualist is René Descartes, the creator of the well-known "I think, so I exist." Descartes had a theory, indeed that the body and soul were made of two different materials, and that the soul was made of something that was not physically tangible. This is called substantive dualism.
The big problem with this kind of dualism is the contact between the two substances. It must be an interactive connection, but there is no point in the body that seems to be present. Descartes claimed that this occurred in the pineal gland, but that was later caused incorrectly. Most voices agree that substantive dualism therefore does not work.
Gilbert Ryle makes a point that the idea of "the mind" has
.....read more Chapter 2: What is it like ...?In 1974, Thomas Nagel came up with the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" He meant that wondering how a mental state is caused if neurons are not the same as understanding how water is H2O. Our consciousness and our subjectivity stand in the way of that concept.
If you compare a stone and a cat, you will quickly say that the stone has no consciousness and the cat does. This is because there are no experiences or forms to a stone. But there is something that makes a cat a cat, a kind of being a cat. So if you say that another organism is a consciousness, you are actually saying that there is a species for that organism.
So, Nagel's definition of consciousness is whether you can ask the question, "What is it like ..." There are some snags in this definition, but as long as you are not trying to be smart and take it out of context, you are on the right track.
Imagine that you are a bat. Bats are very different from humans - they use echolocation, and their ears are much more important than their eyes. As a human being, it is very difficult to imagine what that is like. Bats don't see depth, can you imagine what that is like?
But even if you could turn yourself into a bat and back, even then you wouldn't know what it's like to be a bat, since bats don't speak a language and aren't concerned with philosophical questions.
A distinction is therefore made between P consciousness (phenomenal consciousness) and A consciousness (access consciousness). The P consciousness is the function that makes it a being to be something, and the A consciousness is the presence to think and act.
You would think that we are only talking about P consciousness in this book, but that is not the case. Reporting and realizing everything that you are aware of is also very important. Just think how you would describe colors or life, for example. You can report it, but there will always be a bit more, a bit of consciousness. This is an example of a combination between the two types of consciousness.
This distinction is also regularly rejected, and some philosophers believe that there is only P consciousness, while others only believe that there is A consciousness. Does this sound familiar? Jupp, it is very similar to dualism and monism, huh?
But if there is something to be a bat, then there is also something to be you. Use exercise 1 to think about this.
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Chapter 3: The Grand IllusionIn the past two chapters you have hopefully become a little doubtful about your own interpretation of the world. Often we cannot fully trust our own ideas about consciousness, or we do not have the right tools to substantiate it.
It can be pretty scary to realize that you cannot trust your own experiences, and if you go too deep it can throw you in a deep dark hole. However, it can also feel very liberating for some.
The point is, sometimes the existence of consciousness can seem like an illusion. Remember that an illusion does not mean that there is nothing - an illusion means that there is something that seems something else. (Example: a barking dog is an illusion of aggressiveness - however, it is not aggressive but scared.)
In the context of consciousness, it is important not to forget this definition. When we say the consciousness is but an illusion, we mean to say that in fact, it is something else that hasn’t been explained yet.
A good example of illusions are the visual ‘optical illusions’ that we all know. Our brain create an image that isn’t actually there, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing. What is there are the things that create the illusion, and our brain makes something else out of it.
Vision, can be argued, is our primary sense. If two senses are competing (such as seeing someone say something and hearing something else) – vision wins most of the time. Our language is littered with visual allegories too, such as ‘I see what you mean’.
That doesn’t mean that vision is never wrong, however – cue the optical illusions. Just like our thoughts and experience, vision can sometimes betray us and show us something that isn’t there, or leave out something that is.
It’s hard to imagine not seeing if you have seen all your life. It’s such a basic thing that, just like breathing, you are not consciously aware of doing it most of the time. But now try to focus on seeing. Look around, close your eyes and open them again. Do you see one picture? Do you see loose elements combined into one? Do you see everything or just a little bit at a time? Do you notice anything you didn’t see before?
It’s weird how these questions focus your awareness, huh? This oddity is what caused the term ‘grand illusion’ to arise. Vision can be seen as just an illusion, and here’s why.
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Chapter 4: Neuroscience and consciousnessIf you could look right inside a brain and see everything that was happening there, would you then understand consciousness? That is what this chapter opens with.
And yes, some would say yes. Materialists and identity theories would agree that, of you could see and understand everything of the brain, then the problem of consciousness would be solved entirely. However, any of the theorists that believe that consciousness is something extended, something other would disagree. Because after all, the mind, the soul is something that isn’t physical, so how could examining the brain help with understanding it?
Noë is one of these people, who says ‘you are not your brain’. We always have tried to look at consciousness as something inside the brain but what if it isn’t there? What if it is somewhere else in the body, or even outside of it? You wouldn’t find it by studying matter and neural connections. This is what is the called the fallacy of neurocentrism – believing that everything happens inside the brain.
Then, there are also the mysterians, who seem to believe that there is never a way to understand consciousness and many would also say that we are not meant to understand it. They, too, would thus disagree that examining the brain would help not in the slightest bit when it comes to understanding the consciousness. Some other mysterians also simply believe that at this point in time and technology, we will never understand conscious, but maybe in the future we might.
Interesting is that nobody flat out said that the brain has nothing to do with consciousness, they just disagree on what extend it does. The naked eye doesn’t reveal much about that big grey lump in our heads, however, attaching some electrodes or looking at a slice through a microscope helps a lot.
It’s said to be one of the most complex things in the universe, holding over 80 billion neurons and trillions of neural connection. You can understand why it is hard to grasp everything that the brain does. But those neural connections don’t end with the brain. They are also spread out over the entire body, and with the spinal cord together form the Central Nervous System (CNS).
Quick recap of the brain:
Chapter 5: the Theatre of the Mind‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.’
These are the words of Hume , the beginning of the 18th century. It stems back from the days op Plato and his allegory of the cave. If you don’t know the allegory, look it up on YouTube, there are some pretty good videos on it.
But Hume did usher a word of caution, not to let the theatre mislead us. The idea of a theatre is very simplistic, while in reality, the mind is a very complex, fluent thing.
If asked where they think they are located, most people answer somewhere in their head or their heart. Most people (about 83%) conceive themselves as ‘the I that perceives’, often located in their head near the eyes.
Most people also feel like their mind is a space, where sensory experiences come and pass, a place where things and thoughts are viewed by the mind. This is exactly like the Cartesian theatre. And while it may feel like that big open space, Daniel Dennett (He’s back people!) argues, like many other theorists, that this space and the mind in that sense of the allegory, do not exist.
The Cartesian look of things is simple. Many materialists still search for that one place where consciousness arises – the Cartesian Theatre – and thus still hold onto a dualist pattern of thinking, where the consciousness has to arise from a single specific place.
Being a Cartesian materialist (CM) has become some type of word for abuse. It implies you cannot pick sides, or are unconsciously not very convinced of your own point. In other words, it’s not very nice.
CM is everywhere if you just look, in common phrases such as ‘snap into consciousness’ or the idea that something happens outside of the consciousness. This chapter examines the evidence of whether or not a theatre of the mind is possible.
The biggest question thus far asked is, ‘where the hell is our consciousness located then?’ If you, very attentively, reach out and touch you nose, where do you sit in your theatre and experience this sensation? Realistically, the consciousness should both give orders to the
.....read more Chapter 6: The unity of consciousnessIf there is one thing that has not been questioned yet, it is that our consciousness is one thing and certainly not made up out of many parts.
From an outsiders point of view, this seems like a rather illogical assumption. The brain for instance, is made of many parts and processes, all running and functioning simultaneously, without ever having to come together. The same goes for the body. So why not for the consciousness?
It is proven that different processes in the brain and body work at different speeds and cues. This means there isn’t a focal point where they all start or finish. Seeing as we cannot find on specific place the consciousness is housed or located, it would almost make sense to consider that the consciousness might be made of many parts as well.
However, if you stop looking from a biological point of view, you might see where this conscious unity is coming from. After all, you only experience one ‘me’, and the only point your consciousness can ever find itself in is the present. We only see one world around us, not different parts of sound and vision and touch. Thus, a question arises;
How can such unity, experienced right now, arise from such diversity of non-instantaneous processing?
When stating it like that, dualism will look like a very nice, promising option. Dualism, after all, states that there is one, coherent mind that governs consciousness and is completely separate from those neuro-biological processes in the body. There, problem solved.
Many philosophers, such as Descartes and Poppers, chose this solution. As did Benjamin Libet, who proposed to take a part of a person’s cortex from the brain and keep it artificially alive. If his theory was right, then electrical stimulation of the piece of brain should, through central mental fields, provide a sensation with the owner of the brain, and thus prove consciousness is a mental field. (It failed.)
So yeah, like proven in previous chapters, though seeming to hold the answers, dualism seems to run into more trouble than the answers that it offers. Including dualism, there seem to be three options to the unity of consciousness;
Doesn’t it seem like the three options every consciousness issue ever offers? That’s right, because they are. These are the three things always to consider when dealing with a consciousness problem.
Chapter 7: AttentionMany philosophers are still in disagreement of whether the concept of attention is a real thing or not. The very familiarity of the concept of attention can make it hard to think about clearly, but perhaps we should start with how it feels. The metaphor of the ‘spotlight of attention’ comes easily to mind because paying attention feels this way – like directing a light on some things and not others. Perhaps it feels as though attention makes things or thoughts brighter, more prominent, or more focused.
Attention feels like something extra. Hamilton, for instance, described it as, ‘Attention is like concentrated consciousness.’ It feels like the intensity of things increase when you focus attention on them.
And while we shouldn’t thing of attention’s metaphors – such as the spotlight – as something real, experiments have found that the metaphor of ‘lighting up’ has an almost realistic equivalent: a real attentional ‘spotlighting’ effect in visual perception. Participants kept their eyes fixated on the fovea, where spatial resolution is highest, and were shown textures in the periphery, where it is much lower. When they attended to the textures, they could more easily distinguish them. It was as though their spatial resolution had improved. Crucially, in tasks where enhanced resolution actually makes the task harder, the same effect was found for focused attention too: participants’ performance got worse. Later experiments found that the same effect for brightness, contrast, and colour saturation, but not for differences in hue. It seems that, as in James’s notion of focalisation and concentration, attention actually increases the spatial resolution of what we see. It may also change visual and other sensory experience in different ways depending on context, so it seems that attention can qualitatively shape the kinds of conscious experiences we have – even if, as James also pointed out, we know how to adjust for these effects so we are not misled into thinking the light actually just got brighter.
The image of the spotlight of attention is well known, but perhaps, looking at your own experience, there might be a couple of different metaphors applicable too. This is one way for what we call ‘first-person practice’ to relate to consciousness and one reason why we ask you to devote time and energy to the ‘exercises’ suggested in each chapter: we cannot hope to understand consciousness in general unless we are familiar with our own personal version of it. And the idea of ‘paying careful attention to experience’ implies that attention itself is at the heart of all
.....read more Chapter 8: Conscious vs UnconsciousThe ‘power of the unconscious’ is a common phrase reflecting the popular notion that our minds are divided in two, conscious and the unconscious. We are either urged to unleash our unconscious potential or listen to what bubbles up in us, but we also learned to overrule our animal instincts and emotions with reason thanks to our conscious mind.
We link the conscious and the unconscious to mind and body: we often think as the conscious processes as mental ones (I’ve given it much thought) and the unconscious processes as embodied (I have a gut feeling)
The division of the mind can be traced back to ancient Egypt about sleep and dream and early Hindu texts. Plato also gave the soul three parts: Reason, Spirit, Appetite, all with their own goals and abilities.
Gradually this shifted from parts of mind to mechanisms and distinct types of processing within one brain. This can be traced back to Helm-Holtz’s idea of ‘unconscious inference’, to William James’s distinction between associative and true reasoning. Most theories suggest that one process is fast, automatic, inflexible, effortless and dependent on context, while the other is slow, effortful, controlled, flexible, requires working memory and independent of context. This has been rediscovered and reinvented time after time, the distinction is common because it is valid.
The question is this – what could the difference between conscious and unconscious processes be?
For this we will consider first perception, then action and finally how perception and action and conscious and unconscious may converge in the phenomena of intuition and creativity.
Simple everyday phenomenon, like only noticing the humming of a microwave when it stops, seem odd because it suggests perception without consciousness. You unconsciously hear the sound. The phenomena of unconscious perception have been known since the very early days of psychology. Whenever there is a talk of automatic behaviour, unconscious processed or subliminal effects, there is an implicit comparison with conscious processes, yet those remain entirely unexplained. In early experiments, conscious perception was defined in terms of what people said: if we say we are conscious or unconscious of something, then (unless deliberately lying) we are. Yet this is problematic in some ways:
One problem is that whether people say they have consciously seen (or felt or heard) something depends on how cautious that are being. This became clearer with the signal detection theory.
This requires tow variables to explain how people detect things like sounds, flashes of light, or touches on the skin. One variable is the
.....read more Chapter 9: Agency and free willIf you think back to the things you do and the movements you make, there is often a disconnect between the build up and the actual action. Think of it like waking up and it is freezing, but you are under the covers and there it’s warm.
The question James asks us in this scenario, is, how on earth do we get up, under these circumstances? Where does the will to get up and go about your day come from? It might involve a long process of convincing yourself of sticking a leg out of the covers, then removing them, then getting up, but other days, you blink, and you find that you miraculously just got up, without any conscious decision to do so. (Exercise 1) This is example of the oddity that is free will.
The problem of free will may be the most-discussed philosophical problem of all time and we can date is back to as far as the Ancient Greek philosophers two thousand years ago. The basic question is whether or not we are free to choose our actions and make decisions, and for us and this book, it is whether consciousness has any role to play in our acting freely or feeling the things we do.
Many religions bear the concept of free will, as well as the consequences of the actions that you make out of free will. Christianity has Heaven and Hell, in the Islam people are judged by the Almighty Allah. And when asked then what it is that made these choices, most religions point to the soul as the one with the free will. A form of consciousness then.
There are two main problems. For free will, the biggest problem is determinism: if this universe runs by deterministic laws, then everything that happens must be inevitable, so the argument goes, and if everything is inevitable, there is no room for free will. And without free will, there isn’t a point to doing anything, because there was no other way things could have gone.
The problem for the belief of absence of free will is moral responsibility: if I am not truly free to choose my actions, then how can I be held morally or legally responsible for them?
This is where the connections with self and consciousness come in. Because after all, we tend to believe that ‘I’ am the one who acts, the one who has free will. ‘I’ am the one who (un)consciously decided to spring out of bed early this morning. When the chosen action then happens, it seems as though my conscious thought was responsible.
And it’s true that it seems that without the conscious thought, you would not have done what you did, and that you consciously
.....read more Chapter 10: Evolution and animal mindsHumans are animals, so questions about consciousness of the human can also be related to the rest of the animal kingdom. This chapter will introduce the basic of evolutionary theory as a foundation on which to ask about the evolution of consciousness in different species.
What is mindless design?
When we see obvious signs of design, we readily infer a designer. This, in essence, is the argument of design by reverend William Paley in 1802. He supposed that he found either a stone or a watch. For the stone he concluded it had always been there, but for the watch he concluded it must have a maker. Every bit and piece constructed to fulfil its purpose. He could not see how these complex pieces could have come together by accident, nor the effect of natural forces. He thought it self-evident that ‘there can’t be design without designer; contrivance without contriver; order, without choice’.
With animals and their specific and complex designs of anatomy and behaviour, it must indicate there is a designer, in which this argument become evidence for the existence of god.
Paley’s ideas were wrong. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins said there are more than just two options – accident and or conscious design. There is a third, that was not able to be explained in Paley’s time, but was clear by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution.
Evolution means gradual change and living things might, in general sense, change. The fossil world suggested gradual change in living forms and this demanded explanation. What was missing was the mechanism of how evolution works. Darwin came with the answer, natural selection. Over a longer period of time, creatures vary and if there sometimes is a severe struggle for life, then some variation must occur in structure or habit that is advantageous to a creature. The individuals with this new characteristic will survive and produce off spring with that same characteristic. If you have Variation, Selection, and Heredity, you must get evolution.
Natural selection isn’t the only force in evolution. Together with mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, sexual selection, and layers of self-organisation from the molecular level upwards, it explains how design appears natural without designed.
What is directed evolution?
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck agreed with Darwin. He believed that if an animal used a particular faculty to change itself, the effect would be passed on to their offspring. This suggested evolution is progressive and directional, with species inevitably change over time. Darwin’s scheme suggested no thing as progress. This vastly created a tree with species and subspecies and branching out everywhere.
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Chapter 11: The function of consciousness Evolutionary theory answers the ‘why’ questions in life. ‘Why do birds have wings?’ So they can fly. Then you can ask, why are we conscious?
Nikolas Humphrey thought we developed consciousness because it gave us a selective advantage. However, the link between consciousness and evolution is not that simple. The history of evolutionary psychology contains multiple scientists with different beliefs about its origin.
Charles Darwin wrote evolutionary psychology (E.P.) would settle as a respected field in biology. Nevertheless, Williams argued that the human mind couldn’t be defined solely by the mutations of genes. This opposition introduced ‘sociobiology’, a field which has been ridiculed repeatedly. Sociobiology has similarities well as as differences with evolutionary psychology, listed in the table below:
Similarities between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology | Differences between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology |
Exploration of human sexual behaviour and preferences | The understanding of the construction of the human mind |
Differences in ability and aptitudes between sexes | E.P. believes we behave the way we do because of our genes and environment |
Social gender roles | Sociobiology treats human behaviour as adaptions |
Assumption of the presence of human nature |
|
The problem with the ‘adaption’ theory, according the evolutionary psychologists is that we have a different origin (first humans in Africa) which we have to take into account when judging these adaptions (sugar for hunter-gatherers even though it causes obesity now, food cravings by pregnant women even though we are well-fed now). Steven Pinker debated that we also developed certain tastes and traits, because it made us more desirable to produce offspring.
Along the way humans grew a sense of morality, but where did this come from? Some believe it was provided by a God, others think it is a product of our consciousness. What is clear is that we can trace the origin of morality to our ancestors, namely the preservation of your own genes (family as well as racial) and the theory of reciprocity. This reciprocal altruïsm is believed to be the source of sympathy, trust and justice.
According to evolutionary theory, our consciousness should serve a function. However, we can argue whether it has a function at all, and if so, what it would be. Owen Flanagan claims consciousness serves no evolutionary role, and therefore does
.....read more Chapter 12: Evolution of the MachinesIs there something special about human beings that enables us to think, see, hear, feel, and fall in love? Something that gives us a desire to be good, a love of beauty, and a longing for something beyond? Or are all these capacities just the products of a complicated mechanism inside our bodies? In other words, am I just a machine? And could the machines what we create then also one day do all those things and more? In other words, could there be machine consciousness (MC) or artificial consciousness (AC)? If there could, we may have some kind of moral responsibility for our creations. We may also find that their existence changes our views of our own consciousness.
Ever since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that we are machines has existed. In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that the human body was a mechanism but that no mechanism alone was capable of speech and rational thought – for that, res cogitans or thinking-stuff was needed.
Among those who rejected his dualism was Gottfried von Leibniz who came up with his famous allegory of the mill. Imagine a machine whose construction enabled it to think, feel, and perceive. Imagine, then, that the machine were enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that we could go inside it, like entering a windmill. Inside we would find only pieces working upon one another and never anything to explain the perception. From this he concluded that to explain perception, we must look to a simple substance rather than to the workings of a machine, which can never have the unity that consciousness does. Similarly as the mill, if we now look inside our brain, we can see the cogs and beams and walls that make the brain so, but not anything that seems to give us consciousness.
Nowadays, with all we know of our anatomy and psychology, the question is not so much ‘Am I a machine?’ but ‘What kind of machine am I?’, and, for our purposes here, ‘Where do “I” fit in?’ and ‘Where does consciousness fit in?’ These answers we can seek in both biological research or try to mimic it using artificial intelligence.
In biology, science has successively explained more and more of the mechanisms of perception, learning, memory, and thinking, and in so doing has only amplified the ancient open question about consciousness. That is, when all these abilities have been fully explained, will consciousness be accounted for
.....read more Chapter 13: Altered states of ConsciousnessJames, at some point, said the following; ‘Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question.’
James’s ‘other forms of consciousness’ would now be called ‘altered states of consciousness’ or ASCs – a concept that seems simple but is notoriously difficult to define. I get drunk and so feel and act differently; I recover from depression and wonder how life could ever have felt so unliveable; I feel like a calmer person on the meditation mat. In all these cases, something has obviously changed, but what? As soon as we start to think more deeply about altered states of consciousness, the problems begin.
You can define ASCs;
Chapter 14: Reality and ImaginationIn everyday life, we discriminate ‘real’ from ‘imagined’ all the time without noticing the skill involved. That is, we distinguish our own thoughts from what we assume to be a public reality independent of those thoughts – a skill called reality monitoring or reality discrimination. Experiments in which people are asked to see or hear some stimuli, and to imagine others, show that many different features can be used for the purpose of discrimination, including how stable, detailed, or vivid the experiences are, and whether they can be voluntarily controlled. One study presented participants with either complete or incomplete well-known word pairs and tested how well they remembered which words were actually presented and which needed completing imaginatively: visual presentation resulted in better reality monitoring than auditory presentation, and speaking the words out loud worked better than internally verbalising (‘thinking’ about) them.
Distinguishing memories of events that really happened from events we have only imagined is particularly difficult, and its failure results in false memories – that is, convincing ‘memories’ of events that never actually happened. These can be created when we tell the same story many times, with slight variations, and then remember the last version we told. The latest version retroactively interferes with the original memory. False memories can also be created when a family story keeps being told or a photograph from childhood convinces you that you can remember that day on the beach. And they can have lasting effects on behaviour.
It is super important to make the distinction between real and imagined. False memories are most problematic when people ‘remember’ sexual abuse that never happened or identify suspects they never saw. There have been tragic cases in which therapists allegedly recovered repressed memories of sexual abuse under hypnosis and convinced their patients that the events really happened when they did not.
Real memories tend to be more detailed and more easily brought to mind than false memories. Sometimes real memories can be identified because we can put them in context with other events or remember when and how they happened – a skill called source monitoring. This is not important for learning skills and facts. For example, you may reliably and correctly remember the speed of light, the capital of Germany, and the name of the man next door, without needing to remember when or where you learned them, but for autobiographical memory the context is important. If the memory of an event in your life is detailed and plausible, and fits with other events in time and place, then you are more likely to judge that it really happened. We probably all hold
.....read more Chapter 15: Dreaming and BeyondHave you ever had that you were dreaming and you realised you were? And then a lady passes by in your dream and you really don’t like her dog, and when you blink, the dog changes? No? Just me then?
This is an example of a lucid dream: a dream in which you know during the dream that you are dreaming. This ability to ‘wake up’ inside a dream while staying asleep prompts all sorts of interesting questions about sleep, dreams, and ‘altered states’ of consciousness. What does it mean to say that I ‘wake up’ or ‘become conscious’ in a lucid dream? Aren’t you conscious in ordinary dreams? What are dreams anyway? Are they experiences or only stories constructed on waking up?
When we sleep, we all go through a cycle of three states: waking, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and non-REM sleep, a typical night’s sleep consisting of four or five cycles between non-REM and REM sleep. These waking and sleep states are defined by physiological and behavioural measures, including how easily the person can be awakened, their eye movements and muscle tone (the degree of passive contraction in the muscle fibres), and their brain activity as measured by either EEG or scans. In REM sleep, the brain is highly active and the EEG resembles that of waking, although paradoxically, the sleeper is harder to wake up than during non-REM sleep. Even in non-REM sleep, the overall firing rate of neurons is as high as in waking states, but the pattern is quite different, with the EEG dominated by long, slow waves rather than complex, fast ones.
The neural systems and physiology of sleep has been well studies and generally considered to be well understood. During sleep, parts of the brain are isolated in different ways and to different extents. Blocking of sensory input happens at the thalamocortical level in nonREM sleep and at the periphery in REM sleep. In REM sleep, the brain stem blocks motor commands at the level of spinal motor neurons so that whatever is going on in motor cortex does not result in physical activity. This means you can dream of climbing out of the window onto the roof, but your legs won’t let you do it – although these protective mechanisms can break down briefly in sleepwalking, and are overactive in sleep paralysis.
When woken from non-REM sleep, people typically say either
.....read more Chapter 16: Egos, bundles and theories of the selfWho is reading this book? Who is conscious of the writing on the page, the attempt to understand and answer the question, or the sounds of revelry in the next room? Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately bound up with those about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone having the experience: that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer. Our experiencing self seems to be at the centre of everything we are aware of at a given time, and to be continuous from one moment to the next. In other words, it seems to have both unity and continuity.
In everyday language, we talk constantly about our ‘self’. It seems that we not only think of this self as a single thing but give it all sorts of attributes and capabilities. In ordinary usage, the self is the subject of our experiences, who carries out actions and makes decisions, a unique personality, and the source of desires, opinions, hopes, and fears. This self is ‘me’; it is the reason why anything matters in ‘my’ life. But where or what is this ‘me’? Are you ready to question everything you know boys and girls?
One way of escaping the problem might be to declare that I am my whole body, and there is no need for a self as well. This would be fine, except that most people don’t feel that way. We feel like something more than just the body.
That this apparently natural way of thinking about ourselves is problematic has been recognised for millennia. In the sixth century BC, the Buddha challenged contemporary thinking with his doctrine of anatta. This is often, perhaps inaccurately, translated as ‘no-self’, when really he was rejecting the common idea that we consist of a separate and continuous entity. Instead, he claimed that the self is just a name or label given to a collection of parts, in the way that we give the name ‘carriage’ to a set of parts – a suggestion that seems as hard to understand and accept today as it was then.
The central question is why it seems as though I am a single, continuous self who has conscious experiences. Possible answers can be divided into two major types. The first, ego theories, claims that it is true: there really is some kind of continuous self that is the subject of my experiences, that makes my decisions, and so on. The second, bundle theories, accepts that it seems this way but claims that really there is no underlying continuous and unitary self. The illusion that there is has to be explained some other way.
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Chapter 17: the View from WithinWhat do you discover when you look into your own mind? William James was confident: ‘Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness’, he said. But a hundred or so years later we might be inclined to raise a few awkward questions.
What does ‘looking’ mean? Who is looking into what? Does the looking itself change what is seen? Is there value in looking without reporting? Does reporting destroy what we are trying to describe? Can everything be reported when some experiences are supposed to be ineffable? How reliable are our judgements about our states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness even the kind of thing that reliable judgements can be made about? Do these questions ever end? God I hope so.
The study of consciousness is sometimes divided into two fundamentally different approaches: the objective third-person approach and the subjective first-person approach. Between these two there is sometimes added another: the second-person, or inter-subjective, approach. This approach is concerned with, but limited to, the development of empathy between people, the roles of mirror neurons, imitation, and joint attention in the relations between two people, and theories of intersubjectivity and how self is constructed through relationships with others and it will not be necessary for you to know this in order to understand the chapter.
Going back to the first two, there are two ways to discuss them; One concerns first-person versus third-person science; the other concerns first-person versus third-person methods.
There are at least three problems with the notion of a first-person science.
All these are arguments against a first-person science of consciousness, but none of them necessarily rules out a role for subjectivity, experiential work, or first-person methods in third-person science. There, for instance, has been a long history of the
.....read more Chapter 18: Waking UpIntroduction
Siddharta Gautama, after 7 days of fasting under a pipal tree, became enlightened, he “woke up”. His message for the world was not to look in others, like himself, for truth, but to see it within oneself. He said “work out your own salvation with diligence”. This was where the Buddhism, as we know it, really came to life. Siddharta, later known as Buddha, proposed four truths:
Despite warning of tradition, Buddhism became a religion, first Theravada Buddhism in southern India, Ceylon and Burma, then Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, Chan Buddhism in China, Zen Buddhism in Japan, and now Western Buddhism… in the west, obviously.
So, this final chapter of the book discusses the following: Can we change our consciousness? Buddhism is one discipline in which spiritual and scientific learning are among the most interweaved. Buddhism also finds a place in psychology more than any other religion. Since 1987, Dalai Lama has been engaging with western scientists, in 2005 held a speech at the biggest annual neuroscience congress.
So why do we like Buddhism so much? Maybe because there is no god or otherwise supreme creator, no indestructible human soul (only, Buddha is a bit like Jesus but less from outer space and more an idol that people strife to be like) and absolutely no duality! Also, Buddhism is almost empirical: If you do X, you will experience Y. Straightforward instructions, based on practice and experience.
Also, Buddha said: Everything is relative and interdependent, arising out of what came before, and giving rise to something new. This is like the scientific principle of cause-and-effect and that’s also applied to consciousness. What it comes down to is that there’s no consciousness without matter, sensations, perceptions, and actions that condition it.
Buddhism focuses on methods, not doctrines. It has none, and in addition thus also no dogmas, rituals, worship or saviour. (At least, that
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