Image by John Hain from Pixabay
A recent competition in Science to understand the nature of consciousness raises lots of questions about fundamental processes in the human brain and how we investigate them. How do we investigate processes so innate and largely invisible to others? How do we separate the background noise in an awake brain from the processes being studied? Why are we so binary? Theories don’t have to be either one or the other but can be a mish-mash of both.
One of the main problems with the study of consciousness is that there is no widely accepted definition of what consciousness actually is. So, how can we study something that may not actually exist?
In my book How the Brain Thinks, I discuss some of problems around definition and current use of the term consciousness. What is the difference between consciousness and awareness, for instance? How is consciousness and its main components attention and visual working memory related to our internal narrative, that voice within, sometimes called our ‘default mode network’? Do these these constitute consciousness? If so, have we solved the problem? Do we still think that the soul exists elsewhere outside the brain?
There are similar problems around the definition of conscious, non-conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious and other terms such as wakefulness, arousal, awareness and explicit and implicit. I think we should use the term conscious to mean mental activity that we are aware of when we are awake, subconscious to mean mental activity that we are unaware of when we are awake, and unconscious to mean just that; a sate of non-arousal or non-wakefulness, that can be graded medically using scores such as the Glasgow Coma Scale.
In my opinion the terms unconscious and non-conscious should preferably not be used when we discuss processes around thinking. Thinking could be then defined as cognition when we are awake that is associated with differing degrees of awareness.
It is disappointing that a $US20 million competition funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, ‘a nonprofit best known for funding research at the intersection of science and religion’, aims ‘to narrow the debate with experiments that directly pit theories of consciousness against each other’. Talk about binary! And, what is the true agenda here?
I discuss the work of one of the first contestants, Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris in How the Brain Thinks. What is interesting is that his global workspace theory (GWT) is being pitted against the integrated information theory (IIT) proposed by Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But both theories rely on a mish-mash of simultaneous activation of large areas of the cortex. The theories actually overlap, but are being promoted as either correct or not-correct. Confusion indeed! Unfortunately science doesn’t work like that, a concept that a binary ethos like religion sometimes seems unable to accept.
I look forward with interest to future developments.
Dr Graham Desborough is a general practitioner, writer, mountaineer and photographer. If you like this post, you can join his mailing list at drgrahamdesborough.com or check out his book How the Brain Thinks.
