• Question: What is consciousness?

    Asked by anon-179685 to Amy, Claire, Daniel, John, Maria, Stephen on 13 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Stephen Baillargeon

      Stephen Baillargeon answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      This is the hardest question I know of. From my understanding, it is a unique pattern of electrical activity that takes place in the brain that manifests itself as a vaguely united system of desires and information that is capable of a complex enough system of perception that it is able to take in information about itself. If you died and the exact pattern of electrical activity that creates your memories, personality, and beliefs popped up in a different brain or in a computer, it would likely feel like you fell asleep and woke up with a strange new body.

      Consciousness exists on a spectrum, where there are very simple objects or organisms that have a small amount of desires and behave accordingly. A balloon wants to be round, and will push to become round until it dies. We have more complex desires and the chemistry of what those desires are and how we behave in accordance with them follow a much more complex set of rules that gives us variety between individuals and a high level of unpredictability.

      Developing computers has helped people understand what consciousness is greatly because we really had no idea how patterns in electricity could create such intricate things. Computers are by any consistent definition at least a little bit conscious. Your phone probably tells you in words when it needs to be charged. The most complex computers that exist are still far from reaching the complexity of even an ape’s consciousness, but the analogy between brains and computers has helped us understand consciousness quite a bit.

      There are still things that are pretty difficult to explain for even the most intelligence neuroscientists, but they’re making great progress. “I Am A Strange Loop” by Douglass Hoffstadter is a good book if you’re interested in getting deeper into the question and what the answer implies about morality, life and death, music, and lots more. I’m glad your curious about this and I hope my answer helps get you started on understanding the topic more clearly.

    • Photo: Maria Montefinese

      Maria Montefinese answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      Hi! 🙂 Thank you so much for the question! It’s very tricky! There are two meanings of the term consciousness. First, consciousness refers to a physical and mental state of being aware and responsive to the environment. In this sense, you are not conscious when you are sleeping (or if you faint). On the other side, consciousness refers to the awareness of your perceptions or experiences. In this sense, you are not conscious of something when you “missed” it. For example, I can show you an image for a very little time so that your brain “sees” it, but you don’t (so, you are not conscious of it). Another example is when you don’t realise that someone is calling you or speaking to you.
      There is a famous experiment that you can find in this video (please, try it! :)) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo) where you can see how you can be aware or not of some details in the enviroment if you are focused only on some parts of the enviroment.
      In this picture that you can see at this link
      you can see how the consciousness of something in the enviroment can change even if you look at the same thing.
      In the last example at this link, instead,
      you can see how you can be aware of something (the cube in this case) also if it’s not actually drawn in the picture.
      All the best,
      Maria

    • Photo: Claire Melia

      Claire Melia answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I think you already have 2 great and really detailed answers below from Maria and Stephen, so i’m not sure how much more I can add. Consciousness is a really complicated concept and we still don’t even entirely understand it and how it works.

      At the most basic level consciousness refers to a mental (and physical) state of being aware. You also often hear this term used by medical professionals where it refers to the patient being awake. It’s the idea that you are actively aware and engaging with something. For example, I am fully aware that I am thinking about and answering this question right now. However, this is only a tiny amount of our brain at any one time.

      We also have our sub-conscious in which our choices and behaviours are influenced without us neccessarily paying active attention. Take for example racism. In a job interview the interviewer may not be making an active choice to ‘be’ racist, but sub-consciously they have a negative opinion due to the interviewees race and this therefore influences them to not give the person a job. This sub-conscious of ours takes up a lot more space than our conscious does!

      Also, adding to Maria’s post, if you want to test your consciousness and attention then this video is great! We use it at open days at Keele to teach students and their families a little bit of psychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB_lTKZm1Ts

      Hope this helps a little!
      Claire

    • Photo: Amy Pearson

      Amy Pearson answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      The answers from Stephen, Maria and Claire are so awesome and detailed. I think Stephen is right that it is the question of all questions really, if any of us could answer it we would have reached the ultimate goal of many psychologists (and philosophers)!
      Maria defines really nicely the difference between ‘consciousness’ as ‘wakefulness’ and ‘consciousness’ as perception and awareness. Consciousness seems to be expressed in a link between our brains and bodies, in particular our sensory organs. Our bodies can be conscious of something happening without us ‘knowing consciously’ that we can feel it. I dont think we can even define consciousness properly yet as something distinct from ‘knowing’ or ‘feeling’ or ‘being’. We dont even really understand where consciousness is situated- whether our ‘mind’ is in our brain. Some might argue that computers can be conscious, even though they dont have bodies so to speak, whereas some people think you need a mind/brain in a body to be conscious.

      In all, I wish I had a better answer for you, but if I could really, truely, explain how around 3lb of thinking meat was able to make up everything you are, experience and will ever know, Id be the most famous Psychologist alive 😉

Comments