Introduction to consciousness

Consciousness is a mystery. It’s a fundamental part of our mental lives: we’ve all experienced being conscious except in 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 heart of the question: what does it mean to be a human being, and what does that mean for me? Our conception of ourselves is intimately linked to our conscious experiences and memories. Consciousness enables us to differentiate ourselves from others. While we have to 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 to 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’s like a wet bar of soap: the harder we try to grasp it, the more it tends to slip away.

A series of articles to be published exposes some of the questions and debates about the nature of consciousness. Some of them go very far. They question the way we understand the mind and also the psychology on this blog in order to clarify what consciousness is and what its links are with the natural or social sciences.

A lot of thinking has been inspired by philosophy. In fact, many of these debates arose at a time when there was no real distinction between psychology and philosophy. In this course, we’ll look at how psychology is currently seeking to address philosophical issues, and to what extent it is succeeding. We will see that contemporary research reveals a very strong relationship between philosophy and psychology, with both mutually enriching each other.

Consciousness interferes with other themes studied in psychology, such as memory.

So in the case of autobiographical memory, it’s hard to imagine how you can study the memory of someone recalling autobiographical events without asking about the conscious memory of these events. Yet it seems easy to overlook the role of consciousness. Freud believed, for example, that repression could serve to render certain autobiographical episodes inaccessible to consciousness. Consciousness therefore plays a fundamental role in this form of friendly memory, in a way that is not always made explicit. In the case of autobiographical memory, it merely serves as a basis for hypotheses about memory.

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

The same applies to perception. The Muller-Lyer illusion, for example, shows that we don’t always perceive exactly that two lines are the same length. Yet illusion studies also rely on consciousness, as participants’ judgments are dependent 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 assume neutrality (or transparency), i.e. that consciousness does not systematically modify the processes under study. So, for example, they assume that conscious verbal accounts of autobiographical events reflect the state of autobiographical memory, and that people’s verbal accounts of what they have perceived reflect their actual perceptions.

Consciousness has also been studied in other areas of psychological perception. Researchers contrast conscious and non-conscious perception. The former implies awareness of what we perceive, while the latter assumes that sensory information is processed below the level of consciousness. In both cases, consciousness is used to delimit 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 chequered history.

For most of the 20th century, consciousness was considered a subject that could not be studied scientifically. Since then, however, its study has 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 twentieth century helped us to understand the importance of unconsciousness (or, as we would say today, non-consciousness), current research focuses on cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to consciousness itself. The study of consciousness also tends to be multidisciplinary, integrating the analyses of philosophers as well as psychologists. Because the study of consciousness presents a number of problems, it is difficult to know which is the most appropriate approach to study it. Philosophers have posed essential questions and different ways of approaching them, establishing a useful framework for evaluating psychological explanations of consciousness.

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

The first chapter begins by examining our intuitive conception of consciousness, through the study of real-life cases that highlight different aspects of consciousness. We’ll also look at 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 set out the theoretically important themes. As we shall see, there is a great deal of convergence among researchers on the definition of the main characteristics of consciousness. There is, however, far more disagreement on how to explain these characteristics, and especially on whether not to explain them at all. The third chapter will outline two psychological approaches that seek to explain consciousness and unravel the mystery that surrounds it. Consciousness can be studied from a number of different angles, and here we’ll look at the cognitive and biological approaches. Finally, the fourth chapter considers the various philosophical approaches to consciousness.

Elisabeth Carrio

May 2018