Introduction to consciousness

Consciousness is a mystery. It is a fundamental element of our mental lives: we have all experienced being conscious except during periods of sleep. We don't need specialists or special knowledge to understand the differences between being conscious and not being conscious.

Consciousness is also at the center of the question: what does it mean to be human, and what does that mean for me? Our self-conception is intimately linked to our conscious experiences and memories. Consciousness allows us to differentiate ourselves from others. While we must interpret our experiences with others to make sense of them, we seem to have immediate knowledge of our own conscious experiences. And psychology helps us understand, define, and explain how we become conscious and how this consciousness relates to other psychological phenomena. Yet despite this impression that consciousness presents no mystery, it continues to elude all attempts at explanation. It is like a bar of wet soap: the more we try to grasp it, the more it tends to slip away.

A series of articles will be published, exploring some of the questions and debates surrounding the nature of consciousness. Some go very far. They question our understanding of the mind and psychology on this blog in order to clarify what consciousness is and how it relates to the natural and social sciences.

Much of the thinking has been inspired by philosophy. In fact, many of the debates arose at a time when there was no real distinction between psychology and philosophy. In this course, we will examine how psychology currently seeks to address philosophical questions and to what extent it succeeds. We will see that contemporary research reveals a very strong relationship between philosophy and psychology, with each enriching the other.

Consciousness interferes with other topics studied in psychology such as memory for example.

So in the case of autobiographical memory, it's hard to imagine how you can study someone's memory of autobiographical events without questioning the conscious memory of those events. Yet it seems easy to overlook the role of consciousness. Freud, for example, believed that repression could serve to make certain autobiographical episodes inaccessible to consciousness. So consciousness plays a fundamental role in this form of memory, but in a way that isn't always made explicit. In the case of autobiographical memory, it only serves as a basis for hypotheses about memory.

The same observation can be made of other psychological fields. In linguistic experiments, when people are asked whether sentences seem strange or ungrammatical to them, they produce conscious reports and a verbal report of what their consciousness tells them. Such reports may or may not accurately reflect linguistic comprehension processes, but researchers often use other measures, such as the time taken to read sentences, in an attempt to guard against possible inaccuracies in conscious reports.

The same point can be made about perception. The Muller-Lyer illusion, for example, shows that we do not always accurately perceive that two lines are the same length. Yet studies of the illusion also rely on consciousness because participants' judgments depend on their awareness of the lengths of the two lines. In cases like this, consciousness is not studied directly but is used as an indirect means of understanding other aspects of the individual's psychological functioning. Researchers start from an assumption of neutrality (or transparency), namely that consciousness does not systematically modify the processes being studied. For example, they assume that conscious verbal reports of autobiographical events reflect the state of autobiographical memory, and that the person's verbal reports of what they perceived reflect their actual perceptions.

Consciousness has also been studied in other areas of perception in psychology. Researchers thus contrast conscious and non-conscious perception. The former implies an awareness of what we perceive, the latter assumes that sensory information is processed below the level of consciousness. In both cases, consciousness is used to delineate different mental faculties, such as different kinds of memory or perception.

Despite the various uses of the concept of consciousness, its study in psychology has a turbulent history.

For most of the 20th century, consciousness was considered a subject beyond scientific study. However, its study has since enjoyed a revival. New journals have appeared on the subject, and international conferences are devoted entirely to consciousness. Although Freud's work in the early 20th century helped us understand the importance of the unconscious (today we would say nonconsciousness), current work focuses primarily on cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to consciousness itself. The study of consciousness also tends to be multidisciplinary, incorporating analyses from philosophers as well as psychologists. Because the study of consciousness presents a number of problems, it is difficult to know which approach is most appropriate for studying it. Philosophers have posed essential questions and different ways of approaching them, thus establishing a useful framework for evaluating psychological explanations of consciousness.

Having now set the scene, we can now begin the study of consciousness.

The first chapter begins by exploring our intuitive conception of consciousness, through the study of real-life cases that highlight different aspects of consciousness. We will also examine the ways in which the word 'consciousness' has been used and its different meanings. A brief historical review will help situate contemporary debates. The next chapter will outline the theoretically important themes. As we will see, there is considerable agreement among researchers on defining the main characteristics of consciousness. However, there is much more disagreement on how to explain these characteristics, and especially on how not to explain them. The third chapter will outline two psychological approaches that seek to explain consciousness and unravel the mystery surrounding it. Indeed, consciousness can be studied from different perspectives, and here we will outline the cognitive and biological approaches. Finally, the fourth chapter will consider the different philosophical approaches to consciousness.

Elisabeth Carrio

May 2018