Chapter 1 Thinking about consciousness

Perhaps the best way to begin thinking about consciousness is simply to begin thinking about our own consciousness. Try the following activity.

You may find this exercise difficult. Despite being familiar with the concept of awareness, it's not easy to describe it in words. However, you've probably paid attention to the objects around you. I have too. Right now, I'm aware of the objects around me, the noise of my computer, the back of the chair that supports me but isn't really comfortable. I'm also aware of wanting to write this chapter, of the objects on my desk. Perhaps you've had the same kind of experience.

As strange as it may seem, by performing and reflecting on this exercise, you have already established the foundations for a good understanding of consciousness. First, did you notice anything strange while doing this exercise? I tried to formulate what I was conscious of, but as I formulated it, this conscious experience was already in the past. What I was writing down sounded more like a memory of a conscious experience than a conscious experience itself. This relationship with memory presents a curious contrast with the present and the past, and consciousness seems to be strongly linked to our awareness of being here and now, in our physical and temporal environment. Of course, we might respond that the sense of a here and now exists only because we are aware of it. Yet the here and now also seems to elude our efforts to consciously reflect on, formulate, or communicate our experiences. Instead, we must rely on the memory of our conscious experiences. In other words, Our description depends on our ability to store information that is consciously available and therefore available for further processing.

During this exercise, your attention has probably been drawn to things you are aware of, even though you haven't mentioned them. I can describe some of the objects in my immediate environment and some of their properties (the desk is made of light wood, for example). In fact, I'm not really describing consciousness, but the things I am aware of. I'm interested in the contents of consciousness, but not in the process of becoming aware of it. To better understand, consider this analogy. If we want to understand visual perception, listing all the things our visual perception allows us to perceive doesn't really help. Indeed, understanding it requires considering the processes and mechanisms that allow individuals to have the visual perceptions they do. It's the same with consciousness. We want to understand the process that gives rise to awareness, not just describe the things we are aware of. In order for the study of consciousness to focus on the process involved, we must avoid any reference to the objects or their properties that we are aware of. Seen in this light, our verbal accounts of objects and their properties are rather useless. So there would be an inherent contradiction in the very notion of consciousness. Thinking about consciousness pushes us to think about the things we are conscious of. Yet to understand what consciousness is, we must explain the process by which these things reach our consciousness. Perhaps now you can begin to perceive why consciousness is a bit like a piece of soap!

Another problem you may encounter in this exercise concerns the language with which we describe consciousness. Are there things you are aware of that you have not described? For example, I would say that I was aware of the distance between the telephone and myself, and yet it does not appear in my verbal description. Perhaps you have also found things you are aware of that do not appear in your descriptions. This may be explained by practical issues. Language does not easily allow us to describe scenes in their entirety. Hence the proverb 'a picture is worth 10,000 words'. And so it is likely that aspects of your environment of which you are aware have been omitted from your description. However, another reason relates to the controversial issue of relationships between language and thoughts of thought. A particularly controversial hypothesis proposed by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf is that the nature of our language determines the type of thinking we can have. For these researchers, a language without words or phrases to describe certain colors leads the speaker using that language to think differently about that color than speakers of another language that does have that word or phrase. Could it be, then, that conscious experiences depend on words or phrases that the language makes available to us? For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Pintupi has only one word, 'Katarta,' which means 'the hole left by a monitor lizard after it has reached the surface at the end of hibernation.' A Pintupi speaker, aware of such a burrow in their immediate environment, will be able to attest to the complexity of this experience more easily than a native French speaker. Similarly, a native French speaker whose car breaks down, aware that it is due to the carburetor, will be able to describe his experience more easily than a speaker of a language that does not have words for carburetor.  Language would then determine the type of conscious experience lived by an individual speaking a given language. Could it be that the linguistic resources you have for your descriptions determine your conscious experiences? Perhaps if you spoke a different language, your consciousness would also be different. Although we will not explicitly explore this possibility, we will return to it briefly toward the end of this chapter.

As you've noticed, my description of consciousness revolves around psychological processes like seeing, hearing, or thinking. For example, I noticed that I could hear the noise of my computer. I was also aware that I was searching for words to describe my consciousness, but this process is usually considered specific to understanding and producing language. Is consciousness more than one of these psychological processes? If consciousness is more than that, what might it be? Try to imagine something you are aware of and examine what causes it. For example, I am aware of the existence of a green plant in my office, which allows me to identify the object, to think about it, even to decide to move it, and to communicate about it. But to understand the essence of consciousness, we must leave out of our description any reference to other psychological processes (seeing, perceiving, hearing, etc.) and focus on the process of producing consciousness itself.

To try to explain this process, let's study some real-life examples that will help us better understand what consciousness is and its different aspects.

Consciousness and sleepwalking

Sleepwalking, or sleepwalking, raises a number of questions about the nature of consciousness. If the state of alertness or sleep are taken as references to define states of consciousness or unconsciousness, how then should we consider sleepwalking? It would imply a certain degree of automatism on the part of the sleepwalker, who appears to have no control over his behavior. Yet, it seems that he is somewhat aware of his environment. The sleepwalker seems to be able to interact with the objects and people around him. For example, in Shakespeare's McBeth, his maid recounts: 'Lady Macbeth got up from her bed, put on her dressing gown, opened her writing-table, took out some paper, reread her writings, then sealed her letters, and went back to bed, and all this in the deepest sleep' (Act V, Scene 1). Observing Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, her doctor noted: 'Her eyes were open,' and her maid added: 'Yes, but her senses were closed.' And this is what is intriguing about sleepwalking: To what extent do people remain conscious during these episodes?

Below I describe the case of Ken Parkes, a young Canadian who committed a horrific crime while sleepwalking. This case illustrates that sleepwalkers are capable of sophisticated interactions with their environment and of executing complex sequences of behavior that normally require conscious awareness (Broughton et al., 1994). However, sleepwalking was the central argument in Ken's defense, an argument that relied entirely on the nature of consciousness. For someone to be accused of murder, the intent to commit the murder must be demonstrated. The Canadian legal system, however, assumes that the sleepwalker is in a state of automatism in which they are either unaware or unable to control their behavior. Automatism is a lack of will on the part of the sleepwalker, and therefore, their behavior, being involuntary, implies that they are not guided by conscious intent. As the Court of Appeal noted: "Only those who act voluntarily with the required intent should be criminally punished."

Parkes' case also raises the issue of the moral dimension of conscience. When we talk about conscience and the criteria by which it is distinguished from non-conscience, we are also referring to what can be considered morally responsible. Thus Discussions about conscience play an important role in many moral or ethical debates. For example, issues of abortion, animal rights, euthanasia - all these questions rest on the notion of individual conscience. Scruton (2000) argues that because animals have conscience, it would be immoral for humans to deliberately inflict suffering on them. Therefore, questions concerning conscience are not only of interest to philosophers and psychologists. They are also important for society as a whole.

Visual neglect or hemineglect

Visual neglect is most commonly associated with injuries to the right hemisphere of the brain that damage the parietal lobe, although it can also occur due to damage to the frontal lobe. This results in the inability to perceive certain aspects of the environment, hence the term neglect. This phenomenon is often described differently by different researchers.

Marshall and Halligan (1988), for example, report the case of a 49-year-old woman named PS, whose visual neglect was due to damage to the parietal lobe. Because these omissions affected only one side of her visual field, the damage being in the right hemisphere, this is called unilateral visual neglect. Marshall and Halligan showed PS a series of picture cards. Each card contained two photographs of houses, one above the other. Sometimes the houses were identical, and sometimes they differed in that one side of one house was on fire. The researchers then asked PS to tell them whether the two houses were identical or not and to indicate which house she would prefer to live in. When the flames were coming from the right side of the house, TS correctly identified the two photographs as either identical or different. She also correctly indicated that she preferred living in the houses that weren't on fire. However, when the flames were coming out of the left side of the house, the results were completely different. When she was shown a pair of houses, one of which was on fire and one of which wasn't, she considered them to be identical. This might make you think she had no preference for living in either house. TS herself thought the preference question was a bit silly since the two pictures were identical. And yet! Surprisingly, in almost 80% of cases, she indicated a preference for the house that wasn't on fire: PS's way of processing visual information was normal, even though it didn't seem to be available to her consciousness. In other words, although TS wasn't aware of the flames coming out to the left of the house, she still seemed to perceive information that influenced her judgment about her preferences. The researchers presented the houses with flames on the left side again; she again responded that they were identical. On the final trial, however, she exclaimed, "Oh my God! It's on fire." Somehow, it seemed, visual information could influence her preferences, but except on the final trial, this information was not conscious.

Bisiach and Luzzatti (1978) demonstrated that this phenomenon is not due to a visual problem. They collected data from patients with damage to the right parietal lobe. They asked their patients to imagine themselves in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, facing the cathedral, and to describe the buildings in the square. The patients tended to name only the buildings on the right side of the square. Since the patients were "imagining" the square, their reports could hardly be attributed to a visual problem or to a lack of knowledge of the buildings on the left side. Bisiach and Luzzatti asked their patients to imagine walking toward the cathedral, facing the square, and again to describe the buildings. This time the patients described the buildings that would have been on the left the first time and were now, of course, on their right.

The above two cases show thatIt is possible that information can be processed perceptually and normally without being conscious. Although the information may be available for some processing, such as preference judgments, it is not conscious, or more accurately, it may be ignored by the processes of consciousness-raising. While this does not tell us what consciousness is exactly, it does give us details about the relationship between consciousness and brain structure and processes, and it indicates a complex relationship between consciousness and information processing.

It should be noted, however, that Bisiach and Rusconi (1990) were unable to duplicate Marshall and Halligan's findings when they tested them on four patients. Farah (1997) suggested that PS may have based his judgments on small differences on the right side of the photograph or on a very slight detail perceived on the left side. Whatever the interpretation, PS's case illustrates the phenomenon of visual neglect, even if we do not yet have a satisfactory theoretical explanation.

Blind or implicit vision

Blindsight differs from visual neglect in that patients experience a kind of blindness without being blind. This was studied by Weiskrantz et al. (1974). A patient with blindsight will be unable to see a significant portion of their visual field, although a detailed examination reveals partial access to the information present in that field. Thus, these patients may have eye movements toward stimuli they claim not to see.

Young and De Hann (1993) repeated Weiskrantz's studies on a patient named DB. During surgery to remove an abnormality in the right occipital lobe, a section of the visual cortex was removed. This left DB with an area of blindness (called a scotoma) that shrank over time but never completely disappeared. The patient's own accounts indicated that DB could not see in the area of the scotoma. He appeared partially blind. However, a series of experiments conducted by Weiskrantz and his team showed that DB was able to detect visual information present in the scotoma field. They first discovered that DB could detect flashes of light there. When they asked DB to direct his gaze to where he thought these flashes had occurred, his results were better than those expected from simple guesswork. The results were even better when they asked DB to point to the point where he thought the flash had appeared. Weiskrantz then demonstrated that DB could then detect other aspects of visual stimuli (e.g., DB detected the horizontal or vertical orientation of a stimulus). Note that DB made all these "assumptions" always while insisting that he was unable to see anything in the region of the scotoma. In fact, when asked if he thought he had succeeded, DB replied, "No, I couldn't have succeeded since I can't see anything." (Weiskrantz, 1986). These findings have been confirmed by other researchers. Stoerig and Cowey (1989), for example, showed that color recognition ability could be preserved in cases of blindsight.

A number of observations can be made from this research. First, although patients with blindsight can access visual information without being aware of it, their ability to access this information is greatly reduced compared to those without this problem. Furthermore, a patient with a scotoma will have impaired performance in this region compared to the unaffected field of vision. In summary, although these patients can access visual information without being aware of it, this access remains limited.

Second, although these patients appear to access visual information, in fact they cannot. As Tye (1995) noted, these partially blind patients do not use their abilities to detect visual information in the scotoma area spontaneously. Only when they are encouraged to testify verbally or when asked to perform certain tasks do they show that they can access this information. Moreover, these patients appear to believe that their "guesses" are just that: guesses.

Visual neglect and blindsight tell us something about how individuals experience the world and how the information they gather becomes available for other psychological processes. These phenomena can also shed light on the nature of consciousness on at least two levels. First, for these patients, some aspects of their visual environment are not available to their awareness although this information is accessible for other psychological processes. This allows us to compare cases where information is available to consciousness and those where it is not. This can help us understand the benefits of conscious information. Second, these two phenomena demonstrate that Our consciousness is linked to the activity of the brain. We will see that the brain cannot be responsible for consciousness, but there are definite links between the brain and consciousness. Visual neglect and blindsight help us understand which regions of the brain are involved in consciousness.

Post-traumatic amnesia

The final example I will present is a memory disorder in which the patient's conscious experience is dramatically transformed, sometimes in just a few hours. This most often occurs after a head injury. Antonio Damasio was a prominent neurologist who studied consciousness in patients who could not access their conscious experience, such as a patient named DT who was injured in a horseback riding accident. DT was unconscious for about ten minutes. When he awoke, he was agitated and confused, although the last thing he remembered was faces looking at him. His identity returning, he announced that he wanted to go for a run, which he had been planning to do before his fall. Finally, once in the ambulance, his sense of self fully returned. According to Damasio, DT went through various states of consciousness: a level of unconsciousness and automatism, a form of consciousness in which conscious perception of the environment returned but not his sense of self, and finally full consciousness.

These examples show that consciousness can be studied at different levels. There is not a simple opposition between two states: consciousness and non-consciousness. Rather, there seem to be different types of consciousness, qualitatively distinct and having different degrees on a spectrum ranging from full consciousness to full non-consciousness.

Note that I deliberately use the term non-consciousness as opposed to the term unconscious coined by Sigmund Freud. Indeed, Freud's views on the unconscious differ from the unconscious studied by contemporary researchers. For Freud, the unconscious provides the motivations for our behavior. However, the notion of non-conscious states or processes as discussed here, or by any humanist perspective, do not play a motivational or psychodynamic role. On the contrary, they are assumed to be informational in nature and inaccessible to consciousness. This is why Freud's work is not studied here. I will therefore speak of non-consciousness and not of the unconscious, the latter concept being increasingly called into question.

Talking about consciousness

It's not surprising to find so many different ways to talk about consciousness. After all, my intention was to understand the concept before outlining its various theories. At this "pre-theoretical" level, we haven't yet refined the terminology. And there are two difficulties associated with this proliferation of vocabulary that we must keep in mind. First, using different words implies that there are different realities. A word is in fact never neutral, nor totally equivalent to another word. Then the same word can be used to describe a constellation of phenomena. This is particularly the case with the word 'consciousness'. Indeed, I used this word to refer to something that is involved in a feeling or an overall experience but also that is linked to states like sleepwalking. Of course, it is possible that what is involved in each of the situations is totally different and this possibility has currently become a focus of research on consciousness. Some researchers argue that we must interpret theories of consciousness with caution in view of the difficulties of terminology and vocabulary. Their main argument is to note that these theories are almost always partial, although they can answer some of the phenomena associated with consciousness. But they cannot answer all observations. In fact, a theory of consciousness is, upon examination, only a theory of certain aspects of consciousness.

It is therefore important to bear in mind that difficulties can arise when there is no agreement on terminology or vocabulary.

Consciousness: Historical Reminder

Let us go back to René Descartes and particularly to his belief that the body (including the brain) and the mind were two separate entities. Although most philosophers and psychologists now reject this dualism, the question of how the mind and thoughts relate to the body has not been satisfactorily resolved; in fact, the mind-body relationship is particularly interesting when it comes to consciousness: How can something as non-physical as a feeling or a thought be produced by something as physical as the brain?

Descartes adopted what became the method of doubt to understand the very essence of being. The method involves rejecting as part of the individual's essence all aspects of an experience whose reality can be questioned. For example, right now, I am typing this text and looking at my computer screen. Although I have no doubt about the reality of my perceptions, it is conceivable, though unlikely, that I am on a beach in the Bahamas. And because I can coherently imagine an alternative state, my experience can be questioned because it is possible that I am experiencing a very complex perceptual illusion. By this method, Descartes concluded that his senses and even the existence of his body could be questioned. However, Descartes was not able to doubt his own thoughts. He believed that it was not possible that he could not think that he was not thinking. He then concluded that his essence was to be a thinker, a conclusion that gave rise to the famous phrase: : 'I think, therefore I am.' The roots of the contemporary problem of consciousness lie in this conclusion. If the essence of a person is to think, then it is conceivable that the mind exists independently of the brain. Whatever the mind is, it seems that its physical basis is immaterial. For Descartes, thoughts do not depend on the existence of a brain.

Descartes does not rely on empirical data to resolve the question of the mind-body relationship. He has an approach often adopted by
philosophers who study our conceptualizations, by examining their
implications and their consistency with other beliefs. This method is a useful complement to the empirical methods of psychologists: By examining in detail how we conceptualize an entity or process, we can see that
our ways of thinking are poor or even inconsistent, or arrive at results that could never have been established based solely on the collection of empirical data. Through the method of doubt, Descartes poses the problem of whether our conceptualization of the mind requires thoughts to be embodied in a body. Such philosophical analyses may require researchers to do more theoretical work in order to complete their explanations. If a psychological theory implies that thoughts need bodies to exist, for example, Descartes' conclusions would suggest that his theory and explanations are at best incomplete.

Descartes' conclusion is problematic when one considers the conventional assumptions of science: One such assumption is that the universe and everything in it is physical. At best, it is made of space, energy, and matter. We are also made of matter: although the organization is complex, we are made of molecules and atoms. Another assumption is that the physical universe, and all the physical objects in it, can be understood in purely physical terms. According to this assumption, complex phenomena like consciousness could be reduced to, or at least explained by, purely physical phenomena, such as being in a certain brain state (this refers to the reductionism of Crick, 1994).

These hypotheses oppose Descartes' conclusions. One approach to the mystery of consciousness would then be to try to respect both Descartes' views that mind transcends matter and the conventional assumptions that all things in the universe are physical. Suppose you take Descartes's side, distrusting all scientific views. What would it mean that the mind or consciousness is not composed of matter? Certainly, sciences like chemistry or physics would then not have to concern themselves with explaining the mind or thought. But what could a non-physical mind be? It seems impossible to say. Perhaps because our understanding of the world is too anchored in the understanding of physical matter. Once we have said that minds are not made of matter, what more can we add?

Furthermore, if we adopt the assumption that the universe is physical in nature and can only be understood in purely physical terms, another problem arises. If people can be understood in purely physical terms, then the point of psychology would disappear. Instead of saying that someone is thinking about going home, for example, we would then have to say that their brain is performing a certain type of activity. When we say that someone is in love, perhaps we should say that their brain is in a particular state. Trying to express concepts such as love solely in terms of brain states seems impossible. Expressing it this way would miss essential qualities of such concepts, such as feeling.

Combining the idea that the mind cannot be explained solely in terms of brain activity with the assumption that everything in the universe is inherently physical leads to a paradox. And this paradox has inspired research in psychology that helps explain why consciousness remains a mystery. The challenge is therefore to explain how it is possible for matter, which is presumed to be non-conscious, to give birth, when it is correctly organized as with a human being, to something which is not physical, such as a feeling, an emotion or an experience.

The mind-body problem is not the only historical element in the contemporary discussion of consciousness. William James (1890/1984) considered consciousness to be an essential feature of our mental lives, linked to perception and attention. He distinguished two aspects of consciousness that seemed to oppose each other. On the one hand, he felt that our consciousness was a continual flux, changing at all times: As you saw in a previous exercise, consciousness changes the moment you think about it. It is as if its connection with the "here and now" were never stable. James called this phenomenon "the stream of consciousness." Yet, as he noted, this continual flux of consciousness opposes our sense of self: we have the sense that, despite the changes in our consciousness, a stable entity, the self, continues to exist.

Under the influence of behaviorist theories, the study of consciousness was then completely neglected. Because consciousness could not be directly observed, some researchers, such as Skinner, doubted its existence. The belief in consciousness, which could not be objectively observed or measured, was considered speculative at best, and rejected at worst by the scientific and psychological world. Despite the fact that cognitive psychology assumes that mental processes that cannot be observed can be scientifically studied, it tends to ignore consciousness as a subject of study, favoring other components of the mind such as memory, language, or attention. The reasons for this are diverse, but they are partly due to the complexity of the subject. However, Researchers in neuroscience and other disciplines such as philosophy have begun to take an increasing interest in it, particularly since the 1980s and 1990s. Research on consciousness today tends to be multidisciplinary, bringing together philosophers, cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists, physicists, etc.