Re: Thoughts on consciousness?
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| Vagabond wrote: I also think about consciousness along these lines, that it is a mechanism which can be useful for manipulating information, however when considering this point of view I am faced with the possibility that all our thoughts, actions and motivations are merely a result of an unconscious supporting neural network, and thus when these thoughts become conscious for our use it would seem that the mere act of them being conscious would prove to be useless, and might be performed by an unconscious process. This would then leave one with 2 conclusions, that, as you said, consciousness is merely an artifact produced from a high level of connection between neural networks, or that there is something special that consciousness imparts that an unconscious process can't achieve, or is more efficiently achieved by conscious intervention. I have been flip flopping between these 2 conclusions for a while, but I'm sure there is more to be said about it. | |
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I think it does seem likely that everything really is a result of unconscious neural firing, but I think you may be able to draw another conclusion out from that idea. There's always the possibility that the interaction between the pattern of activation and the area of activation plays some role in consciousness. It may very well be that activation in the prefrontal cortex (the area related to planning, amongst other things) is more prone to be consciously attended to than activation in the pons (an ancient area related to basic physical functioning). But even if something enters our consciousness, there's necessarily a recoding of information. We aren't aware of the specific patterns of neural activation, we're aware of their (qualitatively different) implication.
I don't think that's really the case; there have been many interesting studies on consciousness, a fact which owes a great deal to the cognitive revolution. Many people do work on, for example, differences between unconscious and conscious reactions to stimuli. This ranges from social psychologists examining
implicit associations in how we react to other races and genders to cognitive scientists looking at unconscious processes in visual and auditory perception, to neuroscientists conducting neuro-imaging studies of consciousness.
In cognitive science, we often talk about the
binding problem in relation to consciousness, which is basically the problem of understanding how things come together in the brain to form a unified whole. Perhaps that term could aid you in your googling.
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