Perhaps no aspect of the mind is more familiar or more mysterious than the mind and our conscious experience of ourselves and the world. The problem of consciousness is perhaps the central problem of modern theorizing about the mind. Despite the absence of any coherent theory of consciousness, there is a widespread, although not universal, consensus that an adequate consideration of the mind requires a clear understanding of himself and his place in nature. We need to understand what the essence of consciousness is, and how it relates to other unconscious aspects of reality.
The eternal question
Questions about the nature of conscious awareness have probably been asked since humans existed. Neolithic burial practices seem to express spiritual beliefs and provide early evidence of at least minimally reflective thinking about the nature of human consciousness. In a similar way, it was found that prelative cultures invariably take some form of spiritual or animistic view, which indicates the degree of reflection on the nature of conscious awareness.
Nevertheless, some argue that the essence of consciousness in the form in which we understand it today is a relatively recent historical concept that arose some time after the era of Homer. Although the ancients had a lot to say about mental issues, it is less clear if they had any specific concepts regarding what we now consider to be reason.
The meaning of words
Although the words “conscious” and “conscience” are used today in completely different ways, it is likely that the reformation emphasis on the latter, as an internal source of truth, played a role in the turn so characteristic of the modern reflective view of oneself. Hamlet, who appeared on the scene in 1600, already saw his world and himself with deeply modern eyes.
What was meant by the essence of consciousness in the New Age? In the past few centuries, all the greatest thinkers of mankind have been reflecting on this issue. By the beginning of the early modern era in the 17th century, many thinkers concentrated on the essence of consciousness. Indeed, from the middle of the 17th to the end of the 19th century, the mind was widely regarded as something substantial.
Ideas Locke and Leibniz
Locke clearly refused to make any hypotheses about the essential basis of consciousness and its relation to matter, but he clearly considered it necessary for thinking, as well as for personal identity.
What was meant by the essence of consciousness in the 17th century? Locke's contemporary G.V. Leibniz, drawing on possible inspiration from his mathematical work on differentiation and integration, proposed in The Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) a theory of mind that took into account infinitely many degrees of consciousness and, possibly, even some unconscious thoughts, the so-called "Miniature". Leibniz was the first to make a clear distinction between perception and vision, that is, roughly between reason and self-awareness. In Monadology (1720), he also proposed his famous mill analogy to express the belief that the mind and essence of man cannot arise from simple matter. He asked his reader to imagine that someone is walking through an enlarged brain as someone is walking through a mill and is watching all of his mechanical operations, which for Leibniz have exhausted their physical nature. Nowhere, he argues, such an observer will not see any conscious thoughts.
Hume and Mill
Associative psychology, pursued by Locke or later in the 18th century by David Hume (1739) or in the 19th James Millet (1829), sought to uncover the principles by which conscious thoughts or ideas interacted or influenced each other. James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, continued his father's work on associative psychology, but he allowed combinations of ideas to produce results that went beyond their component mental parts, thereby providing an early model of mental appearance (1865).
Kant's approach
A purely associative approach was criticized at the end of the 18th century by Immanuel Kant (1787), who argued that an adequate consideration of experience and phenomenal consciousness requires a much richer structure of mental and intentional organization. According to Kant, phenomenal consciousness cannot be a simple sequence of connected ideas, but at least it should be an experience of a conscious self located in an objective world, structured taking into account space, time and causality. This is the answer to the question of what is meant by the essence of consciousness by the supporters of Kantianism.
Husserl, Heidegger, Merlot Ponti
In the Anglo-American world, associative approaches continued to influence both philosophy and psychology until the twentieth century, while in the German and European fields there was a greater interest in a wider structure of experience, which partly leads to the study of phenomenology thanks to the work of Edmund Husserl (1913, 1929), Martin Heidegger (1927), Maurice Merlot-Ponti (1945) and others who expanded the study of consciousness in the field of social, physical and interpersonal. The essence of public consciousness was described by the sociologist Emil Durkheim.
Discovery of Psychology
At the beginning of modern scientific psychology in the mid-19th century, reason was still largely equated with consciousness, and introspective methods dominated in this area, as in the works of Wilhelm Wundt (1897), Hermann von Helmholtz (1897), William James (1890) and Alfred Titchener (1901). The concept of the essence of consciousness (unconscious) was expanded by Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of deep psychology.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the consciousness of scientific psychology was eclipsed, especially in the United States with the rise of behaviorism (Watson 1924, Skinner 1953), although movements such as gestalt psychology continued to cause constant scientific concern in Europe. In the 1960s, behaviorism weakened with the growth of cognitive psychology and its emphasis on information processing and modeling of internal mental processes. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the emphasis was on explaining cognitive abilities, such as memory, perception and understanding of language, the essence and structure of consciousness remained a largely neglected topic for several decades. Sociologists made a serious contribution to all these processes. The essence of public consciousness is still being actively studied by them.
In the 1980s and 90s there was a significant surge in scientific and philosophical studies of nature and the foundations of consciousness. As soon as the essence of consciousness in philosophy began to be discussed again, research spread with a stream of books and articles, as well as the introduction of specialized journals, professional societies, and annual conferences devoted exclusively to its study. It was a real boom in the humanities.
Entities of consciousness
An animal, a person, or another cognitive system can be considered as conscious in various senses.
It can be conscious in the general sense, just be a rational being, able to feel and respond to its world (Armstrong, 1981). Being conscious in this sense can admit steps, and what sensory abilities are sufficient can be unclearly defined. Are the fish aware of this? What about shrimp or bees?
You can also require that the body actually use this ability, and not just possess a tendency to it. Thus, he can be considered conscious only if he is awake and alert. In this sense, organisms will not be considered conscious when they sleep. Again, the boundaries may be blurred, and there may be intermediate cases.
The third meaning can define conscious beings as those who are not only aware, but also aware that they are aware, thus considering the essence and functions of consciousness of beings as a form of self-awareness. The demand for self-awareness can be interpreted in various ways, and which beings will qualify here in the appropriate sense will begin to change accordingly.
Nagel criterion
The famous criterion of Thomas Nagel (1974) “how it looks” is aimed at encompassing a different and, possibly, more subjective idea of ​​the conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious only if there is “something that it looks like” to be that being, that is, in some subjective way, the world appears or appears from the point of view of a mental or experienced being.
The subject of conscious states. A fifth alternative would be to define the term “conscious organism” in terms of states of consciousness. That is, you can first determine what makes the mental state conscious, and then determine what is a conscious being in terms of the presence of such states.
Transitional consciousness
In addition to describing beings as conscious in these various senses, there are also related feelings in which beings are described as being aware of various things. A distinction is sometimes noted between transitive and intransitive representations of consciousness, the former including some object to which it is directed.
The concept of a mental state also has many different, although possibly interrelated, meanings. There are at least six basic options.
States of consciousness that everyone knows
In one ordinary reading, a conscious mental state is when a person is aware of his presence. States require mentality. To have a conscious desire to drink a cup of coffee is to immediately and directly realize what you want.
Unconscious thoughts and desires in this sense are simply those that we have, not even suspecting that we have them, regardless of whether our lack of self-knowledge is the result of simple inattention or more deeply psychoanalytic reasons.
Quality conditions
States can also be considered as conscious in a seemingly completely different and better sense. Thus, a state can be considered conscious only if it has or includes qualitative or empirical properties, which are often called “qualia”, or “gross sensory sensations”.
The perception of the wine that a person drinks, or the tissue that he explores, is considered in this sense a conscious mental state, since it includes various sensory qualities.
There is considerable disagreement about the nature of such qualia (Churchland, 1985, Shoemaker, 1990, Clark, 1993, Chalmers, 1996) and even about their existence. Traditionally, qualia were considered internal, particular, inexpressible monadic features of experience, but modern theories of qualia often reject at least some of these obligations (Dennett, 1990).
Phenomenal conditions
Such qualia are sometimes called phenomenal properties, and the type of consciousness associated with them is called phenomenal. But the latter term is perhaps more correctly applied to the general structure of experience and includes much more than sensory qualia. The phenomenal structure of consciousness also covers most of the spatial, temporal and conceptual organization of our perception of the world and of ourselves as agents in it. Therefore, it is probably better at the initial stage to distinguish the concept of phenomenal consciousness from the concept of qualitative consciousness, although they, no doubt, intersect.
The concept of consciousness (the essence of consciousness) in both of these senses is also associated with the concept of Thomas Nagel (1974) of a conscious being. The Nagel criterion can be understood as the desire to provide in the first person an internal concept of what makes a state a phenomenal or qualitative state.
Access to consciousness
States can be conscious in a seemingly completely different sense of access, which is more associated with intrapsychic relationships. In this regard, state awareness depends on its ability to interact with other states and on access to its content. In this more functional sense, which corresponds to what Ned Blok (1995) calls access awareness, awareness of the visual state depends not so much on whether it has a qualitative “something similar”, but on whether it really is visual information which he carries is usually available for use and guidance.
Since information in this state is flexibly accessible to the organism contained in it, it is considered a conscious state in an appropriate respect, regardless of whether it has any qualitative or phenomenal sensation in the sense of Nagel.
Narrative consciousness
States can also be considered as conscious in a narrative sense, which appeals to the concept of “stream of consciousness”, considered as an ongoing more or less consistent narrative of episodes from the point of view of the actual or simply virtual “I”. The idea would be to equate the conscious mental states of a person with those that appear in the stream.
Although these six ideas about what a conscious state does can be independently determined, they are obviously not devoid of potential connections and do not exhaust the scope of possible options.
Attracting connections, it can be argued that states appear in the stream of consciousness only to the extent that we are aware of them, and thus establish a connection between the first metamental concept of a conscious state and the concept of stream or narration. Or you can associate access with qualitative or phenomenal representations of a conscious state, trying to show that the states that represent in this way make their contents widely available in accordance with the requirement of the concept of access.
Differences
In an effort to go beyond six options, one can distinguish between conscious states and unconscious ones, referring to aspects of their intramental dynamics and interactions, in addition to simple access relationships. For example, conscious states may exhibit a richer supply of content-sensitive interactions or a greater degree of flexible, purposeful leadership, such as associated with self-conscious control of thought. Alternatively, you can try to define conscious states in terms of beings. That is, you can give some idea of ​​what a conscious being or, possibly, even a conscious self is, and then define an idea of ​​a state in terms of such a creature or system that would be inverse to the last option considered above.
Other values
The noun “consciousness” has an equally diverse range of meanings, which are largely parallel to the meanings of the adjective “conscious”. Differences can be made between the essence of human consciousness and its state, as well as between the varieties of each of them. One can specifically refer to the phenomenal consciousness, the consciousness of access, reflexive or metamental and narrative consciousness among other varieties.
Here, the mind itself is usually not considered as a substantial entity, but simply an abstract reification of any property or aspect is attributed to the corresponding use of the adjective “conscious”. Accessible consciousness is simply a property of having the necessary kind of internal access relationship, and quality consciousness is simply a property that is attributed when “conscious” is applied in a qualitative sense to mental states. How this connects a person with the ontological status of consciousness as such will depend on how much the Platonist relates to universals in general.
Although this is not the norm, nevertheless, a more realistic view of consciousness as a component of reality can be accepted.
Conclusion
After the death of vitalism, we do not think of life as something other than living beings. Living creatures exist, including organisms, states, properties, communities, and evolutionary lines of organisms. But life itself is not an additional thing, an additional component of reality, a certain force that is added to living beings. «» , , .
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Thus, there are many concepts of the essence of consciousness (which we briefly described in the article). Consciousness is a complex feature of the world, and its understanding will require a variety of conceptual tools to cope with many of its various aspects. Thus, conceptual plurality is what one can hope for. As long as a person avoids confusion, clearly understanding its meanings, it is very important to have many concepts with which we can access and see consciousness in all its rich complexity. However, one should not assume that conceptual plurality implies referential divergence. Consciousness, the essence of man are inextricable concepts.