Conclusions

This talk on consciousness explores an area that is widely known to be a challenge for psychology. It seems that there are no easy answers to the questions posed by conscience. Yet despite the debates, considerable progress have been made in consciousness research. Theories such as Baars's and Damasio's make positive propositions regarding the notion of the self and the access and control of information during conscious awareness. These are important aspects of our conscious experience, and despite disagreement over how to explain these phenomena, researchers have developed theories and begun to explain a considerable amount of collected data. Neuropsychological evidence on the experiences of some patients has helped to understand some of the different elements involved in consciousness and their possible physical bases in the brain.

This chapter also explored your own intuitions as well as the scientific literature. I hope you can understand why. Our evaluation of theories like Mysterianism, among others, depends in part on our intuitions about conscious experience (or phenomenal consciousness).Dennett believes that our intuitions lead us to make mistakes and need to be analyzed: we need to clarify some of our own conceptual confusions. Other researchers believe that our intuitions are well-founded and that this raises difficulties for a scientific approach to consciousness. At this level, we can only try to objectively evaluate these two approaches and understand their implications.

So we are still facing important questions. First and foremost, Given the different types of consciousness, is it reasonable to think that a single theory can explain them all? The evidence we have discussed suggests that phenomenal consciousness requires an explanation other than one based on access to consciousness or its controlling function. Second, how to treat phenomenal consciousness? ? Answering this question would have profound implications for our understanding of the mind and psychology. If we decide that phenomenal consciousness can be explained scientifically (either by questioning qualia or by trying to explain them in terms of their biological and cognitive functions), then psychology can be seen as a science of the mind, just like physics or chemistry. If, however, we decide that phenomenal consciousness cannot be studied through a scientific approach, then we are faced with two options: the first is to continue to adopt a scientific approach to psychology, which will then offer only a partial explanation of mental life (explain neither phenomenal consciousness nor the mind). The other option is to recognize that even if consciousness is a subject of psychological study, psychology cannot be equated with natural science and offers other kinds of explanations.

We're back where we started. We began by trying to silence our intuition: by becoming aware of our environment, we not only gather information about that environment, but we experience it in a certain way. And we ended with how we should deal with this intuition, with the following conclusion: While the current state of our knowledge does not allow us to solve this problem, when we do, it will have profound implications for our understanding of the mind and how it should be studied.

The various chapters on consciousness were inspired by an Open University course in psychology written by Nick Braisby

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