I’ve just started reading a book Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore. It’s an Oxford textbook so it presumably should have both good breadth of coverage and balanced/unbiased analysis of various opinions and theories. Having been written in 2000 — 2002 and published in 2003 it’s getting a little old now in 2010 but I couldn’t find anything newer that would match the sheer scope of a college textbook. My first experience with a Western textbook — Vision Science by Stephen Palmer published by M.I.T. in 1999 — has been extremely positive. Even though I tend to dislike the quasi-unopinionated and sometimes overly authoritative tone implied in textbooks, the fact that they are designed to present tons of information in gradual, accessible and well-defined form blows away all other formats (collections of essays, single-theory-books, etc).
Since I think I understand C. well enough from my studies of Buddhism and from self-analysis, I’ve decided to document my understanding of C. as I read the book and before I get changed by the act of reading. I see this as a series of posts that summarize my opinion of various aspects of C. My post On nature of consciousness was a first such post, written before the book was delivered by mail, and this will be the second.
To reiterate main idea of the previous post, the common mistake people do when trying to grasp C. is naive separation of C. from the brain. As soon as you do that, you get into a position when you have to explain whether C. is self-sustaining or emerges from brain, and how does the causal relationship work between the two. After reading first few chapters of the book, I realized I mistakenly used word C. as a substitute for “mind” — a different albeit related concept. Indeed, it is the mind, not C. that is the software running on the hardware of the brain.
My bad, and I already see how the book can help me clarify my definitions and reconsider my assumptions. Instead, C. should be more specifically defined as the subjective experience of life. In this sense it is a very small subset of the mind machine, as most of the processing that goes on in the brain is in fact unconscious. Based on this clarified definition, my current understanding of nature of C. therefore needs to be clarified:
In the functional model of the mind, there is a zone usually called Short-Term Memory (STM). This zone is used to hold the parsed output of the sensory input (predominantly visual), as well as the memories of the-parsed-output-of-the-sensory-input retrieved from the LTM. The fact that STM is used for both input and memory explains why you can’t clearly see something AND visualize something else at the same time. It is my understanding that C. is a feedback mechanism that uses the content of the STM to query LTM for loosely matching objects. This explains why you may not hear people calling your name when being deeply immersed in some interesting train of thoughts — there’s simply no available STM to process the audio input. This feedback mechanism is what makes inductive thinking possible and it is what creates the “I know what I’m thinking about now” effect. The level to which the ability to reflect on the content of your own STM is developed to a different degree in different people, hence the label “unconscious” we use to denote both babies and hooligans.
Another thought I had when reading introductory chapters of the book, is how people rush with analysis before they even have clear understanding of basic things like “entity”, “event”, “process”, “change”, “cause”, “effect” etc. This is where Technical Buddhism comes in handy since it starts with defining “objects” as aggregates of various material and subjective elements that may be included or excluded from consideration by changing the focus and scope, thereby changing the perceived object. This is known as dependent-co-arising, or the infamous Void or Emptiness that Religious Buddhism obsess about. In the book I see numerous examples of rat-holes that scientists and philosophers of the past have gotten in, due to their lousy understanding of Emptiness. When you understand how objects are created by the mind, and see the ephemeral nature of objects, you can no longer be fooled by the labels of words. What hides behind the label is no longer perceived as a solid and stable entity but rather as collection of disparate attributes temporarily aggregated under a single umbrella term.
It will be interesting to see how the book will challenge and change various aspects of this understanding.
