Consciousness

……. Perhaps consciousness arises as a true “sixth sense,” albeit a virtual one (our other five senses conventionally being touch, hearing, smell, sight and taste). Like the Persian “King’s Eyes,” www.livius.org/es-ez/eyes/eyes.html who were charged with keeping the King informed, perhaps our “consciousness” keeps our hungry-for-knowledge subconscious mind informed of an ever-changing and socially complex outside world that it cannot see. What we perceive as consciousness is just a byproduct of the vast amount of brain activity required to produce this sixth sense, and then manage all the continuous cross-talk between it and our subconscious minds, all the while updating the sixth sense with the new perceptions flowing in. Consciousness, or the “I” we see inside us, might just be an artifact of the “post-processing” step that tries to summarize and make sense of the material flowing in, and manage the disagreements between it and what is “downstairs.”

For example, our social world changes continually, so that a former ally might have just a moment ago become competitor. When we search our subconscious mind for how to accommodate these changed circumstances it might get the wrong item off the memory shelf. We have to send it back, updating it with the new information. Listen to St. Augustine musing in his “Confessions” in the fourth century AD about what he called the “places of my memory”:

“ I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; other rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, “Is it perchance I?” These I drive away with the hand of my heart, from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out of its secret place. Other things come up readily, in unbroken order, as they are called for; those in front making way for the following; and as they make way, they are hidden from sight, ready to come when I will. All which takes place when I repeat a thing by heart. “

Students of the Great Apes might complain this explanation for our consciousness could equally apply to the apes’ complex social circumstances, and we should also grant them consciousness. Perhaps we should, but even so, there might be two differences between us and the Great Apes that challenge this objection. One is that our social world is even more complex than that of the Great Ape, including social exchange and the extended forms of cooperation we have seen in earlier chapters. A computational state that keeps the “I” centerstage might be particularly valuable for reminding our subconscious minds to put our social system to best use. But the other is even more fundamental: our minds have discovered language. We alone have a symbolic code for translating our subconscious thoughts from whatever form they might take into the same audible (or tactile) language that we use to communicate with others. It might not be an accident that for most of consciousness is expressed in our native language. Perhaps it is this aspect of our virtual sixth sense that tips our awareness over into something we can label as “I” or “me” ~ Pages 332 to 334

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events in its environment, or, for that matter, by thoughts and by internal adjustments of the life process. Consciousness emerges when this primordial story -- the story of an object causally changing the state of the body -- can be told using the universal nonverbal vocabulary of body signals. The apparent self emerges as the feeling of a feeling. When the story is first told, spontaneously, without it ever having been requested, and forevermore after that when the story is repeated, knowledge about that the organism is living through automatically emerges as the answer to a question never asked. For that movement on, we begin to know. ~ Page 31 [Excerpt ~ “The Feeling of What Happens” - Author -- Antonio R. Damasio