Consciousnesses as Peripheral Input Processing
I awake each day and remember where I am and who I am. I have a consciousness of a self that existed yesterday and back through time to my childhood. I have been thinking about consciousness recently. This interesting topic has a wide and deep associated literature.
A definition of consciousness was offered by John Locke’s in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (1690). He described it as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Since then, the term has taken on the weight of hundreds of meanings.
Is consciousness the awareness of one’s perceptions and sensory input? Does it represent a person’s ability to exert free will? Is it the action of introspection? Are we being tricked by neuron activity that creates an illusion? Or, is consciousness some shared experience with other people, or extending even into the cosmos? This article will settle on only one interpretation of the term. I want to talk about our consciousness when we’re perceiving sensory input or internal memories.
The conscious part of the brain can be conceived to focus on how bits of perception are represented and interpreted. This is the aspect of consciousness where one is always processing income information. conscious of something.
This aspect can link to the other manifestations of the term, consciousness. Again think of waking up. You remember who you are, and have been since childhood, and will be until your death. You can be reminded of your place in your family tree, and relationship to your friends, and indeed all living things.
The view of consciousness I support is as a Bayesian inference machine. See, our brain receives confusing sensory data 24/7. The brain must produce a sensible understanding of that data. I need to know whether to fight, freeze, or flee. If it’s my phone I need to decide to answer it or not. When it’s from my wife, I probably better answer it!
The conscious mind can be thought of as a device to minimize prediction errors. My mind will allow me to determine if I should believe a political speech I hear. Can I pet a strange dog I meet? Or, would it be better to keep my hands to myself. The information we receive from our sensors is contradictory and must be interpreted.
We process sensory input in conscious ways and unconscious ways. We have perception without awareness and implicit or autonomous reactions. We have many senses that bring information to the brain. Some of these sources of perception are: 1) pressure, 2) itch, 3) temperature, 4) pain, 5) thirst, 6) hunger, 7) direction, 8) time, 9) muscle tension, 10) proprioception (the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts), 11) equilibrioception (the ability to keep your balance and sense body movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes), 12) stretch receptors (found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, blood vessels, and the gastrointestinal tract.), and 13) chemoreceptors. Our minds can think about all the sensory input from those senses and mental constructs originating in the mind.
This is an empirical approach to consciousness. I’m not concerned here with deep philosophical thoughts. I am trying to answer questions from a simple down to earth perspective. How does my consciousness seem to work on a day to day basis? How can I live my life effectively?
Another aspect to the question is how am I using my consciousness when I’m awake. What am I thinking of when I’m thinking. Sometimes I’m smelling the roses in my yard, or the coffee in the kitchen. Other times I’m seeing what the dog is doing. Or, I could be thinking about the work I need to get done. When awake, I’m usually thinking of something. It can relate to my external senses, or I could be remembering something that happened in the past, or that I thought about in the past.
So, even though I am limiting this discussion to one definition of consciousness, I have above listed several different ways it manifests itself and can use. It is like a continuum of consciousness, which serves alternate purposes. This view of consciousness can relate to processing of peripheral sensory input, reviewing past events, predicting the future, or making decisions.
Also, this consciousness is not the only thing happening in the brain. After all, sensory signals can be processed and reacted to without being consciously perceived. Sometimes when someone throws a ball to us, we can catch it without thinking about the action. We have multiple sensory-motor processing and acting which takes place without conscious thought. Our heart beats, our kidney functions, hopefully without interference from our higher level brain. When we sleep, our body keeps taking care of itself during our unconscious period of the night.
The connection between personal identity and consciousness comes to the fore when we dwell on the state of sleep. During the day I will think about certain topics at different times. As it approaches time to nod off, I will focus on something that relaxes me and doesn’t drive me to active new thoughts. But I have no doubts about my identity or my own consciousness. Even though my conscious thoughts will end during sleep, I don’t worry about who will wake in the morn. It will be the same me that dropped into the state of sleep and who has lived many years on this earth.
Our consciousness can turn off at the onset of sleep and resume after hours with full force. That sense of “Who am I?” is not lost after a short disconnect. A person’s beliefs persist from one day to another over periods of time. This may relate to our Bayesian inference, these features in our brain that define our persistence attributes. What we believe today, how we interpret the world. These determine our future being and future beliefs. You can look at our reflection in a mirror or an old photograph and say “that is me.”
This can sometimes lead to deep questions. What will happen to me after I die? Might I continue to exist after death? How much of our consciousness would have to survive to say there is still a me left. Is the memory of me in the memories of my friends and family enough to say I live on, in some form?
Another important question is how other folks experience consciousness. There is even a field of science relating to this one. We talk about the theory of mind when addressing what I believe of how other minds operate. I certainly know that most people have self-consciousness in some form similar to me. I even think my dog has some form of conspicuousness. He certainly is smart enough to know the doglike reflection in the mirror is not a strange animal. These thoughts are not always enough to make me comfortable about how other thinks. I still feel unique and worry about how my fellow humans process information and judge the events of the world.
Consciousness is another aspect of our lives the evokes wonder and amazement. Evolution has marvelously orchestrated a system that allows us to think about how we think and will allow us to remain busy analyzing the universe as long as our species can continue.
I’ve described our consciousness as an internal mental process that uses a set of conditional cues to shape the sensory input or process internal beliefs. This process contributes to making us who we are. It can determine whether we consider ourselves Democrats, Republicans, or independents. Cults and other groups, like military boot camps, use harsh methods to breaks parts of those conditional responses to replace them with their set of process conditioning cues. Our identity, behaviors, and interactions are tied into our consciousness.
Next time you have an idle thought, remember how important your consciousness is for your experience as a person. Focus your mind on what will give you good thoughts and will make you a better person.
Some links to similar information:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI The Neuroscience of Consciousness — with Anil Seth
Here is an author who asserts there is no unconscious thought http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/there-is-no-such-thing-as-unconscious-thought
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