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Consciousness: Questions
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Consciousness is a dynamic process, and ... an adequate descriptive answer to the What question must deal with more than just its static or momentary properties. In particular, it must give some account of the temporal dynamics of consciousness and the ways in which its self-transforming flow reflects both its intentional coherence and the semantic self-understanding embodied in the organized controls through which conscious minds continually remake themselves as autopoietic systems engaged with their worlds.
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Under the direction of Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health (LACH; formerly the Human Energy Systems Laboratory) focuses on advances in human consciousness emerging from the process of scientific discovery. However, it is especially concerned with investigating specific research topics whose controversial findings require, to various degrees, a transformation in human consciousness. Because the discovery of seeming "anomalies" in science often raises challenging questions concerning the need for substantial changes in perception, understanding, and wisdom, LACH includes eight specific consciousness research programs that are controversial in society as well as in mainstream scientific disciplines including psychology:
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Similarly, there is evidence of vision without introspective consciousness of vision in cases of subliminal visual perception (Dixon, 1987) and ‘blindsight’ (Weiskrantz, 1988). In these cases subjects act on the basis of information about the visual features of objects, despite denying - sincerely and without hypochondria - that they have relevant visual experiences. Blindsight subjects have damage to certain neural pathways connecting portions of the retina to the visual cortex, yet in some sense they have perceptual states sensitive to these stimuli. For example, some ability to discriminate an ‘X’ from an ‘O’ is intact. This is evidenced by the preponderance of correct answers they can give to questions about the stimuli. When asked to reach for objects in blindsight regions... some subjects reflexively pre-orient their hand and fingers in ways suited to the specific shapes of the objects.
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Because Carruthers has explicitly applied his functionalist “higher order thought” theory of phenomenal consciousness to derive a negative conclusion about animal consciousness (Carruthers 1998a,b, 2000) this account deserves special attention here. According to Carruthers, a mental state is phenomenally conscious for a subject just in case it is available to be thought about directly by that subject. Furthermore, according to Carruthers, such higher-order thoughts are not possible unless a creature has a “theory of mind” to provide it with the concepts necessary for thought about mental states. But, Carruthers argues, there is little, if any, scientific support for theory of mind in nonhuman animals, even among the great apes, so he concludes that there is little support either for the view that any animals possess phenomenological consciousness. The evaluation of this argument will be taken up further below, but it is worth noting here that since most developmental psychologists agree that young children before the age of 4 lack a theory of mind, Carruthers' view entails that they are not sentient either — fear of needles notwithstanding! This is a bullet Carruthers bites, although for many it constitutes a reductio of his view (a response Carruthers would certainly regard as question-begging).
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Similarly, scientists in this century have regarded the issue of what consciousness is as a religious or metaphysical question. After all, Western science started out as a protest against religion. Since religion went inward, science saw its own task as going outward. But as science went further and further into the external world, they ended up inside the atom where to their surprise they saw consciousness once again staring them in the face!
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The search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) -- specific systems in the brain that correlate directly with states of conscious experience -- has become an active area of research in recent years. Methods such as single-cell recording in monkeys and brain imaging and electrophysiology in humans, applied to such phenomena as blindsight, implicit/explicit cognition, and binocular rivalry (among others), have generated a wealth of data. At the same time a number of theoretical proposals about NCC location have been put forward. In addition, important conceptual questions raised by this work are beginning to be addressed.
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