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Consciousness: Scientists
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Because humans express their conscious states using language, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness. There are... speechless humans (infants, feral children, aphasics, severe forms of autism), to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Moreover, the study of brain states of non-linguistic primates, in particular the macaques, has been used extensively by scientists and philosophers in their quest for the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness.
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Since all persons -- scientists included -- experience consciousness or (synonymously) awareness, science does not deny the existence or reality of consciousness. However, science has difficulty in explaining consciousness, or even defining it. It is not sufficient to experience consciousness in the most intimate way (as the principle that has experience); it must have a theoretical basis and be measurable. This leads science to believe that consciousness is a property of systems that it recognizes: living systems and, sometime in the future, artificial intelligent systems.
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Today human consciousness is understood by many scientists as a function of the brain. This realization is based on the observation the fact that consciousness can be affected through chemical substances working in the brain and that often mental disorders cause changes in consciousness. Human behavior is affected by conscious and unconscious processes (assumed to be displaced consciousness contents and instincts), whereby the dividing line is to be drawn with difficulty.
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Many scientists equate mind and consciousness. Yet in your personal presentation at the conference you described mind as subtle matter, different from consciousness. What is your conception of mind, matter, and consciousness?
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Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.
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Conventional explanations portray consciousness as an emergent property of classical computer-like activities in the brain's neural networks. The prevailing views among scientists in this camp are that 1) patterns of neural network activities correlate with mental states, 2) synchronous network oscillations in thalamus and cerebral cortex temporally bind information, and 3) consciousness emerges as a novel property of computational complexity among neurons.
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